Thank you very much.
It is amazing to see such a crowd of people who are interested in Methodism.
In the world in which I live, that just doesn't happen.
And I was staying with a friend last night who looks rather as gance at my ongoing
interest in Methodism, and she said, Be sure you've got some jokes to put in every
now and then to make sure they're still all awake.
I don't have any jokes.
I don't think John Wesley went for jokes either.
You, who are preachers, will probably have quite a share of those, because I gather,
at least in my tradition, a joke sometimes begins a sermon.
But my address is quite earnest.
But like the traditional sermon, I'd like to cover three points.
And first of all, why I chose this topic
and some of the challenges that are part of the topic.
Secondly, some misunderstandings that people have had, maybe some of you as
well, about Methodism in Canada during the latter part of the 19th century.
And then I want to present some contrary
evidence through the experience of a few individuals, and I want to set them in
their wider social, political, cultural context.
And finally, and this may be a bit
controversial, but controversy is good for Methodists.
I'd like to give a few thoughts how awareness of spirituality and its changing
context might offer us some insights and opportunities for our own time.
And I'm especially interested in your
feedback, since you are clergy, unlike an academic like myself.
So why this topic?
Well, spirituality is a topic that's hard
to examine at any time and certainly so in the past.
And I've got a definition up there for it.
It's a very simple one.
More often than not, spirituality gets
forgotten when historians do a quick sweep of Christian history.
It's easier to focus on the writings of
great preachers and theologians, and then we look at the past through their eyes,
through the eyes of the preacher, the theologian.
Spirituality can't be quantified at institutions.
You can't analyze it the way you analyze doctrine, and those who practice it in the
past can't be interviewed, and you certainly can't poll them.
So we have to study spirituality through
the few accounts that we do have of people's experience, the way they've
written about it in diaries, letters, biographies, and other published works.
When Dr. Petler asked me for a topic entitled I
happened to be Reading, a recent work by one of my favorite cultural historians.
His name is Robert Orsi, and he studies religion as lived experience.
So not so much as belief, but as experience.
And Orsi's interest is largely in Roman Catholics.
And in his latest book, the one I Was
Reading, he looks at the many ways in which Roman Catholics in the 19th and 20th
centuries experience the presence of the divine.
Some of his examples are appearances by the Virgin Mary.
She seemed to appear quite frequently in
the 19th century visits to shrines, veneration of saints, and, of course, the
belief of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
All the examples he lists were precisely
those areas where Roman Catholics and Protestants strongly differed.
Protestants would have nothing to do with the doctrine of transubstantiation.
They saw the veneration of Mary and the saints as idolatry.
They dismissed the sacred nature of the priesthood and the papacy, and they were
strongly critical of the Church's control over the reading of the Bible.
It's not surprising, therefore, that given
such dismissal of their valued spiritual practices, roman Catholics saw Protestants
as totally lacking any experience at all of sacred presence.
As Robert Orsi Succinctly summarizes the
difference between the two to be Catholic equals sacred presence.
To be Protestant equals sacred absence.
We know, of course, that such a stereotype was and is quite misinformed.
And you who are in the Wesleyan Holiness
tradition, will have no trouble in providing examples of sacred presence in
revivals and in the lives of preachers and laypeople.
And the same can be said for Wesley's followers in early 19th century Canada.
And I'd like to give you a description of one of those experiences.
The first Mass camp meeting held in five
in central Canada on at Hay Bay, on the Bay of Quinte.
And it's written you may be familiar with
this already, but it's written by Methodist Episcopal.
Itinerant Nathan Banks, and this is how he described it.
It might be said of a truth that the God of the Hebrews has come into the camp.
For the noise was heard far off.
The groans of the wounded, the shouts of
the delivered, the prayers of the faithful, the exhortations of the
courageous penetrated the very heavens and reverberated through the neighborhood.
End of quote.
Preacher's accounts of the early 19th
century, whether it was an upper or lower Canada, the Maritimes or Newfoundland, are
filled with such stories of divine presence.
Possibly some of those stories are more
exuberant than John Wesley would even have been comfortable with.
And you'll find similar accounts almost a
century later by Holiness preachers in eastern Ontario and Western Canada.
And you may still I'd love to talk to you
afterwards, you may still be experiencing this.
But what about Nathan Bang's successors,
the mainline Methodists in the years after 1850?
Historians who have written about the period have argued that by the 1850s and
60s, methodists were no longer looking for divine presence.
The argument that the historians put forward is that in their desire to become
respectable and accepted, methodists lost their experience of the sacred.
They abandoned the old exuberant religion of the heart in favor of college trained
ministers and orderly services in impressive Gothic and Romanesque style
churches, churches which we still see throughout the landscape.
What mattered now was Methodist influence
at the center of political power and the newly formed Canadian nation.
Now, my own research and writing has been
on methodism in the second half of the 19th century, right up until the time that
the mainline Methodist joined the United Church of Canada in 1925.
I've looked at family papers, accounts of Methodist practices, doctrinal emphasis,
and theological training, and I disagree strongly with the view that the
denomination had lost its spiritual core in the process.
I've also become more aware of the complexity and tensions that are part of
trying to understand spirituality in a changing context.
And on this last topic, I'd like to offer a few reflections at the end of the talk.
So are you still awake?
All right. No joke.
But we continue.
We today know something of the speed of
change caused by the Internet, social media, and advanced technology.
We know how it's made our lives so very different from that of previous
generations, even the generation of our parents, in a different way.
But just as comprehensively life changed
for 19th century Canadians and Methodists after mid century, this is my main theme.
When people's everyday experience changes,
their spirituality or experience of the sacred also expresses itself in new forms
that reflect their changed communal and self identity.
Our world changes, and our spirituality,
which is our experience of God in the world, also changes.
So what was the new context?
By the 1850s, the relatively humble status
of Methodists, especially in the villages and towns, had really changed a lot.
It now included a number of professionals,
well to do entrepreneurs, tradesmen and farmers.
Most now listed Canada as their country of birth.
This shift in membership status was part of a wider socioeconomic restructuring,
which was brought about by canal and railway construction, large scale
immigration after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and rising farm input.
So the frontier became much more settled.
In Ontario between 1851 and 1871, the
number of people living in places of 1000 or more almost tripled.
New Brunswick's Methodists became the fastest growing religious group in that
colony, and most were respectable tradesmen.
And their prosperity was beginning to find expressions in new places of worship.
Constructed in the impressive Romanesque and Gothic styles.
In central Canada, methodists were becoming the province's most prolific
builder of churches, increasing the number of churches by fivefold.
So you can imagine what an impact that
would have on the community to see themselves growing so quickly.
The perception that these changes were
accompanied by spiritual decline comes largely from the warnings and
reminiscences of an older generation of preachers.
They look back with nostalgia on what came
to be seen as Methodism's heroic period the years of camp meetings in frontier
settlements, dramatic conversions and self sacrificing itinerant preachers.
Such lamentations are familiar in times of change.
David Hempton, who is a historian of Irish Methodism lovingly, labels these men the
Old Croakers, and some of us have become Old Crokers,
old Croakers preachers trained in an earlier period who have lost influence and
find themselves out of step with the times.
In actual fact, far from losing spiritual
vitality, the 1850s were a period of intense revival in central Canada.
Between 1849 and 1859, the membership of the Wesleyan Methodist Church more than
doubled, from roughly 24,000 to roughly 51,000.
And that of the Methodist new connections almost doubled as well, from 3389 to 5708.
In the Maritimes, Methodism grew little during this decade, but suddenly in 159,
over 300, over 3000 new members came in largely through revivals, not in the
country, but in such major urban centers as Halifax, St.
John and and Charlottetown and Methodist Connectional Funds.
Funds for the entire denomination, not
counting local funds, doubled during the decade.
Now, one reason why some of the Old
Croakers may have looked with nostalgia to the to the primitive simplicity of the
past was that lay influence had also increased.
Lay influence increases influence of the clergy tends to decrease.
Lay people demanded a better educated ministry, more reflective, less emotional
preaching, and some wanted a reform of the class meeting.
Some saw the class meeting's reliance on personal testimonies as becoming stale.
Same old, same old repetition of my conversion story.
And they saw that as a deterrent to drawing in new members.
In 1874, laymen for the first time were granted seats in the General Conference as
an inducement to try to get the New Connection Methodists to unite with the
Wesleyans to form the Methodist Church of Canada.
The denomination's welltodo, male members
took on prominent roles nationally and also at the local level.
The denomination was expanding, and so they played a vital role as church
trustees, members of building committees, fundraisers and stewards.
Their wives and daughters served in
providing poor relief, sunday school teaching and other forms of outreach.
As a result, the 1850s brought profound changes among ministry and laity.
As self conscious modernizers.
A new generation of laity and clergy went
about building churches, founding colleges, establishing periodicals and
newspapers, constructing new disciplines and forming committees.
In this process, especially in urban centers, ministers wanted to ensure that
material progress did not happen at the expense of spiritual growth.
That's always the danger, right?
We become rich and we lose our spiritual core.
And so ministers realize this would
require a renewal of lay spirituality in a form more fitting for the Times.
How did this happen?
Very simply and very much in keeping with Methodist identity, the 1850s saw a
revitalization of John Wesley's teaching on Christian perfection.
This would have a profound impact on denominational leaders such as theologian
and Victoria College Chancellor Nathaniel Burwash and Albert Carmen, who after 1883
became the general superintendent of the Methodist Church of Canada.
And you can tell by their dates of death
as well, that they had an extensive influence because they died in old age.
And in those days, you didn't retire, you died in harness, and they held on.
So it shaped the leaders, the doctrine of Christian perfection.
It also shaped many lay leaders, clergy leaders.
In earlier accounts, there are references
to Christian perfection entire sanctification or holiness,
but they're really few and far between because most of the emphasis is on
conversion and the accompanying experience of the witness of the Spirit.
But it was especially the efforts of two
American revivalists, james Caughty and Phoebe Palmer, who instilled in Methodist
audiences a new interest in Christian perfection.
In 1857, Palmer came to Hamilton, Ontario,
and it was the first of a series of Canadian visits.
Religion was big news in those days and the press always covered it.
And revivalists made very good use of always contacting the press.
And the way Palmer billed her revival
method in the Hamilton Spectator was as a laity for the Times.
And as she explained to the newspaper, two
things made her revival a success the practical nature of revival and the
role of organization and discipline among church members.
And the way she describes that.
She came to a regular weekly prayer meeting in the evening.
There were about 50 to 75 people there and
in the course of her talking, somehow the spirit started to move and quite a number
of businessmen stood up and they said, we are going to Tithe and we are going to
bring one new member to next night to tomorrow night's prayer meeting.
So it was quite disciplined, quite well organized.
And as a result, the next night this happened.
And as a result, 18 days of meeting, afternoon and evening, took place in the
church apparently was overflowing with people.
And similar accounts emerged from her
impact and other urban centers and also the preaching of James caughthe.
Their methods were part of a shift that matched the world of the laity.
I think that's important revivals were sober in style.
They called on the cooperation of wives
and sisters, the importance of the family, and in these ways, they targeted a middle
class who was active in the new commercial and industrializing marketplace,
starting in New York City and also involving Palmer.
A number of American large urban centers experienced similar revivals in the late
1850s, and the press describes these as the businessmen's revivals.
Holiness was now experienced as a heightened sense of the sacred and abiding
experience of God's love that went beyond the emotional moment of conversion.
It expressed itself in a daily structuring
of one's time in ways that were practical and service oriented.
Earlier accounts of revivals by ministers had emphasized the emotional experience of
the witness of the spirit in conversion, but they hadn't talked very much about
what happened to the convert's life after conversion.
Accounts now took pains to note the
absence of emotional manifestations and revivals, the disciplined involvement of
the late, and the consistent practice of piety as the test of conversion.
Thanks to an interest in biography,
especially among laylives men and women, for this period, a number of converts have
left behind a rich description of their experience and subsequent religious
practice, and I'd like to talk about three of these very briefly.
Most of the new converts had already,
since childhood, been socialized in evangelical Christianity.
And so there are no vivid accounts the way
there are of the earlier period of a misspent youth.
Once I was a sinner, they realized they
were sinners, but it was a different kind of sense of sinfulness.
So here's the first one, and it's Charles Colby.
In the village of Stanstead in Quebec and Eastern Townships, charles Colby, an 1858
young lawyer, fell in love with a young Methodist woman from Vermont.
And shortly after that he experienced he had profound experience of divine love.
And as he wrote to his new mother in law,
although he'd been raised in a Christian home, he confessed that his knowledge of
God had always been intellectual rather than experiential.
Suddenly, as he experienced God's goodness
and love, his relationship with the divine had changed.
In his words, all the barriers which had
previously separated me from the Savior had come down, and for the first time in
my life, I was able to enter into prayer as an intimate dialogue with God.
He realized that God's nature was love and
that religion was primarily a matter of the heart rather than the head.
And of course, this intersected with the experience that he had also had of
recently falling in love and planning to marry and start a family.
He did marry. He did start a family.
He was a devoted husband and father,
and like so many others in this period, it was a really turbulent economic time, and
charles Colby lost his house at one point in time, he became insolvent.
He was often away on business, he entered politics, and he served his
country's federal parliament from 1867 to 1891.
And even though he was often away from home, he maintained an active interest in
the welfare of Stanstead's Methodist congregation.
He was a member of the management committee.
He kept an eye on the Stationing Committee's selection of preachers to
ensure that they always met his congregation's needs.
You weren't supposed to do that, but they all did it.
And with a view to the education of his four children.
He was also an enthusiastic supporter and trustee of Stanstead Wesleyan College when
it opened its doors in 1874, moving then to Halifax james Bain Morrow.
He was raised in a devout Methodist family.
At age 16, he started to work for the Samuel Cunard Steamship Company.
And he worked for there in a number of
very influential positions for the rest of his life.
After attending a series of revivals at a
Sunday school at Argyle Street Methodist Church, he came home and he wrote in his
diary in 1851, I find the service of Christ to be perfect freedom, and I have
to rejoice in what I experience of the love of God.
And shortly after that he took the leadership of a young boys class and he
began a long career of active church involvement which included lay preaching,
teaching a sunday saturday evening band meeting, leading a sunday evening band
meeting assistance and church extension leadership in the local and national YMCA
and on the executive of the book and track society.
So there were all these organizations
which had been grown up during this period.
They needed leaders, and many of those who
had experienced Christian perfection became very involved in them.
In Belleville
Jane Clement Jones unfortunately, it's hard to get pictures of women.
So what we have of Jane Clement Jones is a
window that was dedicated to her memory after she died.
It's in Bridge Street United Church in Belleville.
Jane Clement Jones,
during one of James caught his revivalist campaigns in 1856, jane attended.
She was 30 years old, pregnant with her
fifth child, and she also experienced a new sense of consecration.
And what a sense of consecration it was.
In the next 38 years, she became a
tireless and highly conscientious class leader, first to a group of young women.
And after 1869, she took on a senior boys
class, which over its 14 year existence had a total of 770 young men.
Young men often came to Belville.
They studied at a school of business.
Jane would meet them at the train station.
She would bring them to her home.
She had specialties which would attract them.
In that way, they became members of her young men's class as well.
She was active in poor relief.
She helped establish the Belleville
Hospital, a home for the needy, and the Women's Christian Association.
And along with this.
She was a faithful attendee at Methodist
prayer and class meetings, love feasts and Sunday worships.
And of course, she was also a wife to a
local businessman and a mother to eventually eight children.
Like so many of her generation, I think this is important.
She owed a great deal to a meticulous
organizational ability and an overly developed conscience.
I would feel guilty if I did not go, she
would say, because she spent so much time at her church, which was her second home.
In their work on behalf of young people, Colby, Jones and Morrow exemplified the
concern of Methodist clergy and laity to extend the faith to the next generation.
This was so important to make sure the
faith was transmitted, and the key institution in this was the Sunday School.
Here, prominent local men and women assumed active leadership as teachers and
superintendents, although it was the men who were the superintendents.
William Pearson, for example, an Anglican in 152, was converted to Methodism in one
of James caught his revivals in Toronto's Richmond Street Methodist Church.
He was he.
He worked days in the Toronto Post Office,
but he also served 30 years as the church's Sunday School superintendent.
When his church closed in 1888, he joined
Metropolitan Methodist Church, where he taught a Bible class for another 24 years,
resigning in 1912 after 60 years of continuous Sunday School service.
I'm not sure what it would have been like to have been a young child in William
Pearson's Sunday School class at the 60th year of his superintendency,
but he hung in there like other Protestant evangelical
denominations, method of spirituality began in the home with family devotions,
and the results of this are evident in the 1870s.
As in the 1850s, there was another series of revivals, and Methodist membership in
Canada increased from 15.4% in 1871 to 17.2% ten years later.
So more than 2% increase, making Methodists
the country's largest Protestant denomination.
And samples of congregation showed that the majority of converts were children of
parents who had been converted in the 1850s revivals.
And again, when describing the revivals, the emphasis was on the orderly atmosphere
of the revival and on expressions of dedication on the part of the converts.
In place of the old fashioned Methodist
class meeting, young men and women were enrolled in Bible classes, which were led
by lay female and male members for the spiritual needs of young people.
There was the Epworth League, which was organized in Canada in 1889.
Its purpose was to put into active service
the knowledge the children had obtained in the Sunday School.
For example, the League's Department of Citizenship looked at social and political
questions stressing as the best means of creating a strong and vigorous nation.
Patriotism and moral reform.
And how did you get moral reform?
Well, through such means as sabotarian and temperance activity.
Keeping the Sabbath, which was a very hard
we took it for granted many years, but it was very hard to bring that in.
What do you do with the trains on Saturday night?
Do they all stop
and people will explain, well, if they stop, then the crew is simply going to get
drunk on the weekend and the train will have trouble get starting on Monday.
So these practical issues that idealistic
evangelicals like the Methodist had to deal with
and the Epworth League also emphasized a study of Canadian history and politics.
Late 19th century Canadians, as elsewhere
in the English speaking world, strongly believed that theirs was a progressive
age, not just in the material sense, but also in the area of religious knowledge.
In 1910, the Methodist Church of Canada accepted in a moderate form the new
historical approach to the Scriptures known as the Higher Criticism.
This had not happened without controversy,
but in the end it was concluded that both the new and the old readings of Scriptures
were in keeping with Wesley's evangelistic approach.
One of the strongest supporters,
theologian and university chancellor Nathan Nathaniel Bervash, argued that
questions of biblical scholarship were largely irrelevant for those who
concentrated only on the conversion of sinners, such as Methodism's offshoot.
The Salvation Army and Berwash had a lot of respect for the Salvation Army.
However, as he sought the task of
contemporary Methodists went beyond the salvation of the soul to include shaping
Canadian culture with the moral and spiritual truths of Scripture.
He was convinced that faith in Christ was
no longer only a matter of saying, christ died for me or Christ paid my debt.
Such phrases could easily become ritualized and empty.
Rather, faith in Christ meant, said Burwash, the far deeper and broader act of
taking him as the Lord and Master, the example and guide of my life.
Holiness was not just a personal matter.
Those whose lives had been sanctified had a communal responsibility to create a
Christian country in every aspect of life, be it politics, education, temperance,
Sunday observance, or urban social reform, I'm going to just dig a
Henry Rack with whom some of you may be familiar.
John Wesley's biographer has noted that over time, john Wesley's legacy of
perfectionism resulted in two opposing views.
Quote the two elements held in balance in
Wesley an instant gift and experience and a steady progress through pious
cultivation tended to split apart into two different versions of holiness.
Later, perfectionists and pentecostals
concentrated on the gift as an experience with little specific moral content.
Others concentrated on the element of gradual progress.
Some, such as Burwash's former student Ralph Horner, and the holiness tradition,
which emerged after the 1870s, emphasized the first version.
Mainline Methodist generally highlighted
the moral dimension of gradual progress, of sanctification or perfect love.
So you see this distinction right between the two, and I'm sure you've probably
looked at it before in your lectures in this in emphasizing gradual progress of
sanctification, they were part of a Protestant evangelical
moral order that was intent on building a godfearing nation.
Since the 1840s and 50s, Methodists had
joined other committed Evangelicals Presbyterians, Congregationalists,
Baptists and some Anglicans in moral crusades in favor of prison reform,
antislavery temperance and prohibition and Sabbath reform.
In the decades after Confederation in 1867, their combined forces and growing
political and social influence saw them increasingly seeking parliamentary
legislation in support of prohibition and Sabbath observance.
In their eyes, the one obstacle to success
in making Canada a Christian country by Evangelical Protestant standards were the
Roman Catholics, who counted for 41.5% of the Canadian population.
But during the same time, Roman Catholics had also established a parallel moral
order or public religion, especially in Quebec.
So you've got this huge public moral
order, protestant, Evangelical, but in Quebec and amongst some Roman Catholics
elsewhere, you've got the same thing, but it's roman Catholic
anticatholicism had been a feature of British North America from the start.
With Confederation, it took on a more nationalistic expression as Protestants
and Catholics both started to compete for influence in the new nation.
Shaping Protestant fear of Roman Catholic expansion were the wealth worn criticisms
which I mentioned at the beginning of the talk.
And you may remember the central to this
was their understanding of sacred presence.
Protestants dismissed the exuberant ways Roman Catholics practiced sacred presence.
They dismissed it as superstition.
Roman Catholics saw Protestant religion as
a total denial of a sacred experience and of tradition.
What became lost in these verbal wars,
except among a few spokespersons, was the reality that during these years, roman
Catholics and Protestants had both drawn on the experience of the sacred.
But they had done that in different ways.
But they'd both drawn it to build their parallel moral orders.
Roman Catholics, like Protestants, held a patriarchal view of the family that rested
on the sanctity of marriage and on male authority.
Their priests were just as concerned as
Methodist clergy to educate the young and the faith.
Where Methodists used the Bible to train
the child's conscience, roman Catholics used the Little Catechism.
15% of the Little Catechism was devoted to the sacrament of Penance, which was seen
as the best way to train the child's conscience.
So training of the child's conscience was
taking place on both sides of the Christian divide.
Internal discipline, social welfare, and
the conviction that religion was not only a private but also a public matter were as
important to Roman Catholics as to Methodists and Evangelicals generally.
Roman Catholic laypeople were as actively
involved in Methodists as Methodists were in poor relief.
And they shared a concern to inculcate
sound habits like self discipline, temperance and frugality.
And when it came to helping the state carry out its politics of assimilating
native children by teaching them Canadian habits, roman Catholics shared with
Methodists and other mainline Protestants aperternalism, which led them to decide
the future of native peoples with good intentions, but without representation and
openness to aboriginal experience of the sacred.
Now I'm starting to wind down, but it's a slow winding down.
The two faith groups were able to build a parallel moral order in the latter half of
the 19th century that lasted well beyond 1925, the year when a number of
evangelical denominations formed the United Church of Canada.
Observers even in the 1950s and 1960s would be struck by the country's high rate
of church attendance and religious involvement.
Looking back, however, from our vantage
point of the early 21st century, we realized that the close fit between
spirituality and public life also helped lay the groundwork for the rapid
secularization of society that began in the 1960s.
There are many reasons for secularization
that are far beyond the control of the churches.
However, the need to revitalize people's
lives with new forms of sacred presence is as real today as it was in the 19th
century, when the experience of perfect love flourished in Canadian methodism.
But I believe it must happen.
It must happen in a vastly changed world.
The second half of the 20th century, a century that was torn by two world wars,
has proven to be a major turning point in bringing Protestants and Roman Catholics
to both acknowledge the importance of a shared Christian experience.
And it should be another
pointing out to the need for a personal experience.
Carl Ronald, the German Jesuit theologian who left such a strong imprint on Vatican
II, wrote in 1972, it's up there where men and women have not
begun to have the experience of God and of God's Spirit, who liberates us from the
most profound anxieties of life and from our endless guilt.
There really is no point in proclaiming to them the ethical norms of Christianity.
What he's saying is Christianity can
continue to be ethical, it can continue to be moral, but
if it's not based on the experience of the love of Christ, it really is empty.
His words echo John Wesley's emphasis on experience.
They're also in keeping with Wesley's own
openness to Roman Catholic spiritual and mystical writings, for which and of
course, there was little interest in that in the late 19th century among Methodists.
They were not interested in whatever
positive Wesley found in Roman Catholicism.
Today, Roman Catholics such as Thomas Merton, joan Chittister and Richard Rohr
have become valued guides to many Protestants looking for an authentic
Christian experience of God's abiding love.
That experience of love now happens in a
world vastly different from that of the late 19th and early 20th century
globalization and official multiculturalism in Canada, the advent of
the Internet and social media have not only changed the way we identify
ourselves, but also the way we experience God.
There are those who point to new developments, such as climate change,
contact with other world religions, and aboriginal respect towards
nature as evidence that God's love exists far beyond our earlier imagination.
The imagination, for example, of the 19th century.
One contemporary writer who addresses this is Brian McLaren in The Great Spiritual
Migration how the world's largest religion is seeking a better way to be Christian.
And McLaren says, must we stay where we
are, forever defining ourselves as a system of beliefs?
Or may we migrate to a new understanding of Christian faith as a way of life, a
practice of ongoing personal growth and cultural evolution?
Wesley and 19th century Methodists would
agree with his emphasis on Christian faith as a way of life in the 21st century.
We also know that we can't revert to 19th
century understandings of dominion over the Earth and violent conflict with those
with whom we differ on matters of religion.
And so McLaren and others remind us that
it is again time for Christians to migrate to an identity that reflects the needs of
our time to move away from the extractive, consumptive, and unsustainable way of life
that is destroying our planet and civilization.
To look instead to the common good,
as do the Roman Catholic writers I've just mentioned.
McLaren invites Christians to experience
God's perfect love in ways that focus not only on the individual, on a denomination
or a country, but on the entire universe and on everything that's in it, on people
of different faith or of no faith, animals, the environment, and so forth.
He does not say that this revitalization of Christianity will be easy.
But then neither were the challenges that
Wesley faced in industrializing England, nor those that 19th century Canadian
Methodist faced when they tried to live their faith in their time.
So thank you very much for listening.