What Warms Your Heart? (Strangely or otherwise)

Today is a special holiday for Methodists. Some call it Aldersgate Day, others Heart-warming Day, others simply Wesley Day. We celebrate the anniversary of John Wesley's "heart-warming" experience, which in some ways is unfair because his brother, Charles, had a similar experience three days earlier.

275 years ago, on May 24, 1738, John Wesley had an experience of his heart being "strangely warmed" at a prayer meeting on Aldersgate Street in London. It was not a "conversion" experience in the sense that he became a follower of Jesus in that moment. He had been a deeply committed Christian all his life. But Wesley had just arrived back in England after a missionary stint in the American colonies that was a complete and total disaster.

Wesley had grown up in a very pious home, and his type-A personality led him to try to control everything. As a result, he was always trying to earn God's love, and he had finally hit a wall and realized he couldn't be good enough and work hard enough to be worthy (however he defined that) in God's eyes. At this prayer meeting, he was hearing someone read from Martin Luther's Preface to Romans, expounding on Paul's theme of how grace and nothing else connects us to God and makes us whole.

While none of Luther's works, particularly this one, are the most heart-warming things one can read, it spoke to the point of crisis that Wesley found himself in. He finally let go and made room for the Holy Spirit to assure him that he was right with God.

On this Aldersgate Day, I see the church wrestling with itself over how to "get it right". We assume that if we get our theology or ethics correct, if we have the proper stance on human sexuality, if we worship better or make better appointments, or generally achieve any kind of "better" performance (again, however you define that), that God will approve of us and shower us with blessings of more people in the pews and dollars in the plate.

So today, let's "let go", even just for a moment. Let's set aside all these things that we argue about, important though they are, and simply celebrate what we already see God doing amongst us. What warms your heart today?

It warms my heart to see the people in Oklahoma who are helping their neighbors dig through the rubble of their houses, even though their own house was destroyed, too.

It warms my heart to see the people in my church who are the most materially needy be the first to volunteer to serve others who are in need.

It warms my heart to see people reconcile with one another and let go of old grudges when they realize that life is too short to stay mad at one another.

Update: it warms my heart to see this! A Sikh woman's gracious response to a rude post on Reddit actually caused the poster to reconsider his actions, open his mind, and apologize! (there are some 4 letter words, but the heart-warming awesomeness is worth it)

Those are some of the things that warm my heart on this   Day. What warms your heart? Leave a comment and let's bless each other today.

The Myth of the Good Old Days

I don’t believe in “the Good Old Days”. You hear about them all the time. Someone will say something like, “Things were so much better when (fill in the blank). But now people (fill in the blank). So if we just (fill in the blank) things would be so much better than they are now.” This will get large cheers from a crowd and may even inspire donations to a church or political campaign. This is an especially favored rhetorical technique for preachers because it’s easy. We point to one particular thing and give a guarantee that if the people will just think and/or do what we say, things will return to the way they were in the “good old days”.

There are a couple problems with this. First of all, things were never as good as we remember them. There’s a popular joke in the United Methodist Church recalling a bishop who exclaimed “if the 1950s ever return, we’ll be ready!” I didn’t live through the 1950s, but my parents did. They tell me that there was drug use, teen pregnancy, divorce, homosexuality, and political corruption back then. It wasn’t as much as now, and it certainly wasn’t talked about as much back then, but it was there. My mother grew up in Memphis where Jim Crow laws were going strong in the 1950s, and she remembers “Whites only” water fountains, bathrooms, and swimming pools. We don’t have those today (even though racism is still alive and well), and I’d say that’s a decided improvement over “the good old days”.

The bigger problem, however, with the myth of the good old days is that it assumes that there is a system, a belief, or an institutional structure that transcends time, geography, cultural context, and even the type of people running the show.

This is the main problem in a new book that is currently all the rage in many United Methodist circles. In Restoring Methodism, James and Molly Scott argue that such a “good old days” existed in the early days of the Methodist movement in America (the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, or the generations that experienced the American Revolution). They say that certain decisions that were made by the church during the twentieth century have been responsible for the current decline we are experiencing, and suggest ten changes that would return us to an earlier time and would, they claim, stop the losses.

I certainly agree that the church made mistakes during the twentieth century, but we made plenty of errors in previous centuries, too. The various incarnations of the church of Jesus Christ have been screwing up in large and small ways since day one! And I also agree that we can learn a lot from the successes of the past and that those successes can and definately should challenge our thinking about the way we do church today.

But what I have to take issue with is the idea that there was ever some state of pristine Methodism that transcended the context in which it found itself. The 1950s are never going to return, and the eighteenth century colonial frontier isn’t either. It’s the twenty-first century and we need to deal with it as it is. Each generation faces challenges that are its own, and simply replicating the ways church has been done before is as bad (if not worse) an idea than changing everything for the sake of changing it.

What if, instead of longing for a return to the “good old days”, we took an honest look at what the past was like and how that is similar and different to where we find ourselves today? What if we put together a companion volume to Restoring Methodism called For God’s Sake, Don’t Do This Again: Ways the Church Universal has Screwed Up Throughout History and how to Avoid Doing it Again? What if we chose to dream about what the future could be, and not just scheme about how to bring the past back to life?

Admittedly this idea requires a whole lot more time, effort, and work than simply following someone’s ten step plan. But doing so would give us the chance to make some “good new days”. The best might just be yet to come…