Claremont School of Theology Dean Philip Clayton explored answers to this critical question when he spoke to 900 United Methodists at their Quadrennial Training Event in Nashville. In the presentation, Dean Clayton uses examples from the ministry of John Wesley and Martin Luther King, Jr. to illustrate how best to share the Good News of the teachings of Jesus, given current trends in American religion.

1. Beyond Fear! ~ ~ ~
Even the Wind and the Waves…
Philip Clayton
Claremont School of Theology

2. We are a community of people chasing
down the question:
What does it mean for us to be followers
of Jesus in our time and place?

3. “Oh my God, we’re going down!”

5. Our new public…

6. What Is This New World?
And Who Are Its Inhabitants?

7. Who is the New Audience?
1. Gen-Xers
2. Millennials
3. The hypenateds
4. The SBNR’s
5. The “nones”

8. Gen-Xers and Millennials
Generation X Millennials
Born 1965-1976 Born 1977 – 1998
51 million 75 million

9. Paul Knitter on “double belonging”
 “…more and more people are finding that they can be
genuinely nourished by more than one religious
tradition, by more than their home tradition or their
native tradition.”

12. The “Nones”

13. “In the last five years alone, the
unaffiliated have increased from just over
15% to just under 20% of all U.S. adults.
Their ranks now include more than 13
million self-described atheists and
agnostics (nearly 6% of the U.S. public), as
well as nearly 33 million people who say
they have no particular religious affiliation
(14%).”
— Pew Report, October 2012

14. John Cobb to the UCC
Annual Conference:
 “The more progressive denominations on the whole
have been losing members and resources. There are
many reasons. But I think the deepest one may be that
what we do and say does not seem to be terribly
important. This is true with regard to our children
whom we bring up in the church. They may have a
positive attitude toward it, but they may not see any
reason to give much, if any, of their time and energy to
its support.”

15. Reclaiming Our Heritage:
What’s our Wesleyan DNA?

16. (1) Life with God is a process, not a state.
We grow continually in sanctification, being continually
transformed into God’s image by the Holy Spirit

17. (2) We have choice and are responsible …
though always through the prevenient grace
of God!

18. (3) No opposition between private
and social sanctification
• “For Wesley, to turn Christianity into a
solitary religion would be to destroy it.”
Genuinely Wesleyan theology interprets the
life of faith as “a harmonization of both
dimensions of personal and social
sanctification” (Pres. Hong-ki Kim, MTU)
• “Individual healing is closely interwoven with
structural healing” (Dr. Andrew Sung Park)

19. (4) The quadrilateral:
Scripture, Reason, Tradition, Experience

22. (5) Ours is a holistic theology…
• neither dualist … nor world-denying … nor
fatalist …
• neither merely private … nor merely social …
• and, above all, based in and upon
community!

23. “Radical Wesleyanism”
“Though we may not think alike,
may we not love alike?”
— John Wesley

24. “Radical Wesleyanism”
 “We try to understand, not how features in our past are
repeated in our present, but how our present grows out
of our past into our future.”
 “Revelation is a moving thing[; ...] its meaning is
realized only by being brought to bear upon the
interpretation and reconstruction of ever new human
situations in an enduring movement, a single drama of
divine and human action.”
-- H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation

25. “Radical Wesleyanism”
“The study of missiology has a term, Missio Dei, by which
is meant God taking the initiative in mission. It’s the
experience of finding God already active in the most
unexpected places” (Chris Sissons)

26. “Radical Wesleyanism”
 “A radical Wesleyan approach to transformation
through ecumenical conversations” (Chris Sissons)
It’s about reception, about real learning, across
boundaries:
1. receptive ecumenism between traditions;
2. ecumenical reception between the local and central
church;
3. “transformational reception”: siding with the new
industrial poor -- the move that radicalized Wesley!

27. Qualities of ministers:
John Wesley’s “Address to Clergy” (1756)
 1. Good understanding, sound judgment, and a
 capacity for reasoning
 2. Discernment
 3. Good memory
 4. A deep understanding about the nature of the
 pastoral call
 5. A deep knowledge of the Scriptures
 6. Knowledge of the original biblical languages
 7. Knowledge of the sciences, philosophy, and logic
 8. Knowledge of the patristic writers
 9. Knowledge of personalities and character in people
 10.Common sense
 11. Courtesy and scholarship
 12. Singlemindedness
 13. Love for God and neighbor
 14. Desire for personal holiness
 15. Desire to cooperate with God’s grace

28. A Radical Wesleyan Vision, from Hendrik Pieterse
“I suggest…that we recover the ancient biblical
theological category of hospitality to give shape to the
radical nature of holy living as the reckless
abandonment of self in love to God and neighbor.”
“Hospitality offers a disposition and a set of practices
that allow United Methodists to reclaim for our time
this radical Wesleyan vision of self-giving love.”

29. A Radical Wesleyan Vision, from Hendrik Pieterse
“...that experience of holy love that constrained John
Wesley and the early Methodists to transgress the
boundaries of custom, convention, and decency in
compassion for the neighbor in need. As the tradition
of hospitality reminds us, such transgressive love is
dangerous. For in the act of inviting the stranger into
my home, hospitality unsettles my sense of space, my
identity, opening it to transformation in community
with one who is not like me….

30. A Radical Wesleyan Vision, from Hendrik Pieterse
“Disciples formed in the Wesleyan way will look upon
encounter with that which is strange, different, out of the
ordinary not as a threat but as an opportunity for deeper
transformation in the image of God. Such encounters invite
deeper respect for the integrity of my neighbor—not the
abstract neighbor of my imagination but the concrete
one, and especially the vulnerable one whom the world and
the church so easily discount, exclude, and forget....
Boundary encounters, then, become spaces of
expectation, repentance, grace, and solidarity
through which the church can find new life and new
forms of community.”

31. A Vision for the Church in
the 21st Century …
“Wesleyan
Communities”

32. Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures
“The emerging church is diverse and decentralized, averse
to static structures and fixed ideas. Many participants
would resist my calling it a movement, instead
describing it as an ongoing conversation about church
and mission. It certainly is a conversation, which is
occurring in local communities, at conferences, and in
a multitude of blogs…
-- Hal Knight

33. Hal Knight on John Wesley and Today’s Church
(1) These churches “are not responding to a passing fad but to
deep, permanent, and pervasive cultural change. Subsequent
generations will be shaped to an even greater extent by
postmodern culture… Emerging churches exult in traditional
spiritual practices and imagery, but seamlessly interweave it with
contemporary language, art, and technology…”
 “This simultaneous respect for tradition and attention to context
marked the ministry of John Wesley. He also lived in a time of
great cultural and intellectual change. He found it necessary to
develop new practices of ministry in order to effectively reach
people in his day, invite them into a relationship with
Christ, form them as disciples, and enable their participation in
mission. Yet at the same time he sought for his movement to be
an altogether faithful contemporary expression of the heart of
scripture and tradition, especially what he termed ‘primitive
Christianity.’”

34. Hal Knight on John Wesley and Today’s Church
(2) These churches “are communities that practice the
way of Jesus within postmodern cultures”
(Gibbs and Bolger)
 “They are actually very much in the spirit of an earlier
evangelicalism that was rooted in Wesley’s vision of
holiness of heart and life, was especially vibrant in the
early nineteenth century, and never disappeared. This
evangelicalism was committed to ministries with the
poor, abolition of slavery, and women’s rights as well as
fervently evangelistic.”

35. Hal Knight
(3) These churches “are radically incarnational—they see
all of life as potentially sacred, all of culture subject to
transformation and renewal by the kingdom of God.
They reject the dualisms of
sacred/secular, public/private, mind/body, faith/reason that are so
central to Enlightenment thought. As Gibbs and Bolger put it, ‘…All can
be made holy. All can be given to God in worship. All modern dualisms
can be overcome.’”
 “[Wesley] saw the saving power of God at work in every
human being through prevenient grace. There were not
two categories of people, the elect and the dammed, but
only one category, sinners who are loved by God and have
worth and dignity by virtue of that love… [Wesley’s] classes
and bands were occasions where people regularly gathered
to ask what it means to live as a Christian in everyday life.
They had a spirituality that touched every aspect of their
lives and world.”

36. Hal Knight on John Wesley and Today’s Church
(4) These churches “are often frequently networks of
small groups, and for some mutual accountability is a
central practice. They also seek to discover what it
means to be a genuine community, a people together in
relationship, rather than a gathering of individuals…”
“The parallels with Wesley are obvious: a network of
small groups, mutual accountability, transformed
lifestyles, relationship in community, and living for
mission…”

37. Conclusion:
Transformation is about
rekindling our purpose in
and for a
postmodern, interreligio
us (and increasingly
postreligious) world.
Transformed disciples
are transforming
disciples!

38. Our experience (and action) at Claremont…
 Phase 1: A traditional Christian seminary
 Phase 2: Becoming the Christian member in an
interreligious consortium
 Phase 3: Rethinking and re-imagining: where are authentic
and growing Christian communities? Who attends them?
How can we train leaders for effective ministries both within
congregational structures and outside of them?

39. Mark Scandrette’s center, ReIMAGINE is a center for life integration.
Fueled by the life and teachings of Christ ,we aspire to revolutionize how
people live their lives and empower leaders who will revolutionize their
communities.
<www.reimagine.org>

40. Jesus the Revolutionary:
The Great Reversal
• The Topsy-Turvy God
• Kenosis (Phil. 2:5-8)
• An Upside Down Ethic (Luke 1)
• The Prophet of Reversal (Luke 4)
• The Inside-Out Church (Luke 6)

41. Hold On! ~ ~ ~
It’s going to be a wild ride
before we reach that other shore!

43. “If relativity is a stormy sea of uncertainties, [our]
faith does not magically make the waters recede so
that we can march through them on a dry path.
What it does do is give us the courage to set sail on
our little boat, with the hope that, by God's grace,
we will reach the other shore without drowning.”
—Peter Berger

44. Thank you…
www.PhilipClayton.net