In the late 1960s I participated in a four-week continuing education event at one of our United Methodist seminaries. The event was designed as a time of “re-tooling” for pastors less than 10 years out of seminary. How were things changing in the church? What could we expect in the future?
A whole lot of changing, we discovered. And from the perspective of some of us, not necessarily for the better. We were in the midst of a cultural revolution. The cultural revolution brought sexual permissiveness, drugs as a way of life, legalized abortion, the Death of God, and
The
Secular City
. Students, college students mostly but also seminary students, were restless. Actually, the better descriptive word was “angry.” The anger was directed against the Vietnam war, against big business, against capitalism, and even against the church, which seemed complicit in many of society’s ills. The anger was directed also against the approach to education as practiced in many colleges and against old white male liberals. The “liberal” part of the anger surprised me some. I was unhappy with “liberals” too but not for the same reason. In the new cultural revolution the establishment white male liberals spoke a good line about a just society but delivered very little. One of the surprises of the continuing education event was finding myself defending some of my liberal friends upon whom some angry criticism was being heaped.
Just around the corner from that event would be the publishing of Charles Reich’s the
Greening of America,
a best-seller for a number of weeks. It castigated liberals (“the consciousness of liberals has proved inadequate to the task”) but then announced a new day (Consciousness III) in which society was moving away from the former ways of doing things toward a society characterized by love, freedom, and a new openness toward everybody and everything. At the center of the New Day was “self,” the only true reality. In the words of a critic, communal hedonism was announced as the path to enlightenment.
The biggest take-away from the continuing education event, at least for me, was a realization that theology was undergoing a serious shift. There was a de-emphasis on revealed truth (revelation) and, subsequently, a de-emphasis on what I called unifying truth. Karl Barth was going out of style. Indeed, all theologians with a unified world view were going out of style. Multi-volume Church Dogmatics were not being written. Boston University Personalism was passé. This was an era of growing logical positivism and post-modernism, views that “truth” is only that which can be verified by empirical evidence, meaning that claims about morality, spirituality, values, metaphysics, and ultimate reality were but idle words. To make matters worse, social analysis was leading to conclusions that behind these idle words lay cultural, religious and racial prejudices.
Some in the Christian world, as in some seminaries, were buying in. They were ready to discard old-time modernist ultimate-reality views of the Kingdom of God based on the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. Also being discredited were orthodox Christianity’s claims about salvation, heaven, hell, Atonement, Incarnation, judgment, and supernaturalism in general. So the church needed to redirect its vision: deal with problems in the here and now. Address prejudice, racism, oppression, colonialism, and economic injustice. Fight the ills of society; do social analysis: organize politically. New authority centers were based not on revelation (as in the Bible), or church creeds or traditions, but on the experiences of Self. More specifically they were being based on the perceived need of being freed from the injustices society had foisted upon them and others. So now we speak of liberation theology, Black theology, feminist theology, Womanist theology, Marxism, queer theology, and socialism. New value systems were introduced that emphasized inclusivism, multi-culturalism (one culture is as good as another since there is no objective truth), relativism, and tolerance. We were introduced to quota systems and language and conduct guidelines which had more to do with the cultural revolution than the gospel.
Supposedly the new theologies were (and are) dealing with truths but not with Truth. I did a stint on the conference Board of Ordained Ministry soon after and was discouraged by the inability of many of the seminary-trained ministerial candidates to articulate any meaningful theology. It was at this point in time that mainline churches began their 50-year membership decline.
One good example of the problems in the church associated with compromise with secular culture was seen in youth ministry. Since “youth” were a major part of the cultural revolution, a number of church youth, and with them some who worked with church youth, soon saw themselves as the cutting edge of the “New Day.” “Youth,” we were told, were coming of age and no longer wanted to be treated like immature kids. They demanded a place at the table. They wanted to contribute to the remaking of the world. I remember one discussion about the old MYF (Methodist Youth Fellowship) where some said it was irrelevant to youth’s interests and needs and basically needed to be discarded in the new Methodist-EUB merger because it was “Mickey Mouse.” These youths wanted freedom from adult control. The General Conferences of 1968, 1970 and 1972 were characterized by “youth” demonstrations and demands. The conferences could not capitulate fast enough. Even at the time, it was pointed out that the “youth” were primarily college-age, and not high school age youth. Never mind: the General Conferences handed “youth” everything they wanted: control of the Youth Service Fund, an organization independent from adults, quota representation on all church boards, and freedom to pursue their interests without restraint.
In 1974 conference youth coordinators were called to Nashville for a “consultation.” Since I was the conference youth coordinator for our conference at the time, I attended. A serious problem was brought to the surface. In Methodism, before merger, there were 13 youth staff members under the Methodist Board of Education, 15 secretaries, 52 full-time conference directors, and 1,200,000 pieces of youth curriculum produced per quarter. By 1976 the merged denomination counted one part-time youth staff, one secretary and 400,000 pieces of youth curriculum produced per quarter. Giving to the Youth Service Fund simply dried up.
At this point professional educators—had they been perceptive—should have seen evangelicals as their greatest supporters. Indeed, the larger church should have seen evangelicals as the church’s greatest supporters. Evangelicals were those who believed in a unified system of truth. Evangelicals were those willing to defend historic Methodism. Evangelicals were those who could and would push back against secular skepticism, especially when that skepticism was coming not from common ordinary people but from a privileged elite. In the midst of a cultural and intellectual revolution United Methodist evangelicals were operating successful youth ministries, including camping, in many conferences. The problem was not a falling away of youth and adults from Christian faith. Evangelical ministries were emerging and thriving. With the 1960s came an explosion of para-church youth ministries. The 1960s also produced the Jesus People, the charismatic movement, and the growth of Pentecostalism. UM membership in those early years after merger was decreasing at the rate of over 100,000 per year. Meanwhile denominations which still held to a unified system of truth that stressed special revelation (the narrative contained in Scripture) were flourishing. While mainline denominations spoke of the poor, the minorities and the less privileged, those who remained true to the gospel (and its truth claims) were flourishing and in the process reaching the poor, the minorities and the less privileged. The Assemblies of God, a church with a Wesleyan background and 3 million US members and adherents today, grew by 500% from 1950 to the present day. And this is a racially diverse growth accomplished without quota systems, inclusiveness mandates, commissions on Status and Role of Women or Religion and Race. The AG percentage of blacks now is at 9% and the percentage of Hispanics at 20%. Worldwide the Assemblies of God members and adherents total 69 million. All of this since AG was founded in 1915, just a little over 100 years ago.
So we have stumbled along to our present day. We are now living in a time when we are bearing the fruit of the sexual revolution. Biblical and traditional standards (based on an understanding of unified revealed truth) are being compromised by standards advanced by the autonomous self. What is the result? How about broken homes, broken marriages, out-of-wedlock births, sexual addictions, sex trafficking, sexual harassment, poverty, co-habitation outside of marriage, higher incidents of sexual predators, sexual confusion, higher rates of homosexuality, same-gender marriage, transgenderism, poverty and suicide.
The One Church Model supported by a majority of bishops and a number of other well-respected persons, if adopted, would represent a capitulation to secular trends in society. The idea of letting individuals and individual churches decide for themselves what is right and wrong, is not a Biblical approach. Nor is the idea that “contextualization” means sexual practice which may be wrong in one place is right in another place. Those who argue about the church catching up with society are speaking about a secular society
Do United Methodists believe in truth? Of course. Whether or not it is taught in some of our seminaries, our churches are full of people who believe in revealed, unified, universal truth. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has intervened on our behalf through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, who by His death and resurrection has made Atonement for the sins of the world and offers salvation by faith from the consequences of sin. This same God calls us to be in service to all persons so that the world can be transformed. These truth claims are affirmed by the church universal and summarized for United Methodists in our church’s
Discipline
. Let us be faithful.
