Session 4 - Methodism; past, present and future

            This is the last of our sessions looking at the question, 'What's so special about Methodism?' And in this session we are going to be looking at the past, present and future of Methodism. We will begin in the past and move forward from there;

Past

                In our first session we looked at the Methodist structure and in the second we looked at roles, and so we have made a brief mention of Societies and classes. Here we will unpack that early Methodist structure a little and add in the further level called bands.

Societies

                At the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, a number of religious societies began to appear. These were not denominations; rather they were groups of people who came together for the purpose of promoting one or other theological viewpoint or aspect of Christian living. One of those was the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, or SPCK, which was set up to promote Christian education. It still exists as a publishing company today.

            The early Methodist congregations used this language of societies, at least in part because John did not intend these to be part of a separate denomination, rather a movement for reform within the Church of England. Occasionally you may still hear that word being used even today to describe a Methodist Congregation.

Classes

                Methodist societies were divided, by their leaders, into groups of up to about 12 people, called classes. Each class would have a class leader who would teach and offer pastoral care. Being part of a class was not an option at that time for those who chose to be part of a Methodist society. Today it is not compulsory but that aspect remains in the way that each member is appointed a pastoral visitor.

Bands

                Those who chose to would enter into smaller groups of between four and ten people, and these groups, called bands had had a deeper sense of mutual accountability and confession. In the bands they were;

            “Guided by lists of questions for self-examination that were arranged according to the virtues for each day of the week:

·         love of God,

·         love of neighbour,

·         humility,

·         mortification and self-denial,

·         resignation, and

·         meekness, and

·         thanksgiving.

The ‘one thing needful’ was a soul renewed in the image of God.”[1]

Failure & reform

            It could be argued that the Methodist Church was born out of two key factors in the Life of John Wesley.

1.      His desire to reform the Church of England, and

2.      His failures, both real and perceived.

            Wesley's desire to reform the Anglican Church is apparent in many of the things we have looked at in this course, but the extent to which a sense of failure was part of the inspiration for the Methodist Movement may not be so apparent.

            Wesley often thought that he was not a proper Christian because he had either not acted in a correct moral way or more importantly he had not felt internally entirely secure in his trust of God, or not felt the personal connection with God that he thought he ought to. This is why the 24th May 1738 is so important to Methodists. It is the moment when John Wesley described his heart as being strangely warmed in a society meeting at Aldersgate Street. In his journal he said of the experience, "I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death"[2] This was not the last time he felt doubt or remorse, but it was perhaps the first time that he felt complete assurance in his faith; which is significant when you think that his ordination as an Anglican Priest happened ten years earlier in September 1728.

            Wesley's sense of failure was notable in his journey to look after a new community of settlers in Georgia back in 1735. The first sense of failure came as part of the journey, on the ship to the New World. John met some Moravians from Germany and was inspired by their faith, particularly when a storm threatened to sink the ship and the Moravians faced the storm with calm assurance and John had nothing but fear.

            John, his brother Charles and a group of others travelled out to America, in part to care for the souls of the English settlers there but also to help bring Christianity to the Native Americans. John's attempt to convert the locals was a complete failure. He resigned to working with the English and the German Moravians, from whom he learned a lot.

            It went well for a while and Wesley nearly found himself in a relationship with a young woman by the name of Sophy Hopkey, unfortunately he failed to do anything about his feelings until it was too late and she married another man. John didn't take this news well and didn't respond as graciously as perhaps a minister ought to. Long story short, it seemed the right time to come back to England. In England, John found himself without a parish.  He hated the idea of preaching in the streets but was asked to preach by George Whitfield so he gave it a go. There were complaints about him preaching on another priest's patch, and so he coined the phrase 'The world is my parish'. It was often failure or the personal feeling of failure that drove John Wesley to rethink and rearrange his plans, and it was often failure that drove him into more adventurous and more dangerous waters in terms of his exploration of what it meant to be church in the 18th Century.

No new ideas

            One of the strange and interesting things to note about John Wesley and the beginnings of the Methodist Church is that whilst John was an innovator of sorts, he never really came up with any new ideas. Over his life he observed and listened to many people, from many Christian traditions and he absorbed a great deal of information from both within and beyond the Church. He chose things he agreed with, discarded aspects that seemed wrong to him, but also he changed his mind on many things as the years went by. What he did was to gather together ideas that were already present in the world around him and to form them into what we now call the Methodist Church.

Present

            And so we turn to the present day;

Comfortable institutionalisation

            What started as a radical movement for holiness and mission has become static and at many levels indistinguishable from other denominations. Whilst the theology and the passion for social justice has remained largely the same, the culture of the Methodist Church has become established, comfortable and safe. The movement that brought the Church back into the hands of the poor and the working class has over time become significantly more middle class.

            Except that now this safety seems to have given way to rapid decline. When people say, "we would try this new idea, but most people prefer it the traditional way", we must take that in the light of the fact that most people don't have anything to do with the Methodist Church and therefore most people haven't expressed an opinion on the subject.

Decline

            This is a time of decline for the Methodist Church. In the introduction to this course we looked at some of the cold statistics. It is important to look beyond those statistics to the nuances of the situation and to look at where there is growth. There are areas of growth in the mainstream Churches - particularly in the Fresh Expressions Movement - which we will look at a bit later in this session. We should note that a big church is not necessarily a healthy church and a small church is not necessarily a dying one, and for that matter a growing church is not always growing for the right reasons. At the same time we shouldn't allow the nuances to become a smoke screen for the larger reality, decline is happening and it is happening fast.

            This decline leaves us with a lot of questions to be asked and a lot of decisions about how to move forward. Do we try to sustain things as they are, do we go back to how we started, do we move on to new ways of doing things, should we attempt to become part of the Church of England once again, or do we shut down the shop and go home? At the moment the process we are going through includes a little of all of those except perhaps the last option.

Transition

            And so, as a result of the decline in attendance and also as a result of the considerable changes in the wider culture, the Methodist Church finds itself in a time of significant transition. One of the areas of transition is the Reshaping for Mission also known as 'Mapping a way Forward: Regrouping for Mission', This primarily involves the amalgamating of circuits to make larger circuits that therefore have a less costly administration and are able to move resources more easily and quickly to the place where they are most useful. This is in part about practicalities and coping with decline, but it is also about preparing ourselves for the changes that will need to be made in order to think more missionally and to think less in terms of maintenance of our current situation.

            There are many other areas of transition we are looking at including Fresh Expressions, Fruitful Fields and the redesigning of our training for ministry, as well as the increased interest in Diaconal ministry that we looked at in some depth in the second session.

Future

Discipleship movement shaped for mission [3]

            We mentioned briefly in the first session the General Secretary of the Methodist Church, Martyn Atkins and his vision of the Methodist Church as a discipleship movement shaped for mission. In some ways this is less a description of where we are and more a description of the direction in which we want and need to be heading. This idea is to a great extent, looking back at the time before the Methodist Church was an institutionalised church and asking what things can we take from that time and appropriately apply to this time and this situation. One of the things that is distinctive about the Methodist Church is the emphasis on discipleship. Particularly the idea that you aren't simply converted to Christianity and that's it, God's work upon you is done. Rather the work of internal transformation is a lifelong process of becoming more Christ-like, becoming disciples of Jesus Christ.

            The other aspect is the idea that we, quite accurately describe ourselves as the Methodist 'Church,' and we tend to use the word Church in terms of being an institution and in terms of buildings. But once we were Church in the far more fluid and less institutional sense, far more like how Paul meant Church or Ecclesia as the gathered people, as the Body of Christ, more like a movement. We need to be mobile again if we are going to survive this time and be a relevant part of the ecumenical landscape.

            As part of the response to this idea the Methodist church developed the idea of not just reshaping our circuits and districts on a structural basis but also on a theological basis, so that we move to structure our actions around our callings, these have been categorised as;[4]

•      Worship

•      Learning and Caring

•      Service

•      Evangelism

            There has also been a move to bring back the bands. Not simply to copy the practices of the past into the 21st century, but to rethink them for this age. A group within the Methodist Church called the Inspire network, are working to develop bands and similar groupings around the country.[5] They have rethought the questions that John Wesley used. These are the headings of the questions that they explore in the bands;

•      How is my life with God?

•      How is my life in training?

•      How is my life with others?

•      How is my life in the world?

Fresh expressions

            Fresh Expressions of Church are a vital part of what is happening with the future of the Church of England, Methodism and other denominations. It is not a new denomination in itself; rather it is a new way of thinking about how to be church. Although like Methodism - none of it is really new.

            Here is the definition of a Fresh expression of Church from the Freshexpressions.org website;

            "A fresh expression is a form of church for our changing culture, established primarily for the benefit of people who are not yet members of any church.

·         It will come into being through principles of listening, service, incarnational mission and making disciples;

·         It will have the potential to become a mature expression of church shaped by the gospel and the enduring marks of the church and for its cultural context."[6]

The website carries on to say, Fresh expressions:

·         serve those outside church;

·         listen to people and enter their culture;

·         make discipleship a priority;

·         form church.

            The phrase 'Fresh Expressions of Church' is often used in a rather vague way so the website sets out the difference between those things that are, and are not Fresh Expressions of Church and it emphasises that the important distinction lies in the intentions of setting up the Fresh Expression. It says;

•      "If it is to work towards establishing a new community or congregation especially for those who have never been involved in church (un-churched) or once were, but left for whatever reason (de-churched), then it is a fresh expression of church in the making. A fresh expression of church like this may look very different to traditional church."

•      "If the intention is to do mission better or more imaginatively in order to attract people to an existing church, it isn't a fresh expression (although doing that is always an excellent idea). The aim of a fresh expression is not to provide a stepping stone into existing church, but to form a new church in its own right. So it is important to decide the direction you are heading in, before you begin the journey."

            Often, when we do Christian outreach, we plan an event or activity that is specifically designed to be of interest to the people whom we are trying to reach; a coffee morning for shoppers in the town, a disco for young people, motorbike clubs, sports groups, embroidery groups etc. And then when these new people have grown to like us, to trust us, and to accept the message we are bringing, we encourage them into church and teach them how to live as Christians within our culture.

            This may have been a useful way of working in the past, but you may have noticed how this has not really brought new people into the churches over recent years. There are a number of reasons why our outreach doesn't work the way it used to, and one of those reasons is a lack of clarity in the purposes of each group or activity. But another reason is that the culture around the church has fundamentally changed and the church has not changed with it. Some of our Church culture is essential to being Christian, other parts are hangovers from past ages, whether it be Mediaeval England, the Culture that surrounded the Wesleys, the culture that surrounded the Methodist Church at its numerically strongest time in the 1940's, or just things that were appropriate to a specific group of people at a specific point in time. All of those cultural influences can be seen in our churches today and we often expect newcomers to accept them without question.

            By contrast, with Fresh Expressions, the intention is to build a new church congregation there in the place where we have begun the outreach, and to allow it to grow, with the support of the parent church, but in the culture and style of the situation into which it has been planted.

             But before a Fresh Expression of Church gets anywhere near the stage it needs a time of listening, where those involved in setting up the Fresh expression of Church take time, plenty of time, to listen to the community and to listen to what God is already doing in that community. It is usually recommended that six months is taken, praying in that place, learning about the culture and getting to know the people before any attempt is made to begin a Fresh Expression of Church.  

Fractal Theology

            One possibility to consider for the future that is currently under development is the exploration of Fractal Theology. Geometry is basically the study of shapes, and shapes are a way of describing the world around us. For thousands of years mathematicians have presumed that the world can be described in terms of shapes like circles and squares and triangles. But most of the world is made up of wiggly shapes and complex and seemingly chaotic patterns. Benoit B Mandelbrot discovered a way of describing the world in terms of simple patterns, repeated many times at different scales. He discovered that you could describe much of the complexity of the world and not just in a static way; you could also describe the way that things change and grow in the world through simple equations. These fractals are reflected all through nature, and are even reflected in human organisational structures. He found that fractal geometry could allow us to emulate highly complex systems If fractals reflect something of creation and creation reflects something of God, then surely fractals reflect something of God.

            The point of this work is to look at how we should use our theology across all the different scales of our organisation to promote healthy growth of new churches and to help retain the radical transformative edge of the Gospel, even when the institutions become large.

            It takes concepts like; 'the first shall be last and the last shall be first', 'I am the vine you are the branches', 'we are the body of Christ', 'In the beginning was the word and the word was with God', 'love the lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and love your neighbour as yourself' and uses them like formulas to help us see what kind of missional geometry, or missional shape a discipleship movement might take; and how to carry the true spirit of our faith into Fresh Expressions of Church without losing too much of what we need to keep or keeping too much of what we need to lose.

 

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[1] Richard P. Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called Methodists (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 47

[2] W. Reginald Ward & Richard P. Heitzenrater, The Works of John Wesley, Vol 18, Journal and Diaries I (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988) 24^th May 1738

[3] Atkins, Contemporary Methodism

[4] Vision & Values, http://www.methodist.org.uk/who-we-are/vision-values#worship

[5] Inspire, http://inspiremovement.org/network/

[6] What is a fresh expression? http://www.freshexpressions.org.uk/about/whatis