Thanks, James. Thank you.
Appreciate it.
It's really great to be here. Thanks, James.
And we'll get to talking about some of the organizational things and in the Whc maybe
a little later because for me the central focus and the important items have to do
with how we think about this message that is um really part and parcel to our
heritage and is centering us and unifying us in ways we could never expect.
God seems to be weaving our lives together in fresh new ways these days.
And frankly, I know that Don is coming next year.
Don was one of my faculty members, and
when I left the dean's role, I told the university president that he owed me
another doctorate just for hanging out in the halls with people like Don Dayton.
You just sort of glean such wonderful wisdom, and I know that you're going to
enjoy getting to know Don, a fountain of wisdom and historical
understanding of the Wesley and Holiness stream of the church.
I appreciate the workshops that were conducted this morning.
I really was particularly interested in going to Sandra to your workshop on the
Hamilton revival, but I was told rather to stay in the auditorium to have my
programming reprogrammed to properly understand the War of 1812.
Right.
And this was to be done earlier by none other than James Robison.
And I'm thinking, okay, he's coming all
the way from Dallas, Texas to talk about Upper Canada and the War of 1812.
What's up with that? Right?
So I'm glad they got your name right.
And thank you, James, for the confession.
It's good for the soul.
But I thoroughly appreciated
looking at some of those issues through a different lens.
When I land in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at the Santos Dumont airport.
There's a statue there of Santos Dumont.
And I have to reprogram my thinking lest I impose my patterns on a Brazilian
South American, Latin American culture for whom the first person ever to invent
and fly a flying machine was Santos Dumont.
So I have to expunge the Wright brothers from my thinking.
Right. Susan, you've been there, you've seen it.
It's interesting how we write our history through our own lens.
When I look at a map of the world
sitting in Los Angeles los Angeles is the center of the universe, right?
And of course, Southern Californians assume that's the case.
When I travel to Bangalore, India, and I look at the technology map of the
world, bangalore is in the middle of the map.
We tend to write things through our own perspective, don't we?
History is written with us at the center.
And I wonder if perhaps we have applied that same human tendency
to how we approach understanding the kingdom of God on earth and even
the message of holiness, which is not so much a doctrine.
I don't like to talk about the doctrine of holiness because holiness really is a
theme of scripture that is not about what god does to us or for us.
It is a very description of the nature of god in god's own self.
It is a description of who god is.
So our function is not so much to preach or practice the doctrine of
holiness as much as it is to reflect the nature of a holy god through our lives,
which then calls us more to a life of surrender.
Because in the face of allowing a holy god to be reflected in us and through us, the
only act of the human will can be to surrender.
It is not to do more or to do better.
It is not to write better rules and regulations.
It is not to exclude those who don't measure up to the legalisms.
That you can't drink, smoke, or chew or go
with someone girls who do is the way I grew up with it.
Right.
It is rather a life of complete surrender and abdication of self will so that the
nature of a holy god may be seen in greater measure in and through us.
So the pursuit of holiness is really a
downward journey of surrender so that the holy god may be seen in us.
And yet, in our propensity to write history and write our gospel through the
lens of our own experience and institution,
perhaps we have created an institutional form of holiness that exacts behaviors
that measure up to our expectation of what we would imagine god would require of us.
So we get into all of the self definitions
of what holiness is, and those become codified in our institutional books,
whether it's the manual, whether it's the book of discipline, or whether it's the I
forgot what you call it help me out the rules and regulations.
Is that what it's called?
I thought it was something like the book of orders.
Orders and regulations.
Forgive me, I forgot the book.
Oh, a right.
Whatever book we use, we codify these behaviors, and it becomes an institutional
line of demarcation that says we are different than you.
So that you are different.
Not quite as good as I am.
Right.
I've got to find a free methodist church to go to, and if I can't find a free
methodist church, well, okay, I'll settle for nazarene.
It's not quite as good, but I'll be okay.
And it may actually be okay to marry someone from the wesleyan church, though
it would be purer if I did stay within the free methodist church.
You get my point, right?
We tend to define our holiness in terms of
our institutional manifestation and expectation of what that message has
become to us in the legalisms and the rules and the restrictions.
Why?
Because we tend to look at our experiences and history through our particular lens.
When I'm in La.
Is in the middle of the map.
When I'm in Brazil, it's santa's dumont that was the first to fly.
When I'm in the Nazarene church.
The Nazarenes have the edge on holiness and personal piety, right?
And so we've allowed these walls to grow, and as they grow, we become demarcated one
from the other, and that becomes compartmentalized, which is strangely
familiar to the disintegration of the whole that happens to the image of God
when we lose proximity to God through Jesus Christ.
Are you tracking with me?
I hope I haven't said something too wrong.
You can fix me later.
I hope, I hope you will do it with grace
and gentility, because we tend to look at things through
our own lenses, and then our institutional frame on
holiness becomes the way in which we interpret it.
And yet it seems to me that God is doing a new thing.
See, all of our denominations grew up in
an environment in the mid 20th century that began to build, ostensibly to grow
and expand and shed abroad the message, so to speak.
But I think all of us became trapped a little bit, or at least bogged down in
some of our institutional quagmires, where institutional expectations and
organizational structures began to preempt the centrality and beauty of the message.
And yet God seems to be calling us to a new day.
I remember sitting at Asbury Seminary one year when I was a student at Roberts.
We went down to the minister's conference, Lloyd, and you remember that.
And I remember sitting around a table with
people, ten story minds, a lot like many of the minds here today, which is
incidentally, very intimidating to talk to people like you.
I remember sitting there and listening.
I was a student at the time, and I
certainly was not able or courageous enough to speak up, but I remember them
saying that the holiness movement was really dead and that the torch would need
to pass to some other entity in the broad spectrum of the church.
And I remember the hair on the back of my
neck kind of going up, kind of in a rebellious act of Irish Italian activism.
I don't know what it was.
And I remember thinking, that's my church
you're talking about, that's my heritage you're talking about.
That's who I am, and you're telling me that my spiritual heritage is dead.
Really.
And yet it seems as though in the last ten
to twelve years, god is calling us to a new level.
If I could put in your mind, if I could paint a picture, an image in your head of
a big river, a river that's flowing through a desert,
and that river has various twists and turns to it, but the water is always
moving, and there are characteristics about that river.
That river is always moving, it's always changing, and it's always life giving.
And that's the holy river of God running through the desert of the world.
Now, if you really want to go there, go to Ezekiel 47 and see the river of God.
This river that flows through the world,
bringing life wherever it goes because it starts in the heart of God in the temple.
It doesn't start in the councils of mankind.
It doesn't start in the manual of the church.
It doesn't start even in the orders or regulations.
It doesn't start in the general's office,
much less the bishop's office or the general superintendents.
It begins in the heart of God because it is endemic to who God is.
This holiness that flows from the very heart of God throughout the river,
bringing life wherever it goes, but it's always moving.
It's never stagnant because that water
will be left as swampiness if you look later in the chapter.
And it's always changing.
There's no river I know of that doesn't
change from one day to the next, from one year to the next.
It's always changing and it's always life giving.
And a great many fish will gather there
and there will be life on both banks of that river.
But every river that I know always has streams that feed it as well.
See, out of the heart of God, there are
multiple streams that come back and converge into this river.
So when you go upriver and you begin to name some of these streams and I begin to
see some of these signs, we are not so much anymore defined by our institutional
denominational structures as much as we are.
Beginning to be defined by our theological and spiritual heritage that is flowing in
a stream of mission dumping into the larger river of God.
Can you see that picture?
So some of these streams I identify as the alliance for Confessing,
Evangelicals, the New Reformed Churches, or the mainline renewals going on in some
of the mainline denominations around the world, not just in North America.
And we even move upstream and we see
upriver and we see a little stream coming in called the Gospel Coalition.
And we realize that that's equally an
important stream of the church that's dumping into the river of God.
I don't like everything that they're dumping into the river of God.
I don't like the way the Gospel Coalition
is emphasizing that there is no such thing as women in ministry.
I don't like some of the postures that they take on the authority of Scripture.
But nevertheless, it's a stream that's dumping into the river of God.
And then I come to this one that just
thrills me and it's called the Wesley and Holiness Stream of the church.
Right now, within that stream, there are a lot of different families.
There are a lot of different groups represented right here in this room.
And each of us has gone about the business
of building our institutions and our structures.
And we have built walls that will
hopefully channel all of this energy forward.
Unfortunately, over 50 or 75 years, some of those walls started coming up above the
water line and getting turned sideways in the stream.
And you know what happens when you build a wall that's higher than the water level
and perpendicular to the flow becomes a dam, right?
So now all of a sudden those
organizational efforts that were intended to channel and focus the flow of the
stream became the dams that slow the flow down.
And in the last ten or twelve years, I'm convinced that God has begun to call us to
deconstruct the walls of institutionalism that divide us
and to drop them down below the waterline and to replace them with picket fences
that allow for the flow to be fast and smooth.
We don't lose our denominational family story because those are very important.
But they begin to channel this energy so that this Wesley and Holiness stream of
the church not better than the Reformed, not better than the gospel coalition.
Different than so that this stream remains fast flowing
and with fresh water dumping into the larger of river of God which is flowing
through the world bringing life wherever it goes.
Does that make sense?
That's who we are.
And it's up to us to ensure that this stream is without obstacle, deep and fresh
in water, flowing directly from the heart of God.
That's the heritage that we carry in the Wesley and Holiness stream of the church.
And frankly, there is more enthusiasm and excitement about this kind of conversation
or this kind of flow than I think I remember or than I even know.
And God is rising, is raising, is lifting the level of this stream of the church.
So that's very exciting to me.
There are some descriptions or descriptors
that characterize this particular stream of the church.
And I realize that it would be easy for us to try to hearken back to terminology and
phrases that we've all grown up with or many have grown up with and use old
phrases that perhaps may not be as understandable.
In these days.
I often tell pastors at some of the
regional network meetings, pastors days, I often tell them, I'd like to challenge you
to preach a message on holiness or a series of messages on holiness over at
least three weeks and never use the words try it sometime.
I think you can do it like the old words
of sanctification or eradication or perfection, right?
Try preaching a series without ever using the words and see if God will take you
deeper in mining the wealth of this stream of the church so that it's fresh and
engaging in the Wesley and Holiness stream of the church.
We tend to be.
And I'm watching the clock because I know that I enjoy dialogue, so I want to make
sure there's some time for some dialogue, for you to
help guide my thinking and for us to converse a little bit for a few minutes.
We tend to be more centered than bounded.
Now, I know that those terms are not necessarily new for you.
You've thought a lot about centered set theology and bounded set theology.
In the Wesleyan Holiness Stream of the
Church, we tend to be more centered than bounded.
Rather than defining who we are by the
perimeter, we anchor ourselves in the center, which allows for a great freedom
in reaching as far as we can possibly reach and engage the issues that are
before us without fear that somehow we will compromise our core identity.
So engaging the LGBT conversation is
something that we are compelled to do, not something we have to respond to.
So that engaging issues of women in ministry is something we are compelled to
do out of who we are, not something we have to do to answer somebody else.
So that engaging the issue of human trafficking, we are doing that out of who
we are inherently, not because it's such a bad social scourge, right?
So we center ourselves, and then we reach
and we go as far as we can beyond perhaps
what we thought we could without defining ourselves by our
perimeter, we anchor ourselves in a centered set.
Now, are there limits to that?
Of course there are, but we tend to be more centered than bounded.
We tend to be more person oriented than propositional in who we are.
We tend to see truth as a person more than a proposition.
Is there a rational dimension to the truth that we preach?
Of course there is.
Are there propositions when we talk about holiness and about the Gospel of Christ?
Of course there is.
But generally, we tend to view the center of who we are, the center of truth that we
pursue and live more as a person than a proposition.
If I were to write a proposition on the board and ask you to engage that
proposition, you would do that by using intellectual
capabilities, by using analytical tools that you've learned.
And you would probably start from a
research standpoint, from a posture of skepticism.
I say all cats run east on Tuesday
afternoon between three and 04:00 p.m., and immediately your brain goes to,
I don't believe that I'm going to test that.
See, you start from a position of skepticism, and you utilize analytical
research proving mechanisms to determine whether the proposition is true or not.
Conversely, I put Hugh up in front of you
and I say, I'd like you to get to know Hugh.
Now, all of a sudden, you begin to approach Hugh very differently, don't you?
What do you do?
What are you going to do with Hugh to get to know him?
Ask questions?
What else are you going to do?
Listen.
Which means you become vulnerable and open to his influence.
What else do you do?
What is it?
Criminal record check.
Oh, there's a positive.
There you go, man.
You're good as gold with that one.
Hey, listen, I'm fishing for at least a cup of coffee or a dinner, right?
Somebody ought to take him to coffee.
Somebody ought to sit down and break bread.
See, we approach a person very differently than we approach a proposition.
The holiness of God is not a propositional doctrine.
It is God embodied in Jesus Christ.
The Completeness thank you, Alan, for your paper this afternoon or this morning.
As evidenced in The Completeness of
Christ, we approach a person differently than we approach a proposition.
So we approach holiness differently than
simply from a posture of skepticism, analyzing the internal strength of the
argument as a doctrinal proposition, right?
And then it compels us to be different so that we approach one another differently.
We don't see the person under the bridge as a problem to be solved.
We see them as a whole, created in the
image of God for whom God has invested God's own self for that
person's complete, wholeness, and restoration.
You see, we approach people differently.
We tend to be more person
oriented than proposition and we tend to be more descriptive than prescriptive.
We tend to experience the fullness and
wholeness of God and describe it rather than prescribing how we should live.
Now, don't misunderstand me.
I realize that you can take these two extremes and in a short, short period of
time, just touching on some of these things, it's easy to be misunderstood.
But maybe a good example, if I might,
and those of you who are worshippers of either of these two people, please don't.
I apologize in advance if I offend you,
but what did John Calvin write that was kind of the big contribution?
Institutes. The institutes of Christian religion.
I ought to ask how many of you have read them.
Yeah, it's tough slogan, I'll guarantee you, if you haven't read it.
Ken Concert made me read those, bless his heart.
He wrote the institutes of Christian religion.
Amazing contribution to our Christian
faith and understanding of Christian faith, bringing into a systematized,
understanding the various major themes of Scripture and how to think about God.
What did John Wesley contribute?
What was his great contribution?
He wrote a journal.
The guy wrote a diary, for goodness sakes.
What's a journal you experience and then you write about it.
Wow.
I cannot believe how I felt.
My heart warmed the other night.
What was that?
Describing the engagement and the story of God with us
and being wide eyed with anticipation over any fresh new move of God.
However God chooses to manifest that in
our lives and recognizing it really as God simply
showing God's own character and holiness in and through us.
We tend to be more descriptive than prescriptive.
Does that mean that we don't have prescript?
We shouldn't study systematics?
Of course not.
Although at many schools in the Wesleyan
Holiness tradition, there are no departments of systematic theology.
There are no courses on apologetics.
I live near Biola that has a strength in apologetics.
Zusa Pacific doesn't even have a course on
Christian apologetics, much less a department of systematic theology.
Why? Because it's how we tend to think.
It isn't just an argument with biola, although they are archrivals.
It's who we are.
Right.
A couple of descriptors very quickly, if I may, as I think about fresh vocabulary,
these descriptors may define this stream of the church.
There are two in particular that I'd like to suggest to you.
They're in the Masterful Living book and I
won't explain all of that, but but you're welcome to it if you want.
It two that I think are particularly important.
One is the whole idea of transformed character.
People who are on the way of holiness
pursuing a life of surrender so that God's nature is revealed in greater measure
through us will experience a transformed character.
This one has a theological underpinning in the otherness of God.
When you think about the otherness of God, not just the transcendence of God, not
just that God is different, but God is completely other.
And you can run down that path.
You know what I mean by the differences between otherness and different.
When you think about the otherness of God,
those who pursue a holy God will experience a similar kind of otherness.
And yet that otherness remains optional because we retain a free will and can
choose the condition in which we wish to live our lives.
That's what I mean by transformed.
See, transformed implies that there are options.
Transformed means that we can be in one
form or condition or another form or condition.
Transportation means moving something from one location to another location.
Transformation means that we may exist in
one condition or form or another condition or form.
And at the apex of that or at the fulcrum of that is the free will of every person
to decide will I live my life according to my own image
that I have in mind for myself, selfishness, the essence of sin?
Or will I surrender and allow my life to be formed in the likeness of Christ,
evidencing the holy character of God and be holy as he is holy?
Right? That's my choice.
So every person in this wesley and
holiness stream, every person in the pursuit of the holiness of a greater
measure of God's holiness in them, has that descriptor or has that characteristic
of being transformed into the likeness of God?
Now, if we define holiness purely in that singular term, it will result at its very
extreme in an exclusive legalism that becomes separatistic and sectarian.
Because if all we're talking about is being other, then we pull ourselves out
from the reality of our culture and create a little holy bubble or a holy huddle.
And then we become the holier than thou's.
And that becomes legalistic when we start to judge others and impose it on others.
So that's not the end of the story.
That's not the only characteristic of
those who are in this stream of holiness embracing this call to holiness.
There is a second characteristic that I call responsible engagement.
In the first case, transformed character is based on the otherness of God.
In the case of responsible engagement, it derives from
the construct or the theological foundation of the Incarnation.
You see, God did not wait around for us to
come back in search of a restored image.
He didn't wait around for us to come back to God for wholeness.
God saw our condition, took responsibility
and initiated engagement with us first
through the prophets, the priests and the kings.
And then, as Hebrews says in these last days, through his son Jesus Christ,
god took upon himself the responsibility to initiate engagement with us.
People who are on the way of appropriating the nature of God's holy character in and
through them take upon themselves the responsibility to reach into every corner
of God's creation in bringing relevantly the gospel of wholeness there.
We don't wait around for people to come knocking on the doors of our churches.
We don't wait around.
We roll up our sleeves, we get our hands dirty and we reach into it into the east
side of London to try to pull people out and save them from hell as the booth did.
Or we reach into the social structures of our day.
In my country
in the 19th century in an attempt to confront the evils of slavery,
we reach under the bridges and we find the broken and the disenfranchised.
We go there.
Yeah, we may be criticized for being there, but we go there because we're not
afraid to get our hands dirty and to get our feet wet.
In the reality of this world, that's called responsible engagement.
Now, if we only define holiness based upon responsible engagement and there is no
transformed character, we wind up with nothing more than good social action.
So you see, when the holiness of God is
being manifest in greater measure in and through us, not only does our character
become like God's own character in increasingly reflecting God's own
holiness, but our compulsion is one that sends us into every corner of the world.
Whatever the situation is, whatever the
contemporary issues are, that we will take responsibility to engage those in a manner
that brings God's character into that place.
Also that the image of God may be restored
in the people that God loves and has invested Himself in.
Now, I would love to go on and talk about
a bunch more of these kinds of descriptors, some of my favorites.
Like one is a purposeful heart.
Another one that I love is curious thinking holiness people
that one I just love particularly for the academic environment.
It fuels our energy.
These kinds of places are absolutely important.
And the restoration or a restored self
that people today are looking for more than anything else.
People are not so much looking for a
ticket to heaven so they can boycott hell these days.
I don't know if you've noticed it.
What they are looking for is an integrated
wholeness that makes sense in their life now.
And the message of the restored image of God is a message that resonates.
That's the salvation we preach, right?
So my hope is
that by God's grace in all humility, we may walk in unity together
in pursuit of greater surrender so that the holiness of God
will in fact be reflected in greater measure through us all.
I'm not asking you.
I'm not suggesting that you give up denominational family loyalty.
I'm not asking or suggesting that our
denominational family stories are unimportant.
They're vitally important.
Just don't let those get in the way of the call to which you have been called.
And in that call,
may God make us his instruments so that this stream of the church is flowing fast
and deep and clean with water that comes from his heart.
I'm going to stop there.
You may have comments or questions, and I'm happy to.
And again, I may have made some giant faux PA.
Please feel free to point it out.
I love conversing. Be nice.
If you don't mind, please feel free to disagree.
That's totally fine. You're completely entitled to be wrong.
Sorry. Comments?
Questions? Is that okay?
James? Am I okay here?
Okay, we've got a few minutes.