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November 06, 2006

A WesleyBummer to be praised

I'm going to have to pull down a link from the blogroll in a while. Shane Raynor lost his domain, took that as a sign that his youth ministry stuff was where his attention needed to be, and this means that Wesley Blog as we have known it is no more (although it's still being mirrored at typepad.com if you like reading his posts).

Shane, from one tiny little corner of the blogosphere: well done. I hope to see your writing again, you'll be missed for now, but above all else keep them kids fired up.

And I find it very interesting that what will be, in all likelihood, Shane's last substantial blogpost was entitled "It's Great To Be A United Methodist". And I agree with him:

The joke goes that Methodists are "too Baptist for the Catholics and too Catholic for the Baptists". That's our biggest strength if you ask me. Many people in my congregation have a Catholic background. Some even call the worship service "mass". Then there are those who could easily be in Baptist or Pentecostal churches, but for some reason, they made their church home with us. We have a "blended" service that makes everyone happy some weeks and no one happy other weeks, which I suppose is fitting since worship isn't really about satisfying us in the first place. But we've managed to carve out a niche right in the middle of the worship spectrum. Liturgical lite if you will.

If we embrace our heritage (and hopefully all UMC's will do this) we'll find that we're thinking evangelicals. We stress the importance of conversion, yet we still have rites of passage like confirmation. We baptize babies, but we do it with the hope (even expectation) that this faith will be fully owned by those infants someday. And if people weren't baptized as infants, we'll do it later. We can even dunk 'em if we want. You see, Methodists have lots of options...

..."Come close to God, and he will come close to you" (James 4:8a GWT). We have that promise no matter what part of the body we worship in, whether high church liturgical or free charismatic. If we come close to God, he will come close to us. Our Wesleyan heritage confirms this.

I love being a United Methodist.

Posted by Chuck at November 6, 2006 09:55 PM

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