Rebuilding and Defending United Methodism Today – Part 3 of 9: Oriented for Conversion

The following is an excerpt from the text for a speech delivered by UMAction Director John Lomperis on Thursday, November 21 at historic Boehm’s Chapel.  The gathering near Lancaster, Pennsylvania was hosted by the Eastern Pennsylvania Evangelical Connection. That evening included lively discussion with the audience. For the convenience of online readers, the speech is divided into nine sections here.

Part 3 of 9: Oriented for Conversion

But the problem our church faces is not just about head knowledge.

Article VII of the EUB Confession of Faith declares that “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God,” which echoes Jesus telling Nicodemus in John 3:3 that “no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.”

Some UMC leaders speak as if the key to church outreach is just a matter of doing some secular market research about what unchurched Americans value, and then basing our branding and identity around claiming to pander to that.  Unspoken assumptions here are that we should let the values of those who do not know Christ dictate the church’s values, and that we humans are so capable of devising impressive, clever plans for church growth that we don’t need any help from the Holy Spirit, thank you very much.  If you listen carefully, that’s what the rhetoric for Adam Hamilton and Mike Slaughter’s recent push for a hard-left position on homosexual practice seems to amount to.

But at the heart of the gospel is the sad reality that we live in a fallen world filled with fallen people whose beliefs and behaviors are pathologically out of line with God’s perfect truth.  We must never lose sight of the fact that the evil of humanity, including that of all of us, is so horrible, inexcusable, and disgusting that Jesus Christ had to suffer a tortuous death for it!

Yet most everyone in our self-indulgent American culture thinks of themselves as fundamentally GOOD people who deserve good lives here and hereafter.  As an unsaved young man, I never heard anything more fundamentally offensive than Romans 3:9-20 saying that not ONE of us is good, let alone that I deserved eternity in Hell.  Any advertising firm could have warned Paul that such messaging does not test well in focus groups.

Of course, we must be careful to always ultimately point to the Savior when we talk about sin.  But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that the fact that we need a Savior is not inherently offensive, especially to Americans today.

I am absolutely convinced that one of the cruelest, most pastorally unhelpful things anyone can do is to lull non-Christian people into spiritual complacency by helping them think that they are already Christians.  This includes prematurely rushing people into church membership.

Perhaps the most chilling passage of Scripture is Matthew 7:21-23, in which Jesus teaches that on the Judgment Day there will not just be a few, but “many” people will actually name Jesus Christ as Lord, will even be very “spiritual” seeming people who did all kinds of impressive religious works, and even did these in the name of Jesus, but to whom Jesus will give a devastating news flash: these professed Christians never actually knew Him in the first place! And then they will hear their eternal sentence: “Away from me, you evildoers!”

Without understanding God’s justice and righteous wrath, we will have very little appreciation of His loving grace and mercy.  Without acknowledging the depth of our sin, we can never truly celebrate the glory of the Savior.

Some action steps:

First, realize we cannot assume that all church members are Christians yet, even if they think they are.  I know from my own personal experience that it is rather easy to be a member in good standing of the United Methodist Church for years without being a Christian.

Secondly, look systematically at your priorities of time and money, as individuals, families, and congregations and ask the question imprinted on the sign my own United Methodist pastor has on his desk: How will this make disciples?  And if there is some church activity or program for which we cannot answer this question, then it may be time to stop diverting God’s resources away from God’s mission.

Thirdly, any of you who ever preach, if you remember nothing else from my talk tonight, please remember this:

Make a deliberate point of working into every single one of your sermons a very clear presentation of the Gospel message that we are all sinners, that there is no hope for our own abilities to crawl out of the God-defying mess we have chosen for ourselves, but that God loved us so much that He came down in Jesus Christ to experience all the sorts of challenges and temptations that you and I face in this fallen world, that He remained without sin, and that while we were still sinners, He chose to suffer a tortuous murder on the cross to pay the penalty we earned for our sins, so that through His blood we might have the offer of new life in Him.

Try to work that into EVERY sermon.

And if working that into your sermon means you need to preach a bit longer, all the better.  Little 15-minute sermonettes do not usually have room for the kind of exegetical depth, real-life applications, and addressing tough questions that our people need.  As my friend, the former Good News leader Jim Heidinger, says, “Sermonettes make for Christianettes.”  But it has also been observed of churches successfully reaching large numbers of young adults: the longer the sermon, the younger the congregation.

At the end of it all, do you really believe that God is going to be pleased with your ministry if you were simply relatively more faithful than other ministers who were Unitarian Universalists in all but name?  Or do you think God may instead want to know why you failed to offer a clear presentation of the Gospel to that non-Christian visitor He drew into your church that one Sunday, which ended up being the second-to-last day of her life?

Fourthly, be very careful to stop speaking and acting as if everyone is already a child of God.  The New Testament is quite clear that while God loves and created everybody, “child of God” is a technical theological phrase referring only to that minority of humanity who have been made so through adoption, while the majority of humanity are “children of the Devil” (1 John 3:10).

When our services use language of “we Christians this, we Christians that,” and don’t include phrases like “if you are here today and have not yet surrendered your life to Christ…,” we are misleading the two groups of unconverted people – unchurched newcomers and nominally Christian churchy people – into thinking that they have no need of conversion.

Fifthly, we need to look systematically at our worship services to see how welcoming they may feel for an unchurched visitor, who cannot recite the Lord’s Prayer from memory and who needs the freedom to be present without participating in all parts of the service.

Sixthly, after the 2008 General Conference added witnessing as part of the sixth United Methodist membership vow, has your church accordingly updated the vows you have new members make?  If not, talk to your pastor about the need to make that change.

Finally, we must also make room in the life of our churches to celebrate when people do become children of God.  It should not be uncommon in our worship services to see adults who have been saved giving their testimonies before everybody and being baptized if they were never previously baptized or else going through our hymnal’s ritual for reaffirmation of faith.  And of course, people should not be prematurely rushed into either ritual.

This is NOT the sort of ministry we can do on our own.  We need to regularly, fervently cry out to God for revival to break out within and beyond our membership.

Part 1: The Need to Rebuild Our Church Cultures

Part 2 : Biblical Groundedness

Part 3: Oriented for Conversion

Part 4: Covenant Accountability, Counting the Cost of Church Membership

Part 5: Covenant Accountability: The Obligations of UMC Membership

Part 6: Why United Methodist Liberals are Now Focusing on “Biblical Disobedience”

Part 7: The “Biblical [Dis]obedience” Siege vs. the Basis for Unity in the UMC

Part 8: The Latest with Melvin Talbert

Part 9: Where Do We Go From Here?