The Method in Methodism: Part III
The Rule of Discipleship
As we continue our series on “The Method in Methodism” I’d like for us to review where we’ve been so far. In week one, we talked about the history of the Methodist movement and John Wesley’s idea that God’s grace was available to all. It was this move of grace that caused the movement to grow both in England and here in America, especially among the poor and others who had been long excluded from the full ministry of the Church.
Last week we worked at defining that grace. Wesley said that God’s grace comes to us as a call to relationship with God and that it comes to us within the same processes as relationships occur. He said that God’s grace comes to us in three movements: prevenient grace (the grace that is offered to everyone, the grace that calls us into relationship with God), justifying grace (the grace that cleanses us from sin and brings us into that new relationship with God and sanctifying grace (the grace that enables us to grow more and more into the image of Christ, the image of God we were created to be in the first place).
We can conceive how this works, we said, by envisioning the metaphor of a house. Prevenient grace is the porch, where we meet God. Justifying grace is the door, where we enter into a new relationship with God made possible by his forgiving and redeeming love, and sanctifying grace is the rest of the house, where we are made at home and grow more and more into members of God’s household by following Christ’s example.
As with any house, however, there are house rules…not prohibitive rules so much as rules to guide the conduct of those who live in the house…rules that define who we are as a family.
John Wesley was big on rules—maybe a little too much, according to some of his biographers. He had rules for nearly everything in his life from maintaining health to how one prays and studies the scriptures. Throughout his life he maintained the discipline of getting up at 4:00AM to pray and read the scriptures, and then held worship at 5:00. When he lived in London later in his life, he lived in a house next to the Methodist chapel at City Road with several other Methodist preachers whom he called his “family.” Morning worship was scheduled for 5:00AM each day, but the other younger Methodist preachers tended to want to sleep in a bit. One morning, Wesley woke, came down at 5:00AM and no one was there…so he preached his sermon anyway to an empty room. That’s dedication! The next day, he established a new house rule that anyone living under that roof would be at 5:00AM worship. To Wesley, being “Methodist” meant living by a strict method!
The very nature of the word “Methodist” implies living by a method or rule of life. The book that orders our church life, for example, is called “The Book of Discipline” – a book of order and method for thinking about and doing the work of the church. Early Methodists understood that being part of the movement meant adhering to a disciplined life of prayer, study, worship, and meeting together. These rules were not established for control. Rather, given the nature of God’s grace we have been talking about, these rules were all about responding to God’s grace through transformed lives. They are a recognition that without a rule or guide for life we humans have tendency to drift into unhealthy patterns. If we want to be different, to reflect God’s image through transformed lives, said Wesley, we need to pay attention to a rule for living.
Our culture has a tendency to flaunt the rules, however. Having no rules is considered to be a good thing, even used in advertising. How about Outback Steakhouse? No Rules, just right. One of the recent bestselling business books by Marcus Buckingham is entitled, “Break All the Rules.” You can probably think of other examples. Postmodernism has made it cool to break the rules or, more correctly, to make up rules that benefit the individual according to his or her own tastes and preferences. Morality and truth have become relative in this culture—what matters is what I think. But what we have seen in reality, however, is what my friend Timothy Merrill calls “a moral nihilism wrapped up in the fabric of freedom and authenticity.”
The irony is that without rules there is no freedom and without discipline there is no growth.
Think about it—we only really accomplish anything in our lives if we do so according to a vision or pattern or rule for living. Who among you works out at the gym or exercises regularly? Why do you do it? It’s because you want to be healthy. You follow a regimen, a rule in order to strengthen your body—to discipline it, if you will. Wesley believed that the same was true for our spiritual lives—we need a plan, a pattern, a discipline, a rule for living according to God’s grace.
When the early Methodist societies were being established, they were formed around Wesley’s General Rules for the United Societies. Interestingly, these three rules are still found in our Book of Discipline. They function as a mission statement, a “prime directive” (to borrow from Star Trek) for Methodists. Every successful organization has such directives, rules, orders.
When I read them, I am always reminded of a similar rule that I learned in the Army—the three General Orders. These things were drilled into us as recruits—so much so that I still remember them almost 25 years later. I won’t recite them all, but the first one is “I will guard everything in the limits of my post and quit my post only when properly relieved.” The General Orders were such that a young private, alone in a hostile environment, would always know what was expected of him.
The same is true for the General Rules. Wesley stated them in this way (I’m paraphrasing):
1. First, do no harm. Avoid evil of every kind.
2. Second, do all the good you can to the bodies and souls of people.
3. Third, attend to the private and public ordinances of God (acts of devotion).
These rules are simple and reflect the rule of Jesus. Remember when he was asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength (the public and private ordinances of God) and love your neighbor as yourself (by avoiding evil and by doing good).
In recent years, some Methodist scholars have taken these General Rules and graphically represented them in the form of a Jerusalem Cross (a cross with four equal sides). There’s a graphic of it on the insert in your bulletin. I really like this model because it captures the spirit of what both Jesus and John Wesley were calling people to be about.
We call this model more broadly “The Rule of Discipleship.” The overall mission of the UM church is “to make disciples of Jesus Christ.” Disciple means follower, but the word also forms the root of the word “discipline.” If you are going to be a disciple, you need to follow a discipline!
There are four points on this cross, representing four poles of Christian faith. On one axis we recognize that faith is worked out both privately and publicly. On the other axis we recognize that faith involves both piety (love for God) and mercy (love for our neighbor).
What we see now is a cross with four equal quadrants that interact with one another. Within these four quadrants we see a holistic view of what it means to be a disciple of Christ.
In this lower left quadrant, for example, we see the intersection of our private lives and the call to piety (love for God). Within this quadrant, the disciple of Christ lives out a life of private devotion to God through things like daily prayer, Bible study, meditation, reading, and reflection—things that bring us face to face with God when no one else is present. It is here that God speaks to our hearts individually, where we cultivate our personal relationship with Christ and are formed through a daily discipline of being in God’s presence.
In the lower right, then, we see how these acts of piety also take place in public in the form of acts of worship. Here we recognize that disciples are not merely individual actors, but are part of a larger community that worships God through weekly worship, through the sacraments, and through the preaching and hearing of God’s Word. It’s a recognition that the Christian life is always lived out by individuals within a community called the church where we are called to spur one another on toward maturity in faith.
Moving to the upper left, we see the intersection of our private lives and works of mercy toward our neighbor—what we call “acts of compassion.” This is a recognition that loving God often happens through loving those around us. Acts of Compassion are those simple, basic things we do out of kindness to our neighbor; and our neighbor is anyone who is in need, anywhere in the world. To the extent that we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and imprisoned, we minister to Christ in our
midst.
But there is also a public dimension to acts of mercy, which we find in the upper right quadrant. These are Acts of Justice. God’s justice was announced through the prophets, who spoke truth to the powers of their day, calling governments and other power structures to promote God’s justice for all. In this quadrant, we recognize that we are to not only minister to those who are poor or marginalized by society, but also to engage the forces that make injustice possible. To work in this quadrant means that we recognize that the world is not right and we seek to change it. Every time we vote, write a letter to someone in power, work for economic justice or peace, or work toward changing the world we are engaging in acts of justice.
The Rule of Discipleship is all about balance. It reminds us that being a disciple of Christ involves more than just attending worship or serving at a soup kitchen once in awhile. It is a call to a whole life of discipleship, paying attention to all four of these quadrants. We cannot emphasize one over the others and call ourselves disciples! We need to evaluate our devotion to God and to others based on this model.
We talked about this a lot when I was in England and I have to tell you that though I had seen this model before, it was then that I realized how vital it is to the renewal and revival of Christian faith. Much of the pathology in Christianity is about a lack of balance between the public and the private, between to love for God and love for our neighbors.
If, for example, I only focus on the public piety of worship, I miss the fact that following Christ is more than just occupying a pew. By contrast, if I only focus on my personal “spirituality,” I miss out on the call to be in community with others. To take it a step further, so much Christianity is focused on piety and being “right” that it disregards responsibility for loving our neighbors and winds up condemning them instead.
If I only focus on compassion without love for God, then my motivation might be skewed toward making myself feel good by serving others rather than doing it as a natural outgrowth of my relationship with God. Or if I simply call for justice, write letters, complain about the way things are in the world without acting with compassion toward the people next door, I’m not living out the whole message of Christ.
Looking at the Rule of Discipleship, I can’t think of a better way to illustrate what it means to be a true disciple of Christ. To be a disciple means to live in balance of love for God and neighbor and of living out faith both privately and publicly. That’s the best response to God’s grace—to embrace the wholeness and transformational power that God offers us by following him into all four quadrants of our lives. This is “practical divinity” and “scriptural Christianity” (Wesley’s terms) all rolled into one model.
If we were to focus our lives and the life of our church on this model, what would happen? How would you live differently? How would you characterize your faith? Where would you need to grow in order to live in balance? What quadrants do we emphasize as a church? What would need to change in order for us to be in balance? These are the questions that confront me when I consider the Rule of Discipleship.
Of course, some are already following this model of compassion and devotion. If you were following the news this week you know that there was another tragic school shooting in Pennsylvania, where a man with a 20 year-old grudge walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse and shot several children, killing 5 of them. It’s hard to imagine a more horrific crime, especially when it was perpetrated against people who were so innocent and devoted to peace.
But what is most shocking about this story to me was the reaction of the Amish community. Hours after the shooting, an Amish neighbor went to the home where the killer, Charles Carl Roberts, had lived with his family before committing this horrific crime. The Amish neighbor, however, did not go to camp out on the family’s lawn, scream at them and pronounce hatred, but instead offered the family forgiveness. “I hope they stay around here and they’ll have lots of friends and support, “ said Daniel Esh, an Amish artist and woodworker whose three grandnephews were inside the school during the attack.
Columnist Terry Mattingly observes, "To grasp the Amish point of view, it’s crucial to understand that they truly believe God desires justice, but also shows mercy and they believe that these are not contradictory things," said Johann Christoph Arnold, senior elder of the Bruderhof communes. "They know that God said, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay.’ The Amish certainly believe that this killer will not go without punishment, but they also believe that his punishment is in God’s hands."
“They know the hurt is very great,” said Gertrude Huntington, an expert on Amish society. “But they don’t balance that hurt with hate.”
I would argue that that worldview is only possible if one lives a life of balance—knowing God’s justice, God’s love not just for us but for our neighbors, too. The Amish have practiced this for a long time. Maybe it’s time we started paying attention ourselves.
How are you living out the Rule of Discipleship? We’ll focus on each of these quadrants in more detail over the next couple of weeks, but I hope that you won’t lose sight of the whole. God calls us to live in balance. Rules are good when they call us to a better way of life!
