Holiness in community

Where you are, and who else is here.

The first session begins close to home. Your group will name the gifts God has given your congregation — the people, the skills, the passions, the location, the history, the particular things this church can do that no other church nearby can. Then it will name the harder things: the frustrations, the disillusionments, the places where the last several years have left a mark. Both lists get prayed over.

From there the group looks outward and begins its Treasure Map — a map or list of every congregation, ministry, and mission group in your area committed to historic, orthodox Christianity. Some you'll know well. Some you'll know only by name. Those get marked as points of curiosity, and they're where you start.

Before the session ends, your group will divide into pairs, choose one of those churches or ministries, and reach out. Not to propose anything. Just to ask if you can come and learn.

Outcome: an ecumenical treasure map of your area, and at least one conversation on the calendar.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.

Session 2 takes up the first of those four words: one.

Your group will hear from the members who made visits, and then turn to Jesus' prayer in John 17 — that all of them may be one, so that the world may believe. It's a demanding prayer to sit with in a room full of denominations. The session doesn't rush past that. Small groups work through 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12, and Ephesians 4, asking two questions of each passage: what does it teach us about being one, and what does it teach us about being many?

Then the group returns to the gifts list from Session 1 and asks a question most churches never ask out loud: what does our congregation contribute to the global body of Christ that no one else does?

The session closes by widening the frame further still — to Revelation's vision of every tribe and language and people and nation, to the demographics of your own city, and to the reality that one in seven Christians worldwide faces serious persecution for the name your congregation says freely every Sunday.

Outcome: confessing your church as part of the one church of Jesus Christ, and imagining what real relationship with other believers could look like.

What does it mean to be a holy church?

Scripture returns again and again to one image for God's love for His people: marriage. Session 3 walks through those passages — Isaiah, Hosea, the wedding banquet parables, Ephesians 5, the wedding of the Lamb in Revelation — and asks what the Bride of Christ image teaches about the nature of Jesus, and about us.

John Wesley preached that following Christ is like accepting an invitation to the wedding banquet of a great king, and that being properly dressed for it means holiness: the mind that was in Christ, and the walking as Christ walked. That idea, scriptural holiness, sits at the center of who Global Methodists are. It's in the mission statement adopted at the founding General Conference and in the vision statement adopted the same week.

Bishop Carolyn Moore tells the story of her own experience of the local church as the Bride of Christ, and the group discusses it together.

The session also asks your group to keep the momentum going — to write down every church that's been contacted, who made the contact, and one concrete way each person will continue that relationship before the next gathering. A thank-you note. A shared meal. A question that came out of curiosity.

Outcome: confessing your church as part of the holy church of Jesus Christ, and living as set-apart people marked by His love.

"Are you in accord with me, as I am with you?"

The word catholic in the creed predates the Roman Catholic Church as we know it today, the age of denominations, and the Church of England that birthed the Methodist movement. In the creed, it underscored unity and doctrinal faithfulness.

John Wesley preached a sermon called "Catholic Spirit" on a strange little verse in 2 Kings, where Jehu asks Jehonadab whether their hearts are in agreement and then reaches down to pull him up into the chariot. Wesley knew what division cost — he was preaching in the long shadow of the Thirty Years' War, when Christians had killed Christians by the million over questions of doctrine.

But Wesley was equally clear that catholic spirit is not indifference. There are doctrinal lines that cannot be crossed, and he called doctrinal apathy the spawn of hell. Session 4 holds both of those together and asks your group to work out where its own lines are: what has to be agreed on before you could serve alongside another church, and what differences turn out not to be deal-breakers after all.

Then it asks your group to brainstorm five or ten specific ways your congregation might partner with other churches nearby.

Outcome: confessing your church as part of the catholic church of Jesus Christ, and finding real fellowship with faithful believers in other churches in your area.

Sent out, and accountable for what we carry.

To be apostolic is to be sent — authorized to share in God's mission of love to the world. But being sent means carrying something, and Session 5 asks what exactly your congregation is carrying.

The group reads Ephesians 4 on the one faith that unites believers everywhere, and Jude's urgent charge to contend for the faith once for all entrusted to God's holy people. It looks at how the Global Methodist Church has ordered its own life around that charge — the primacy of Scripture, the normative role of the ecumenical creeds, the catechism written for local congregations.

Then it turns the question inward. What parts of the one faith does your congregation teach and model naturally? What parts come harder? Where are the blind spots?

And then, characteristically, outward again: who on your Treasure Map might have the wisdom to help your church grow where it's weakest — and how could you ask them?

Outcome: confessing your church as part of the apostolic church, and safeguarding sound teaching within your own congregation.

So what do we actually do?

The final session is the one that turns five sessions of discernment into a plan.

Your group builds four lists where everyone can see them at once. The strengths of the other churches and ministries in your area. The strengths of your own congregation. The good-news needs around you — spiritual, relational, physical; the things that don't yet look like the kingdom of God. And finally, in the space between them, every idea anyone has for how Christians in your area might offer their gifts to meet those needs. Good ideas, bad ideas, farfetched ideas. All of them.

The group chooses two or three that seem most attainable, picks one, decides the first step, and — if at all possible — makes contact with the potential partner before the session adjourns.

Outcome: a plan, and a partner.