By Rev. Richenda Fairhurst
Title: Reckoning Methodism: Mission and Division in the Public Church.
Imprint: Cascade Books, from Wipf and Stock Publishers
From the publisher: Reckoning Methodism addresses the brokenness of The United Methodist Church (UMC) in the United States. …Constructively, this book seeks historical clarity, collective repentance, charismatic learning, and institutional courage as United Methodists reckon with inherited animosities and divisions. This book provides no answers or programmatic fixes. Rather, it provides possibilities for repairing past harms as United Methodists seek ways to continue living out their Wesleyan faith. Reckoning with the public church divided, we glimpse the nature and mission of the church—not only as it has been but also as it could be.
Author: Darryl W. Stephens teaches at Lancaster Theological Seminary and serves as the Chair of the Order of Deacons in the Eastern Pennsylvania Annual Conference of the UMC. He previously served on the staff of the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women and wrote the 2021 Spiritual Growth/Mission Study for United Women in Faith. He writes about moral leadership, social change, and the common good on his blog.
What I appreciated about the book
Methodists are a people shaped by both worship and polity. Our worship together fills us, bonds us, and reminds us of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in our midst. Our polity is more complicated. Our polity is a bit like the books of the law, Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Like these books, our polity includes many instructions as to how we Methodists should live together as we, in our own words, go on to perfection.
Our polity shapes our structures and names our beliefs. In our best moments, the people called Methodist care deeply about how words and actions and belief come together. We are a people of salvation, resurrection, love of neighbor, and mission. Our aim by faith and action is to move our community to a more sanctified, just, and life-giving place. Yet even in this hope, we are also a people who can make a mess of things.
Our rules for living do not guide us in a straight line toward shalom. Too often, our efforts at shared affirmation fail. We stumble over division, and worse, at times we pick division up and stab each other with it. These divides can bring useful change, as it did when Wesley broke with the Anglican church to ordain US Bishops. But it can also do harm and be heartbreak, as when the US church split north and south during the American Civil War. Over the last few decades our arguments have too often flared on a harmful line, with LGBTQ leadership a flashpoint of expulsion, exclusion, and near-schism.
And yet we are alive. And at the recent General Conference in Charlotte, NC, there was a mood for justice and unity that made me hopeful.
What I appreciated about Stephens’ book is that he gives this journey a voice. He has a clarity of perspective and is leaning out the bow of the ship, taking notes as we emerge. He is offering, in pragmatic terms, a kind of map, a way to understand how we got here. He is inviting us to look again. Because, yes, this book is a polity book. But it is not really about our rules. It is about who we are.
As Stephens tells the story of us, he does so with gentleness and encouragement. He shows us our best attributes, where we strayed, and how we can find ourselves again. In a way he is the reliable narrator we didn’t know we needed.
Stephens has spent a lifetime steeped in Methodist worship and teachings and this deep foundation holds the book firmly in Methodist tradition and theological views. In so doing he notes where differences occur. He speaks to healthy ecumenism, council, and evangelicalism as multi-sided aspects of the authentic Church—our church.
Yet where do we go from here?
In setting the map before us, this is the question Stephens gently coaxes us to answer: Now that we can pause and remember who we are, what actions do our public faith and witness call us to?
For Stephens a few mainstays will help us set the sail. He includes many touchpoints to draw from, and the voices of Methodists who have been working to steer through the challenges we have faced. For this article, I am focused on where Stephens’ invitation intersects with the work of the United Methodist Creation Justice Movement. One of the key questions of this Movement is, “What more can we do together?” This question is an important one as we digest the map Stephens has offered us.
First and foundational is the work of addressing racism. Stephens mentions this imperative in the introduction to the book. Anti-racism work undergirds any and all next steps for the denomination and must be forwardly and courageously addressed if we are to be faithful to our sanctification journey.
Second, we must work to heal the trauma too many have experienced directly or indirectly from the recent divisive barbs of our denomination, as well as grappling with other church traumas that divide and harm us.
Third, in re-discovering who we are and what we are doing together, Stephens offers insight into the vital importance of dealing with the environmental crisis. Stephens himself isn’t proscriptive. Yet just in offering us the map to see who and where we are, he notes that environmental justice, concern for God’s creation, natural resources, well-being and climate change are a consistently agreed on concern of Methodist people.
Environmental Holiness
In his chapter on Environmental Holiness, Stephens charts the history of environmental concerns in the church and how these connect with Methodist prayer, polity, and practice. It’s as if environmental justice has a “prevenience” to it. There it is, consistently, calling to us to attend to care of the Earth as an essential part of establishing God’s shalom.
Despite this consistent calling, we have not brought environmental work to where it needs to be in the church. There is, for example, no covenant nor charter document that Methodists have developed specific to environmental justice and God’s creation to define what is theologically essential and how we are missionally accountable. As we set a fresh course as the people called Methodist, this star of navigation can both unify us and help us recognize the importance of our next steps as people of faith on Earth.
Recommend
I recommend this book. It has a lot of history in it, yet it is both invitational and accessible. It is pragmatic, yet also hopeful. I found much good in it. I felt invited to faithfully re-member who we are. It invites us to look up, look around, look to one another, and take the next necessary steps that God calls us to—in this moment—for the wellbeing of our churches, our communities, our neighbors, our faith, and the whole community of creation.
Read also on this site Methodist Creation Justice: An Evolving Tradition of Beautiful Words and Actions and An Environmental Holiness Quiz, both by Darryl W. Stephens. Stephens was a guest at the September 2024 Movement Café.
Rev. Richenda Fairhurst is here for the friendship and conversations about climate, community, and connection. For more conversations, see the team at the United Methodist Creation Justice Movement Café. Find Richenda in Southern Oregon and at JustCreation.org.