Peace and Holiness: DOING JUSTICE - FREE METHODIST STYLE

Monday, March 20, 2006

DOING JUSTICE - FREE METHODIST STYLE

I have permanently posted the essay on doing justice, "To Break Every Yoke," that I prepared and present to the Free Methodist Historical Society on March 13, 2006. Your feedback and conversation via e-mail is welcome.

FREE METHODIST ROOTS IN JUSTICE ADVOCACY. Free Methodists formed a new communion in America in 1860 in affirmation of the freedom of all human beings (against slavery) and free access for the poor in houses of worship (against pew rents and pew sales); also, in affirmation of teaching Biblical holiness and practicing freedom in worship. My essay traces the roots of "doing justice" in the Bible, in early Methodism in England in the mid-1700s under the leadership of John Wesley, and in the priorities and practices of the early Free Methodists in America in the mid-1800's under the leadership of B. T. Roberts. I conclude the essay by citing barriers to and opportunities for "doing justice" in local Free Methodist congregations today. But you don't have to be a Free Methodist to imagine and begin to live justice through your faith!Here is a very brief excerpt:

'PRE-EMPTIVE JUSTICE?' Some will argue that today we, in fact, ‘do justice’ quite routinely. It is true that much could be made of preventive (dare I say ‘pre-emptive?’) work against injustice which vigorous inreach and outreach ministries of a local congregation offer. Who can adequately measure the redemptive care and positive spiritual formation impacts that Sunday School, Christian Life Clubs, addictions recovery, Bible study groups, cell groups, counseling, solid Biblical preaching, and compassionate outreach achieve in individual, family, congregational, and community lives? Daily and weekly, Free Methodists are calling people to live as salt and light in the world, equipping them to stand against temptation and evil, and forming them to be people who are not conformed to the world but who may well transform it. But all our positive, formative, preventive action does not reduce in the least the question of our action or inaction in the face of outright injustice in our community, society, and world.

DANGER: POLITICAL CO-OPTATION. Perhaps part of our conversation should focus on the kind of justice we Free Methodists are currently prone to do. It seems rather obvious that over the past 25 years, Free Methodist members and pastors have been and are involved in the struggle regarding abortion, the provision of positive alternatives for pregnant women, and other “culture war” issues related to public education, sexuality, bioethics, and court decision-making. On the one hand it appears that “culture war” issues have been framed and promoted completely outside Free Methodism, wed to partisan politics, and accepted by our members, pastors, and congregations. On the other hand it appears that historic concerns of Free Methodists and others have been co-opted and distorted by political influence groups. As far as I am concerned, the wedding of partisan-motivated issue advocacy to denominational identity should be resisted at all levels in Free Methodist ecclesiology and practice, both now and in the future. As we consider involvement in justice issues, we should be asking: who is initially and ultimately being served by these priorities and passions? Is the manner in which this issue is being approached and addressed reflective of the Spirit of holiness or the heritage in which we serve? And, are we thinking globally, or even beyond our own socio-economic group or consumer desires, when we vote or act?

MOVING TOWARD OUR ROOTS. One step further, let us ask: who is setting the social justice agenda? How are some issues deemed more important than others? It appears that current evangelical issues overlook and/or bypass core concerns that originally motivated Methodism and defined early Free Methodism: poverty, human slavery, and feminism. Let us ask ourselves: why has poverty and slavery, though these are the two gravest global issues, not even registered on the agenda of either major American political party in years? Why are we not alarmed at this? And what might we do in concert with other branches of the Body of Christ to focus on these global crises, even if national or Western political will regarding them is currently all but nonexistent?

Read the full document here.

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PEOPLE OF PEACE

“What we set about when we began following Jesus was to become radically Christian persons linked in Christian compassion to a world of great evil… We really can’t find anything better to declare than ‘the peace of God that passeth all understanding.’ His shalom can fill those who trust in Him with the spiritual resources which will enable them to wage war on war, and provide them with weapons which by their peaceableness partakes of the nature of the kingdom for whose coming they both pray and work.” -- Timothy L. Smith

FIND THE HABITS OF PEACE

"Christians are prohibited from ever despairing of the peace possible in the world. We know that as God’s creatures we are not naturally violent nor are our institutions unavoidably violent. As God’s people we have been created for peace. Rather, what we must do is to help the world find the habits of peace whose absence so often makes violence seem like the only alternative. Peacemaking as a virtue is an act of imagination built on long habits of the resolution of differences.... The great problem in the world is that our imagination has been stilled, since it has not made a practice of confronting wrongs so that violence might be avoided. In truth, we must say that the church has too often failed the world by its failure to witness in our own life the kind of conflict necessary to be a community of peace. Without an example of peacemaking community, the world has no alternative but to use violence as a means to settle disputes.” -- Stanley Hauerwas

PEACEABLENESS

"What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money." - Wendell Berry

THE END OF VIOLENCE

"Violence is immensely compelling. Those who witness spectacles of violence can be seduced by its logic even when -- perhaps especially when -- they are morally scandalized by it. Violence is labyrinthine. It turns back on itself in serpentine ways. The paths that seem to exist from its madness so often lead deeper into its maze. Violence is literally a-mazing. The traditional way of resisting evil causes the contagion of evil to spread, perpetrated by those who are most determined to eradicate it. How to resist evil in ways that prevent its spread is now history's most fundamental dilemma..... Both Christianity's scriptural sources and its creedal formulae pivot around a public execution, an act of official violence regarded as legally righteous by the political authorities and as a sacred duty by the religionists. The Christian Scriptures and creeds make the outlandish assertion that because of this public execution the grip of sin has been broken, the human race has been offered a new lease on life and, at the same time, placed in grave peril if it refuses the offer..... By moral effort alone one cannot free oneself from the grip of the sacred and the logic of violence. The logos of conventional culture consists of so pervasive a web of conditioned reflexes that we remain largely oblivious of its influence. If we are to be freed from it, something from outside the cultural mix must break in on us. Structurally and anthropologically speaking, there is only one thing truly outside this matrix: the victim whose expulsion brought the system into being in the first place, the stone rejected by the builders of all culture, the Lamb slain since the foundation of the world.... The spiritual and anthropological revolution set in motion by the crucifixion is a glacial process the driving force of which is the 'Spirit of Truth,' -- the Paraclete (John 16:7-8). It was to be the task of this Spirit of Truth to gradually 'accomplish' historically what was 'accomplished' in the hearts of Jesus' disciples at the crucifixion and in the days that followed it.... From the moment of the crucifixion onward, the Paraclete would be at work in the world, slowly giving the victim's voice the ability to sweep away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, and whatever contemporary myths might lend violence a momentary aura of righteousness. However formidable the structures of the sacrificial system might be, however beguilingly and discretely these structures might resort to their scapegoating mechanisms, relentlessly the Paraclete would 'show the world how wrong it was,' gradually leading humanity to 'the complete truth' (John 16:8, 13)." - Gil Baillie in Violence Unveiled