Creedal and Pastoral

After defining myself for so long as a Southern Baptist Preacher's Kid, I shifted along with my family into the United Methodist Church. As I mentioned yesterday, Methodism differs both in organization and in feel from Baptist traditions. Pastors are appointed to churches by their bishop rather than hired by local congregations. Methodist services are more sedate, more formal, and more consciously connected to the traditions of mainstream Christianity.

I must admit that, at first, I was not a fan of the Methodist tradition. I liked my life in the mid-sized (but big by my standards) town we lived in. I liked being part of a theatre program at high school. I liked the hellfire-free, unconditional love-heavy teaching of the youth leader at the Baptist church. In short, I didn't know or trust this new Methodism.

As my parents educated themselves about the UMC's beliefs, however, I began to see that Methodism represented a next step that was in keeping with my own theological drift out of conservative evangelicalism. Now, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was himself an evangelist, one of the spearheads of the Great Awakening--a revival of Protestant activity and theological innovation. Nevertheless, Methodism is considered today not an evangelical denomination but a "mainline" Protestant denomination (along with others like Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and United Churches of Christ), tied closely to historically long-lived and connectional faith traditions.

While many Methodist congregations and ministers espouse beliefs that bear strong resemblance to those of conservative evangelicals, Methodism as a whole side-stepped the fundamentalist upsurge of the late 1800s/early 1900s, the subsequent marginalization of fundamentalism in the 1920s, and the revival of neo-evangelicalism in the 1940s and 50s. Methodists also missed out largely on the "battle for the Bible"--the inerrancy wars--that so transformed the Southern Baptist Convention.

Radical transformation of that sort is relatively rare in Methodist history (though not unheard-of, such as over the issue of slavery) thanks in part to its creedal orientation. Whereas Baptists, like many evangelicals, resist imposing doctrinal creeds upon their members, Methodists overtly and often reaffirm their commitment to a set of doctrinal standards (the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the various writings of John Wesley). They therefore enjoy a stability that many evangelical churches lack. Theological innovation does happen, but very slowly and within some basic limits. Non-creedal traditions, bound often only by "what the Bible says," are by comparison ill-equipped to deal with theological disagreements and are prone to schism (partially explaining the large and ever-growing number of evangelical subdivisions).

Also unlike many evangelical churches, Methodists join other mainline denominations in requiring that their ministers dedicate themselves to advanced study in theology, Biblical interpretation, and church history/practice. Baptist ministers may (and often do) have the Master of Divinity (the M-Div) from Baptist seminaries, but they do not have to. The populist impulse of Bible-believing--You don't need fancy learnin' to understand the clear Word of God--translates often into a less-is-more resistance to higher education. (Of course, post-purge, the theological and hermeneutic education offered by Southern Baptist seminaries is of a limited range). Wesley, however, was an avid autodidact, and his love of learning informs the Methodist ethos that their ministers be professionally educated (i.e., that theological education is a good and positive thing rather than a dangerous dalliance with apostasy).

The most obvious difference for me between Methodists and Baptists, however, had to do with Methodism's lack of a central stress upon the individual conversion experience. As I've explored, the bulk of the Baptist solar system orbits around "getting saved"--formally and as a singular experience trusting Christ so as to avoid the eternal torment of Hell.

As far as I could tell, nothing like this existed for Methodists. Sure, they had a part of the service at the end called "the invitation," but the invitation seemed less about "getting saved" and more about "joining the church." The "testimony," a stock genre in Baptist churches, was almost completely absent in Methodist churches. Even the language was different. A question such as "When did you get saved?" (a subject as basic as the alphabet for Baptists) would likely be met with a confused look. Hell and all its attendant anxiety simply played no real part in Methodist discourse, not at least when compared to the Baptists.

What then did they believe if not in getting saved?

More tomorrow,

JF