Remarks at Patrick Henry College Chapel (Audio)

It’s an honor to speak at Patrick Henry College, which I have known through friendship with President Graham Walker, who serves on our board, and from which I’ve benefited directly as my last assistant of two years was the very impressive Bart Gingerich, a graduate who is now in Reformed Episcopal Seminary in Philadelphia.   Everyone I meet from Patrick Henry is very, very bright, so either you have universal intelligence here or keep your less bright graduates away from visibility.

Our Scripture is Matthew 6, and I’ll focus specifically on the passage “thy kingdom come” as it relates to my own work and organization and ultimately to your vocation.  All of us as Christians are called to serve and advance His Kingdom, that His will might on earth might be in sync with His will in heaven.   Obviously the tensions between the two are always enormous as our own world is fallen.  But the Holy Spirit empowers each of us to do His work despite constant obstacles, and we trust that God will honor and bless what we do in His power, even though we likely will not see all the ultimate fruits here during our earthly walk.  Much of what we do in His service will not bear fruit until well into future generations and not tabulated fully until the Final Day.

My own vocation came to me, although I did not yet fully realize it, when I was your age, attending Georgetown University, and serving as missions chairman at the Arlington church where I grew up.  For better or worse, United Methodist churches, having so few young people, are often eager to empower the few they have with church office.  I also began representing my congregation at the annual state convention for my denomination and became increasingly aware and distressed about the theology and politics that governed United Methodism’s national bureaucracy.  Most especially I was distressed about the denomination’s missions board, which was one of the world’s largest, then having a $100 million budget, a headquarters staff of about 500 and a missionary force of about the same size, with only about 20 percent of the budget going directly to missionaries.

Millions of dollars in grants were going to groups outside the church, many of them very political and radical, including groups openly supporting violent Marxist revolution in Asia, Africa and Latin America.  Liberation Theology was the guiding principle for the United Methodist missions board then as it was for missions for much of Mainline Protestantism in those Cold War days.

I was horrified to learn that my church’s dollars, given faithfully by unknowing worshippers, were subsidizing the Sandinista Marxist regime in Nicaragua, the Marxist insurgency in El Salvador, and other similar movements around the world.   I put together a 16 page report describing these facts for my congregation’s administrative board, whose members shared my horror, and who authorized me to share it with the 50 other United Methodist churches in our part of Northern Virginia.   In response, the bishop of Virginia organized a group of 30 of us to visit with the missions board’s executives in New York city on Veterans Day 1989 for a full day.  The executives there were cordial but adamant.  When the Treasurer was asked if he knew that most church members supporting his agency would disapprove of funding for groups advocating violent revolution, he replied yes.  But similarly, he said, most had disapproved of supporting civil rights decades before.  For them, he declared, it was a matter of conviction, not popularity.

This principled stance may have been admirable had it involved the missions board treasurer’s own funds and not the church’s.   After that meeting the bishop invited us into a 2 year dialogue on reforming the church’s missions board, agreeing on proposals prioritizing missionaries and controlling non church grants that the Virginia Conference of United Methodism submitted to the denomination’s governing General Conference in 1992, which I attended.  And there I saw how the same missions executives we had met in New York were present, successfully lobbying against the reform proposals we had carefully crafted.  I was convinced that only a massive campaign to educate the church’s millions of members would compel reform of the missions board and much of the church bureaucracy.

But how to do so when I had a full-time job in the CIA, which I had believed since high school would be my full-time career?   The Lord made a way, as He usually does, and I was offered a job in 1994 with the Institute on Religion and Democracy to direct its United Methodist work, which I eagerly accepted, and where I have remained for 19 years, having become president in 2009.  The IRD was founded initially by a man older than I but not dissimilar in his concerns, when his children were tasked by their Methodist Sunday school to raise funds for the church’s missions board that sounded dubious.  He was an official with the AFL CIO who specialized in helping overseas trade unions steer away from Marxism and toward democracy.  In 1980 he had compiled his own report about the United Methodist missions board and personally distributed it to the delegates at the 1980 General Conference, which failed to take major action, but where he met a United Methodist evangelist who helped him found the IRD.

Together they enlisted some major Christian thinkers to create a new Christian thinktank that would aggressively challenge especially Mainline Protestant church support for Liberation Theology and urge them instead to affirm orthodox theology and a social witness that affirmed intrinsic human rights for all persons, shunning the Marxist temptation to seek social justice through state coercion.   Across the final decade of the Cold War IRD successfully discredited, on national television and in major publications, once prestigious and powerful church groups, like the National Council of Churches, which had forsaken traditional Christian belief for radical political action, ignoring and betraying their own church memberships.  In those years the National Council of Churches had hundreds of employees in a large New York headquarters.  Today, that once mighty New York office is closed, its staff roster lists only five persons, making IRD now larger than the National Council of Churches.

When the Cold War ended there was some question about IRD’s future mission.  But soon we were enmeshed in the sexuality debates plaguing all the Mainline Protestant denominations, where the major battle flag issue between conservatives and liberals was homosexuality.  IRD declared that the churches’ first role is to be faithful to its biblical, historic doctrines, without which it can only lead individuals and society astray.  IRD also challenged denominational support for abortion rights, church support for unrestricted big government, and church insistence on pacifist foreign and military policies that dangerously ignored the historic Christian understanding that God ordained the civil state to wield the sword against disorder and evil.

Since 9-11, IRD has loudly challenged churches, not just Mainline Protestant but increasingly evangelical as well, that insist that governments like individuals are called to turn the check in answer to terrorism and aggression.  We have also warned against more extreme forms of environmentalism that are often apocalyptic and pantheistic.   And we continue to remind the churches of their duty to defend traditional marriage and family and pillars of all societies.  Sadly, nearly all the once great Mainline denominations have surrendered their biblical stances on sexual morality, suffering schism and accelerated membership loss.  Oddly, many evangelicals now advocate following their example, believing that if churches abandon or at least minimize hut button stances involving cultural confrontation that the culture will respond with appreciation for the church.  The Mainline Protestant example warns otherwise, that compromise of Christian doctrine only wins indifference and ultimately irrelevance.  The church can only truly be the church when it remains rigorously faithful to its historic doctrines, risking, welcoming and even thriving from clashes with the secular culture.

After nearly 25 years I remain still involved in reforming my lifelong denomination.  Unlike the other Mainline denominations, United Methodism has a global membership whose overseas churches, mostly in Africa, are fast growing even as the U.S. church declines, and who have prevented the denomination from compromising its biblical stances on marriage and sex. Now it is liberals instead of conservatives who speak of possibly quitting, realizing that demography is now preventing the victory they assumed must come in time, as it did for Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans and others.  There are now more United Methodists in church on a typical Sunday in the Congo than there are in the entire United States.  I’ve watched with amazement as these Africans have unapologetically defended biblical beliefs at our denominational conventions.  When I first began my struggle for church renewal 25 year ago, I never dreamt that the African church, then few in number, would serve as God’s instrument saving a once all U.S. denomination.  But God often has wonderful surprises.

And I never dreamt that my full-time vocation would become working for church reform, an unlikely career path.  But once again, God often has good surprises for us.  My work now at IRD involves not just my own denomination but challenging the wider church in America to remain faithful to its core doctrines, not to surrender to culture, and not to exchange the church’s core mission for a dubious political agenda.  IRD, and I personally, have witnessed the destructive effects of churches led astray, and we pray our witness and mission can help prevent evangelicals especially from losing their passion for the Bible, evangelism, and holiness.

Thy Kingdom Come often entails struggling against the fallen world even within our church structures, which rarely if ever achieve the perfect holiness to which Christ calls us.  It is tempting when we are young to idealize the church and other institutions that we rightly serve and venerate.  But we must know from the start, and as the Scriptures clearly describe, that no arena of human activity, including the church, is ever free from human sin and error.  So we are always called to be on guard and vigilant, to safeguard our own personal belief sand practice, and also to uphold the integrity of the institutions where we are called to serve, above all the church.

In modern America it is especially tempting to act as consumers towards even our churches, sampling this one or that one, finding that none ever meets our standards, and constantly roaming from one church to the next.   But each church that fully claims Christ is, whatever its faults, part of Christ’s mystical universal Body.  And where it fails it more often commands our loving and prayerful work to restore it before we abandon it for what we imagine are greener church pastures.

Our Scriptures today admonish us to seek treasure in Heaven and to worry not about the troubles that inevitably afflict us.  As we seek Him, God will provide.  As you discern your own vocation, I pray you will remember these words and be prepared for God’s surprises, which are always good news.