The following thoughts are not new (I’ve shared them elsewhere in various forms) but as we in the Global Methodist Church begin a new year together, I hope this vision of an emerging movement is as relevant now as ever. Happy New Year!
Whether you prefer to call it “making resolutions” or hearing prophetically from the Lord, I commend the practice of reflection and vision-casting, of listening for a word or maybe a collection of hopes that God may want to speak over the coming season. And what I would want for you and me, I also want for an emerging Methodist movement. The words that come quickly to mind as hopes and perhaps even divinely inspired words are curiosity, spiritual leadership, prayer, prophecy, and repentance. These are the words or resolutions I would speak over our year ahead as Methodists on the move. Let’s explore them.
Resolve to cultivate curiosity. After years of feeling constrained, I suspect we are all starving for a Spirit-filled Methodism characterized by curiosity and creativity. Can I say this with honest respect for the UMC? The world doesn’t need another United Methodist Church. What a mistake it would be to merely replicate one denomination to populate another! What if, instead, we develop a posture of curiosity toward historic Methodism that allows us to mine the best of the old while remaining curious about all that the Spirit-filled life can be?
Curiosity is the current of the Spirit-filled life. It is a willingness to flow with the Spirit, to go where He leads even when he leads us into uncharted waters. It is characterized by a willingness to be messy, to experiment. And curiosity needs grace, but oh my! Where the Holy Spirit can take us when we are operating with that potent mix of grace, truth, and curiosity!
So what creative pores might open for you in this new season? What new facets of the Spirit-filled life can you explore? Are you open to intentionally growing in the areas of healing prayer and prophecy? Do you need to remember how to lay hands on people and pray healing over them, trusting that even if nothing happens, nobody dies? Which of Pete Bellini’s books about deliverance in the Wesleyan tradition do you need to pick up and read? Or better yet, what supernatural healing might you personally go after?
Here’s a question for curious minds: What would you pray for if you knew you couldn’t lose by praying? It is okay that we don’t yet know (or can’t remember) how to function as Spirit-filled Methodists, but are we ready to learn? To rediscover? And are we ready for spiritual leadership that gives permission to be curious without being relegated to the fringes?
Resolve to support spiritual leadership (yours, and those leading you). Some years ago as we began to dream about what a new Methodist movement might look like, someone started a conversation about reforming the episcopal office to emphasize spiritual leadership rather than administrative or organizational gifts. We began to consider an episcopacy that operates within the gifts and anointing of those who serve — gifts and anointing that have the clear witness of the Holy Spirit about them. Ever since I heard that idea, I have been so taken by it.
What if we could actually cultivate in this movement a spiritual leadership marked by its commitment to the Spirit-filled life?
Alan Hirsch has given the American Church an exceptional study of the five-fold ministry gifts in his book, The Forgotten Ways. The concept of the five-fold gifts comes out of Paul’s writings and refers to the more significant categories of vocational ministry that Hirsch calls APEST. In Ephesians chapter four, Paul writes, “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” — Ephesians 4:11-13
The concept is biblical so I should have recognized it but it was not familiar to me when I first entered ministry. In my upbringing I found that we talked a lot about spiritual gifts when we were looking for volunteers, but we used a business model for structuring the church. Meanwhile, the apostle Paul challenges us to structure ourselves spiritually, rooting ourselves in the wilder anointing of gifts and call — an anointing that comes through the infilling of the Holy Spirit.
Hirsch says the church in the West has lost its missional edge because we have lost touch with true spiritual leadership. We tend to go looking for and even favor evangelists, shepherds and teachers in our local churches. We structure ourselves so that communicators, recruiters, marketers, humanizers, managers, philosophers, systems-thinkers, and organizers are more at home in leadership than prophets and apostles.
So how do we shift from a cultural or corporate model that leans more on church growth to a biblical model that leans more on spiritual leadership? Or let me ask it this way: how many pastors do you know who are apostolic in their gifting? Where are the spiritual entrepreneurs? How many prophets do you know, who have the gift of seeing into the spiritual realm and calling out that which is not as if it is? And how committed would you be to advocating for that kind of spiritual leadership in both the local church and in the episcopacy?
There is a lot of unlearning that goes into that kind of leadership. To keep this kind of resolution, we must also resolve to unlearn the office of pastor as chaplain. And we must unlearn the role of bishop as referee and administrator and politician and all-round “bad guy.” We must repent of our part in feeding an antagonistic culture that distrusts the leaders among us. Can we resolve to do that, so we can unleash a new generation of leaders who move in the supernatural?
Resolve to practice prayer. Here’s something I’ve noticed in our tribe. I’ve noticed that we don’t have a very healthy or well-defined culture of prayer. Think about it. In many other traditions, there is a “sound” to their worship and prayer that is distinctive. When you walk into a Southern Baptist church, or an Assemblies of God church, you know it. There is a distinctive culture and even a distinctive sound.
But when people walk into our churches, what kind of spiritual atmosphere do they encounter? I’m not talking common liturgy or worship style. I’m talking about the intangibles — the spiritual atmosphere, the quality of spiritual leadership, the pervading presence of the Holy Spirit, and the sound we make when we pray. I don’t sense that we’re there yet, but I hope for a culture of prayer and worship in our churches that is so strong that it defines us as a people.
Friends, I believe one of our biggest challenges, spiritually speaking, is to learn how to pray together, to cultivate a culture of prayer. I’ve noticed that we know how to meet and we know how to argue. But do we have a strong and vibrant culture of prayer? If not, can we resolve to work toward that, so that when folks walk into our rooms they know they’ve walked into a house of prayer? Can we learn to share the work of real, deep-end, contending, Spirit-driven prayer as a native language?
I heard a term just recently and it clicked with me. The term is drama-bonding (or you might have heard it called trauma-bonding). It is what happens when people share a significant, difficult experience. We who have been immersed in the United Methodist drama for years now have a shared negative experience as it relates to our faith. But what a shame if that dysfunction becomes the experience and language that best defines our culture. What if instead we intentionally sought to meet together regularly for nothing else other than prayer and worship
What if we learned to speak prophetically over each other, to pray healing prayers over each other, to speak the language of the Spirit?
What if our ecosystem is starved for the kind of prophetic prayer that imagines what God can do and prays it into the spiritual atmosphere?
What if we need less strategic posturing and more healing prayer?
Are you praying for the infilling of the Holy Spirit — for yourself, for your church, for your tribe? Are those prayers characterized by curiosity and creativity?
Resolve to press in to the prophetic. Friends, God shows things to people he loves, and God loves us. Which means God is likely to show us things. Prophetic sight is central to the work of God. If you wonder what in the world God is doing, go looking for the gift of Kingdom eyesight, believing that God shows things to people he loves. And God loves us.
Prophecy begins with God, and connects us with the values of Heaven. It changes perspective. Prophecy is an act of obedience. It isn’t always a comfortable gift, but works best (maybe only) in the context of relationship. And as we practice the prophetic voice and test it against scripture, we discover that our thinking matures, which is the whole point. Prophecy is one way I can practice the mind of Christ.
If you really hunger to grow spiritually this year, then learn to listen for the voice of God. Eagerly desire the gift of prophecy, as Paul counseled in Corinthians (1 Corinthians 14:1). And this is the promise for those who carefully cultivate that gift of listening. As God finds you faithful to “sit beneath the Palm of Deborah” — learning his voice, channeling his wisdom — you will begin to hear things that sound smarter than you could have thought of yourself. You will develop hungers for specific areas where God is working, in one life or a whole area of the world. And you will begin to bear supernatural fruit in this good work you’ve been given, fruit that will last. God will use you prophetically to speak his life-giving message into our communities.
Have you considered that you have more to offer the world than good organizational skills, a pastoral heart, or the ability to multi-task? That God has invited you to turn an ear toward heaven so you can hear and speak that which is not as if it is?
Resolve to release repentance. All of the above hopes and dreams for the year ahead hinge on one final resolution: repentance. If I want the Spirit of the Lord to be upon me, then it begins with my willingness to name aloud the demons that have pestered and demonized me and that would love to be dragged into this new year.
Just recently I found myself at an altar crying out to God in repentance over a hardness of heart that has developed in recent years as a result of all the wrangling we’ve all been party to in our denominational battles. I confessed a deeply rooted spirit of offense that has been hanging on and damaging emotions and wearing me out spiritually. I cried out for the Lord to heal my lack of trust, to deliver me from the stuff that has eroded faith and made me cynical and impatient.
I know that if God is going to work in and through me in the year ahead, I have to be serious about leaving behind the wounds and bitterness, and letting myself get curious again about what can be. All the fruitfulness that is possible in this new season is possible only after repentance happens. I know, because that’s where Jesus says it begins. He began his whole ministry on that word: Repent and believe if you want the Kingdom of God to come near (Mark 1:15). And Peter told those first followers, “Repent and be filled with the Spirit, all of you” (Acts 2:38).
That’s what I want for all of us this year: to become Spirit-filled Methodists. May this be the year of the Lord’s favor, and may we find ourselves immersed in the things of God like never before.
