A Faithful United Methodist Witness in the Big Apple

One of the neat things about being UMAction Director is how my work-related travel often gives me the chance to visit different United Methodist congregations around the country. 

Last week I was in New York to observe the board of directors meeting for the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries and to be the invited speaker for a gathering of the evangelical Wesley Fellowship in the New York Annual Conference. In one of God’s many ironies, it was a liberal pastor in the New York Annual Conference who confirmed me into the United Methodist Church many years ago, thus setting the stage for all of my subsequent work for theologically orthodox renewal in our denomination.

I had a delightful Palm Sunday morning participating in worship and Bible study at the ethnically and generationally diverse Glendale-Maspeth United Methodist Church in the Queens borough of New York City. A stone section of the wall labels the building “Glendale Evangelical Church,” a lasting marker of the community’s Evangelical United Brethren (EUB) history.  Glendale-Maspeth UMC is an often hard-to-find sort of gem: a non- “ethnic” United Methodist congregation with an orthodox pastor within the city limits of a major American metropolis. The congregants demonstrated how even New Yorkers can live up to Garrison Keillor’s memorably labeling of us “the friendly Methodists.”

Before the service, the pastor, the Rev. Dr. Phil Hardt, led us in a procession around the city block, singing hymns and waving palm branches, complete with two young girls lifting high a cross.

Even the negative currents of one of our denomination’s most theologically radicalized and secularized annual conferences have not prevented faithful United Methodists from literally taking to the streets of Gotham to boldly confess Christ.

Many associate urban northeastern United Methodism with the sort of heresy as the prominent MFSA activist who as a delegate at the last General Conference categorically denounced any “hierarchical” language for God, pridefully declaring “I don’t have a king!”

But this New York congregation was not shy about proclaiming the truth of the Lordship and Kingship of Jesus Christ.  They even included “Onward, Christian Soldiers” among the hymns we sang.

I was especially moved by taking part in the collective singing of a later stanza:

Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane,

But the church of Jesus constant will remain.

Gates of hell can never gainst that church prevail;

We have Christ’s own promise, and that cannot fail.

Christian disciples must never complacently slacken in our devotion to taking up our crosses and following Him. Our United Methodist Church, especially within the New York Annual Conference, is under intense spiritual assault by secularizing corruption from within and without. It is sadly the case that, as has happened when the church has faced similar challenges in ages past, we will likely see some branches to which we have been connected choose to separate themselves from the life-giving Vine, after which they will wither away.

But it is also worth highlighting that, contrary to popular confusion, Christ’s teaching about the gates of Hell not prevailing against the church put the former as the one in the defensive posture, not the other way around.

Biblically literate Christians have the immeasurable blessing of not having to live only within our present struggles but rather being people who know the bigger picture. In our present age, the church faces difficult challenges and even suffers heart-breaking apostasies within its own ranks. But we have the surest guarantee that the true church will never be completely overwhelmed. So we press forward through our present trials, with full faith and confidence that in the end, God and His church will prevail.