CHAPTER18EvangelismAPastoralTheologicalPerspective.docx

CHAPTER 18
Evangelism: A Pastoral Theological Perspective
J. Patrick Vaughn
It began as an infection in her gum. Six weeks
later Janice, a seventy-five-year-old member of
my congregation, lay comatose in an intensive care
unit. She had developed a particularly
virulent strain of pneumonia, and the doctors
gave her no hope of recovery. I visited her
the
nightbefore she died. When I walked into the
waiting room, I saw her brother and sister.
I sat
down and listened to their shock and dismay.
Soon, I realized that the sister, Laura,
had not
spoken. She seemed withdrawn, and I wanted to
offer her an opportunity to express herself.
When I asked how she was feeling, she
responded, “Myeyes hurt.” I inquired further.
She
released a heavy sigh and replied, “Too much
water running.” In four simple words Laura
verbalized the anguish of her family.
Pastoral theology is concerned with shepherding,
with the healing, sustaining, and
guiding dimensions of ministry. It seeks to
integrate insights and reflections gleaned from

the
disciplines of both the social sciences and
theology in order to understand and better
serve
the community of faith. Unfortunately, those
engaged in the ministry of shepherding have
not consistently and intentionally imagined themselves
to be evangelists. In this essay I
propose that when evangelism is theologically
grounded in the suffering love of the Triune
God, the image of evangelist promises to shape
and powerfully inform the ministry of
pastoral care and counseling. The evangelist is the
one whose primary concern is “too much
water running.”
Metaphors and Obligations
In Religious Ethics and Pastoral Care Don Browning
offers a model for theological reflection
that facilitates the development of a biblically
faithful and theologically coherent
understanding of evangelism.1 In an attempt to
reintegrate moral reasoning with the church’s
ministry of care, Browning suggests that ethical
reflection operates on five levels. The first is
termed the metaphorical or symbolic level. This is
concerned with issues of ultimate reality.
The second level asks questions of obligation. This is
the level of principle.
Browning argues that level one impacts and
informs level two.The manner in which a
community envisions God will mold how that community
understands who it is obligated to
be and what it is obligated to do. A church’s

ministry is largely influenced by the
metaphorsit
employs to give an image to ultimate reality.
“The vision,” Browning observes, “colors all that
we say and do. It affects our moral thinking.
Even though it does not determine it in
all
Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of
evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm.
B. Eerdmans Publishing Co..
Created from amridge on 2022-10-26 12:09:07.
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respects, it deeply influencesthe way we regard
and care for one another.”2 Communities live
by the way that they image ultimate reality. Their
obligations to act and serve are formed by
their shared vision of God.

Browning’s model suggests that the ministry of
evangelism begins with an inquiry
concerning the very nature of God. As Terence
Fretheim has noted,
it is not enough to say that one believes in
God. What is important is the kind of God in
whom one believes. Or, to use
different language, metaphorsmatter. The images used to
speak of God not only decisively determine the
way one thinks
about God, they have a powerful impact on the
shape of the life of the believer. They may, in
fact, tend to shape a life
toward unbelief.3
The symbols a community employs to image
God powerfully shape and form the nature
and practice of ministerial obligation. Pastoral
theological reflection upon the ministry of
evangelism begins with the very nature of God as
captured and expressed in metaphor.
The Metaphor of the Cross
For Christians, the cross stands as one of
the central metaphors in the faith community.
Jürgen Moltmann has even suggested that it “is the
test of everything which deserves to be
called Christian.”4 The cross reveals a God
whose love is so great that God experiences
painful suffering in and through the divine/human
relationships.5
The crossreveals that God suffers because of human
sin. The priests and politicians, the

religious community and Roman government were
incredibly threatened by Jesus’ life and
ministry. He reached out to the poor and outcast,
sat at table with tax collectors and sinners,
ministered to the abused and beaten. Believed to
be heretical, seditious, and dangerous, he
was finally rejected even by his most trusted
confidants. Human sin and rejection nailed
Christ to the cross.
The cross reveals that God suffers with humanity.
In his pain, brokenness, and
victimization, Jesus identifies with all who experience
pain, brokenness, and victimization.
He aligns himself with all who know
abandonment and forsakenness. Jesus is
Immanuel, God
with us. In short, the God who suffers with men
and women is a God of compassion.
Compassion literally means to “suffer with.”
Andrew Purves has noted that the Hebrew
word
for compassion is rachamim. It is
derived from another Hebrew word, reckem which
means womb or uterus. The literal
meaning of compassion, then, is
the womb pained in solidarity with suffering of
another. The feeling of deep kinship with another
is understood now is
an intimate and physical way as the wounding of
the womb. The wounded womb is the core of
the biblical meaning of
compassion. At its most basic, compassion
represents a feminine characteristic of God.6

While men and women know suffering, God
knows suffering in a profoundly deep and
interior way.
The crossreveals that God suffers on behalf of
humanity. Jesus’ death brings the hope of a
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right and renewing relationship with God as well as
with othermen and women. God the
Father surrendered the Son to death that he
might become the Father of all people. The
Father willingly endured the pain of losing a
beloved Son that all men and women might
become God’s children. Similarly, the Son willingly

entered into the suffering and death of
the crossto be the “brother and savior of all
who are condemned and accursed.”7 The cross
transforms relationships that are marred by sin. It
is a transformation that involves divine
pain and suffering. The God of the crossis a God of
suffering love.
The metaphor of the crossalso captures the Trinitarian
nature of God. In The Trinity and
the Kingdom, Moltmann attempts to develop a
sociological understanding of God.8 He rejects
a view of the Trinity that envisions God as either
a supreme substance or absolute subject.
Such interpretations narrowly view God as either an
arbiter of power or an ultimate, solitary
individual. In contrast, Moltmann argues that the
doctrine of Trinity describes a God whose
very nature is communal.
In the Western church this doctrine has traditionally
been formulated as an attempt to
maintain the unity of God. Moltmann
believes, however, that God’s unity has been
so
radically asserted that the inner differentiated
persons of the Godhead have been virtually
collapsed into a solitary entity. He argues that
God’s unity can be more powerfully and
faithfully understood in terms of perichoresis, a
mutual indwelling. In describing this form of
unityhe writes,
An eternal life process takesplace in the triune
God through the exchange of energies. The Father
exists in the Son, the

Son in the Father and both of them in the Spirit,
just as the Spirit exists in both the Father
and the Son. By virtue of their
eternal love they live in one another to such
an extent, that they are one. It is a process of
most perfect and intense
empathy. Precisely through the personal characteristics
that distinguish them from one another, the Father,
the Son and
the Spirit dwell in one another and
communicate eternal life to one another. In the
perichoresis, the very thing that
divides them then becomes that which binds
them together.… The trinitarian persons form
their own unity by
themselves in the circulation of the divine
life.9
God is one, but not in a homogenized, monolithic,
inaccessible, uniform, unvaried
manner. God is one in a dynamic, passionate,
relational,mutual indwelling of persons in
love. The doctrine of the Trinity “describes God in
terms of shared life and love rather than in
terms of domineering power. God loves in
freedom, lives in community, and wills creatures
to live in community. God is self sharing, other
regarding,community forming love.”10 God
is not a lone monarch ruling in solitude. God is
a covenantal God who governs in and
through and as community, ever seeking to bring
others into relationship.
In the cross of Christ the suffering love and
communal being of God are supremely
embodied and expressed, for “here the love of

the Father which communicates itselfbecomes
infinite pain at the sacrifice of the Son. Here the
responsive love of the Son becomes infinite
suffering over being rejected and cast out by the
Father. What happens on Golgotha extends
to the depths of the Godhead and therefore shapes
the divine life forever.”11 The crossreveals
the depth of God’s desire to enter into
community with men and women. This communal
God willingly endures suffering and death so that
humanity might be renewed, redeemed,
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and restored. The cross reveals a Triune God of
suffering love. This is the evangel which

evangelists seek to share.
Obligations Concerning Evangelism
Again, obligations arise out of metaphorsof
ultimate reality. Browning has written, “It is
not
only in theology but, to a surprising extent, in
the modern psychologies as well that the way
we metaphorically represent the world in its most
durable and ultimate respects influences
(although not necessarily determines in all
respects) what we thinkwe are obligated to do.”12
The cross reveals a Triune God of suffering
love. I believe that this metaphor powerfully
shapes the community of faith and gives birth to
certain principles concerning the ministry of
evangelism.
First, the metaphor of crossenlivens the community
of believers to share the good news
of Jesus Christ. Evangelism is born in
the very nature of God, not in particular
commandmentsor laws. The church shares the
evangel because the God that she worships is
a God who is community-building, other-seeking,
other-affirming. The Triune God of
suffering love deeply hungers for fellowship with
women and men. Charles Gerkin has noted,
Yahweh does not choose to stay apartfrom the affairs
of the world, but chooses rather to be
actively engaged in the world
of human affairs seeking to fulfill Yahweh’s
own purposes. The God of Israel is an active,
passionate God concerned for

the preservation of the community of God’s
people and the welfare of all. Said plainly
and straightforwardly, the God
Yahweh does not choose to stay aloof from the
affairs of the world. Yahweh moves out
from Yahweh’s self in acts of
compassion and justice. So also should Yahweh’s
people.13
The church is fundamentally and primarily motivated to
engage in the ministry of evangelism
because of who God is, a Triune God of
suffering love. The very nature of God shapes
the
people of God into a community that ever seeks
to share the good news with others.
Second, evangelical endeavors shaped by the
metaphor of the crosswill be personal and
relational. Gimmicks, manipulation, threats, and stale,
pre-packaged methods of
proclamation are not acceptable. The God of
relationship desires relationship. This suggests
that the evangelist will not share the gospel simply
through direct proclamation. He or she
will share the evangel with an empathic ear and a
deep, compassionate willingness to listen to
others. Such openness and sensitivity to the
other are essential in the establishment and
development of genuine community. In otherwords,
the good news of Jesus Christ simply
cannot be communicated from a distance,
whether that distance is provided by a large
imposing pulpit or emotional unavailability. The good
news is shared through a relationship
that reflects the perichoretic nature of God.

Third, the metaphor of crosssuggests that evangelical
endeavors will be acutely sensitive
to human experience, especially the experience of
pain and suffering. God so attends to the
condition of men and women that God weeps when
they weepand rejoices when they rejoice.
People’s pain and needs are important to evangelists
because they are important to God. The
faithful evangelist will be open to the particular plight
of God’s children, offering the gifts of
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intimacy, presence, and the willingness to suffer
with another in a situation of hurt and

brokenness. Even as God enters into the world
of human experience, so too will faithful
evangelists seek to entermore fully into that world.
Surprisingly, through faithful attempts to share
the good news, the evangelist will also be
nurtured, nurtured by the God who is already present
in the otherperson’s life. When Christ
told his disciples that as they ministered to the
“least of these” they were ministering to
him
(Matt. 25:40), he was speaking from the perspective
of the suffering love of the Triune God.
In the relational embrace of people’s hurt and pain,
evangelists may hope to be embraced by
the presence of the God they serve.
Fourth, because God is a communalGod, the sharing
of the gospel will involve the work
and commitment of the fellowship of believers.
It will not suffice for an individual or
committee or governing body to engage in
sharing God’s love. Evangelism is the
privilege
and responsibility of the entire church. It
depends upon a network of mutually supportive
men and women.
Fifth, evangelism informed by the metaphor of
the crosswill recognize and respect limits.
There is in the Godhead innerdifferentiation as
well as love and respect for the integrity of
the otherpersons. Personal boundaries are not
transgressed. Evangelists will also respect an
individual’s or family’s or even community’s
boundaries. In Hopeful Imagination Walter

Brueggemann comments on the obligation to respect
limits. He remarks,
Those in ministry have a terrible temptation to
take responsibility for others, to do for others
what they will not do for
themselves. We have a difficult time having enough
freedom to disengage ourselves, to let others be
free when they are
wrong, to let others be free to fail, even when
they are surely headed for destruction.… A
ministry of vitality requires that
we be deeply concerned for and utterly free from
otherpeople.14
Evangelical efforts may include both verbal and
nonverbal invitations to relationship.
Adopting biblical imagery, evangelists will knock at
the door (Rev. 3:20), but, in recognizing
the integrity of the boundaries of the other,
the door will not be knocked down. Though
perhaps not perceived or understood by the
evangelist, she or he trusts that God is
already in
the home, abiding in rooms of pain and
brokenness. When the door does not open,
evangelists trust that God continues to be at work in
those persons’ lives. When the door does
open, they trust that it is God who has turned
the knob. Recognition of limits not only
ensures respect for the dignity of others, it
also serves to release the evangelist of
unnecessary
burden and responsibility. Ultimately, God is
responsible for humanity not those who serve
God.

Finally, sinceGod suffers because of human sin
and rejection, the witness of evangelism is
obligated to confront evil and sin in the world.
On a social level, evangelism involves
confronting forces that dehumanize and kill, powers
that seek to strip awayhuman value and
dignity (e.g., racism, ageism, militarism). On a
personal level, this involves gently,
relationally, and firmly holding people responsible
for their lives, enabling them to recognize,
face, and repent of the pain they have inflicted upon
themselves, upon others, and even upon
God. As Ben Johnson has written, “The church, because
it is the body of Christ, must always
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concern itselfwith mission and evangelism, because
Christ cameto save lost persons and to
redeem the world.”15 The metaphor of crossthus calls
the evangelist to resist the polarization
of social activism and personal commitment.
Pastoral Caregivers as Evangelists
Perhaps out of concern for therapeutic neutrality,
those who seek to serve as shepherds have
seemed reluctant to image themselves as
evangelists.16 This is understandable given the
distorted view of evangelism in popular culture
and in certain expressions of the faith
community.17 Yet, this is also sad and unfortunate.
Because the evangelist is the one who
bears the good news of the Triune God of
suffering love, the image of evangelist offers
to
shape and inform powerfully the ministry of
pastoral care and counseling.
As evangelists, pastoral caregiversare obligated to be
concerned with developing personal
relationships. The shepherd knows his or her flockby
name (John 10:3). The essence of any
pastoral encounter is the establishment and nurture
of a personal relationship. This is
perichoresis in action. In the homes of
parishioners, in hospital rooms, and in the
counseling
office, it is this appreciation and deepening of
relationship that offers the hope of healing
and

restoration.
As evangelists, pastoral caregivers are obligated to
be sensitive to human experience,
particularly need and pain. Pastoral care and counseling
are inherently evangelical because
they are forms of ministry that tend to brokenness.
Shepherds care for their lost and
wounded sheep. As a friend of mine is fond of
remarking, “Personal hurtsrequire personal
healing.” When we ministers listen to the
agonizing cries of the sick, the dying, the
divorced,
the depressed, the grieving, we are not simply
being kindor polite. Through our care and
sensitivity we are sharing the suffering love of
the Triune God. We are, indeed, serving as
evangelists.
As evangelists, pastoral caregiversare obligated to be
involved in communities that offer
mutual support and encouragement. Pastors,
chaplains, and pastoral counselors are not Lone
Rangers. Our ministry is vitally dependent upon
fellowship with our brothers and sisters. The
Association for Clinical Pastoral Education and
the American Association of Pastoral
Counselors, for example, are organizations that seek to
offer guidance, consultation,
supervision, and support in an attempt to serve
the people of God as faithfully as possible.
This is not simply psychologically prudent but
theologically mandated.
I think it is important to note that such
community involves not only caregivers, but

extends to care receivers as well. In my
opening illustration I described the anguish of a
grieving family. The sister lamented that her eyes
hurt because of “too much water running.”
Through our sharing we formed a community; I
believe that I was only able to reach out to
them in their brokenness because of my own
personal experience of a sustaining community.
I have several colleagues with whom I
regularly meet to share my joys and sorrows. I
also
shared this particular pastoral encounter with
my Clinical Pastoral Education group. They
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listened and helped me to tend to my own sense
of loss. The metaphor of the crossreminds
us shepherds that it is only as we are
engaged in mutually fulfilling and supporting
communities that we are enabled to reach out to
our wounded and hurting sheep. In short,
this metaphor issues serious challenges to
individualistic approaches to pastoral care and
counseling.
As evangelists, pastoral caregivers demonstrate a
respect for boundaries and limits.
Emotionaldefenses are respected. A counselor,
chaplain, or pastor does not forcesomeone to
share areasof life that he or she may want to
protect. Daniel Migliore has defined sin as
both
pride and self-rejection.18 Both reflect a lack of
respect for limits. In the former the
boundaries of the otherare neglected. In the latter
the boundaries of the self are neglected.
Engaging self, neighbor, and God in deeper and more
fulfilling ways is made possible only
through struggling with one’s limits and boundaries.
As evangelists, pastoral caregivers confront sin
and evil. Since such confrontation is
generally associatedwith social action and social
causes, it might well be asked if this is
really
possible in a hospital room, a counseling
center, or the front porch of a parishioner.
The
answer is unequivocally affirmative. In these
very places self-destructive and/or suicidal
impulses are confronted, the physical and emotional

abuse of spouses and children is
challenged, the lack of concern for oneself or
others is contested, and the gods who deny pain
and relationship are defied.
I have long been uncomfortable with and
suspicious of those who call themselves
evangelists. As I have allowed the metaphor of
the crossto touch and move me, however, I
have discovered a deeper appreciation for
evangelism. l now feel comfortable with the
role of
evangelist. While certainly appreciating and using
insights gleaned from the social sciences,
the role of evangelist reminds me that pastoral care
and counseling are fundamentally shaped
and informed by the faith community. It is as an
evangelist of the crossthat I offer empathy
to a woman grieving the death of a sister
or listen to the anger of a woman
who has been
abused, or reach out to a childwho has a
serious illness. It is as an evangelist of
the crossthat
I participate in community that I may engage
others in community. It is as an
evangelist that
I lift up the hope of God’s presence in the
midst of the brokenness and pain and
suffering of
human life. In short, the role of evangelist
has moved me to reclaim and deepen my
appreciation for our theological heritage.
In addition, I believe that those of us
engaged in the ministry of pastoral care and

counseling have an important word to offer the church.
We can challenge the church when it
settles for slick marketing techniques and
avoids the suffering love of the cross. We can
question the church when it engages in
evangelism as monologue instead of
dialogue. We can
remind the church that healing comes not through
assent to a particular doctrine but through
the struggle and development of a caring
relationship. We can model for the community
of
faith a form of evangelism that strives to
be responsive to the metaphor of the cross.
As
evangelists we hold forth good news for the church!
Carroll Wise has defined the ministry of pastoral
care as “the art of communicating the
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innermeaning of the gospel to persons at the
pointof their need.”19 This is the essence of
evangelism. My hope is that those of us
engaged in the ministry of pastoral care and
counseling will more and more image ourselves as
evangelists. Who is an evangelist? Quite
simply, she or he is the one who seeks to
share the good news of Jesus Christ by
tending to the
experience of those who cry out, “Too much
water running!”
1. Don Browning, Religious Ethics and Pastoral
Care (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), pp. 47-71.
2. Browning, Religious Ethics and Pastoral Care,
p. 59.
3. Terence Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old
TestamentPerspective (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984),
p. 1.
4. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (New
York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 7.
5. Though I focus on the New Testamenton
the cross, it is important to remember
that the Old Testamentalso bears
witness to a God of suffering love. See Fretheim,
Suffering of God, pp. 107-48.
6. Andrew Purves, The Search for Compassion:
Spirituality and Ministry (Louisville:
Westminster/John Knox, 1989), p.

69.
7. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel and Jürgen Moltmann,
God — His & Hers (New York: Crossroad,
1992), p. 68.
8. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the
Kingdom (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1981).
9. Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, pp.
174-75.
10. Daniel I. Migliore, FaithSeeking Understanding:
An Introduction to Christian Theology (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans,
1991), p. 64.
11. Moltmann-Wendel and Moltmann, God — His &
Hers, p. 68.
12. Don Browning, Religious Thought and the
Modern Psychologists (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), p.
20. Browning
asserts that systems of psychological investigations
are not morally neutral, and he illustrates how
metaphors inherent in
various modern psychologies do give birth to certain
obligations regarding human life. He then
creatively compares such
obligations with the obligations shaped by
Christian faith as expressed in the theology of
Reinhold Niebuhr.
13. Charles V. Gerkin, Prophetic Pastoral Practice
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), p. 134.
14. Walter Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination:
Prophetic Voices in Exile (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1986), p. 51.

15. Ben C. Johnson, Rethinking Evangelism
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987), p. 79.
16. I certainly do not intend this to be a
categorical statement. However, in reading,
training, and conversations with
pastoral counselors and chaplains, I am impressed by
the lack of the intentional and consistent
appropriation of the image of
evangelist.
17. Ben Johnson has observed that certain
interpretations of the meaning and practice of
evangelism focus on “saving
soulsfrom hell.” He terms this “evangelicalism.” It
is actually a perversion of evangelism.
See Rethinking Evangelism, pp. 15-
19.
18. Migliore, FaithSeeking Understanding, pp. 130-35.
19. Carroll Wise, The Meaning of Pastoral Care
(New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p.
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THE BAKEOFF
Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker. 81.26 (Sept. 5, 2005): p000.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Conde Nast Publications, Inc..
All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The
Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Steve Gundrum launched Project Delta at a small dinner last fall
at Il Fornaio, in Burlingame, just down the road from
the San Francisco Airport. It wasn't the first time he'd been to Il
Fornaio, and he made his selection quickly, with just a
glance at the menu; he is the sort of person who might have
thought about his choice in advance--maybe even that
morning, while shaving. He would have posed it to himself as a
question--Ravioli alla Lucana?--and turned it over in
his mind, assembling and disassembling the dish, ingredient by
ingredient, as if it were a model airplane. Did the
Pecorino pepato really belong? What if you dropped the basil?
What would the ravioli taste like if you froze it, along
with the ricotta and the Parmesan, and tried to sell it in the
supermarket? And then what would you do about the
fennel?

Gundrum is short and round. He has dark hair and a mustache
and speaks with the flattened vowels of the upper
Midwest. He is voluble and excitable and doggedly
unpretentious, to the point that your best chance of seeing him
in
a suit is probably Halloween. He runs Mattson, one of the
country's foremost food research-and-development firms,
which is situated in a low-slung concrete-and-glass building in a
nondescript office park in Silicon Valley. Gundrum's
office is a spare, windowless room near the rear, and all day
long white-coated technicians come to him with
prototypes in little bowls, or on skewers, or in Tupperware
containers. His job is to taste and advise, and the most
common words out of his mouth are "I have an idea." Just that
afternoon, Gundrum had ruled on the reformulation of
a popular spinach dip (which had an unfortunate tendency to
smell like lawn clippings) and examined the latest
iteration of a low-carb kettle corn for evidence of rhythmic
munching (the metronomic hand-to-mouth cycle that lies at
the heart of any successful snack experience). Mattson created
the shelf-stable Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chip Cookie,
the new Boca Burger products for Kraft Foods, Orville
Redenbacher's Butter Toffee Popcorn Clusters, and so many
other products that it is impossible to walk down the aisle of a
supermarket and not be surrounded by evidence of the
company's handiwork.
That evening, Gundrum had invited two of his senior colleagues
at Mattson--Samson Hsia and Carol Borba--to
dinner, along with Steven Addis, who runs a prominent
branding firm in the Bay Area. They sat around an oblong
table off to one side of the dining room, with the sun streaming
in the window, and Gundrum informed them that he
intended to reinvent the cookie, to make something both
nutritious and as "indulgent" as the premium cookies on the
supermarket shelf. "We want to delight people," he said. "We

don't want some ultra-high-nutrition power bar, where
you have to rationalize your consumption." He said it again:
"We want to delight people."
As everyone at the table knew, a healthful, good-tasting cookie
is something of a contradiction. A cookie represents
the combination of three unhealthful ingredients--sugar, white
flour, and shortening. The sugar adds sweetness, bulk,
and texture: along with baking powder, it produces the tiny cell
structures that make baked goods light and fluffy. The
fat helps carry the flavor. If you want a big hit of vanilla, or
that chocolate taste that really blooms in the nasal cavities,
you need fat. It also keeps the strands of gluten in the flour
from getting too tightly bound together, so that the cookie
stays chewable. The flour, of course, gives the batter its
structure, and, with the sugar, provides the base for the
browning reaction that occurs during baking. You could replace
the standard white flour with wheat flour, which is
higher in fibre, but fibre adds grittiness. Over the years, there
have been many attempts to resolve these
contradictions--from Snackwells and diet Oreos to the dry,
grainy hockey pucks that pass for cookies in health-food
stores--but in every case flavor or fluffiness or tenderness has
been compromised. Steve Gundrum was undeterred.
He told his colleagues that he wanted Project Delta to create the
world's greatest cookie. He wanted to do it in six
months. He wanted to enlist the biggest players in the American
food industry. And how would he come up with this
wonder cookie? The old-fashioned way. He wanted to hold a
bakeoff.
The standard protocol for inventing something in the food
industry is called the matrix model. There is a department
for product development, which comes up with a new idea, and
a department for process development, which figures
out how to realize it, and then, down the line, departments for

packing, quality assurance, regulatory affairs,
chemistry, microbiology, and so on. In a conventional bakeoff,
Gundrum would have pitted three identical matrixes
against one another and compared the results. But he wasn't
satisfied with the unexamined assumption behind the
conventional bakeoff--that there was just one way of inventing
something new.
Gundrum had a particular interest, as it happened, in software.
He had read widely about it, and once, when he ran
http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.fiu.edu/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=T
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into Steve Jobs at an Apple store in the Valley, chatted with him
for forty-five minutes on technical matters relating to
the Apple operating system. He saw little difference between
what he did for a living and what the software engineers
in the surrounding hills of Silicon Valley did. "Lines of code
are no different from a recipe," he explains. "It's the same
thing. You add a little salt, and it tastes better. You write a
little piece of code, and it makes the software work faster."
But in the software world, Gundrum knew, there were ongoing
debates about the best way to come up with new
code.
On the one hand, there was the "open source" movement. Its
patron saint was Linus Torvald, the Norwegian hacker
who decided to build a free version of Unix, the hugely
complicated operating system that runs many of the world's
large computers. Torvald created the basic implementation of
his version, which he called Linux, posted it online, and

invited people to contribute to its development. Over the years,
thousands of programmers had helped, and Linux
was now considered as good as proprietary versions of Unix.
"Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow" was the
Linux mantra: a thousand people working for an hour each can
do a better job writing and fixing code than a single
person working for a thousand hours, because the chances are
that among those thousand people you can find
precisely the right expert for every problem that comes up.
On the other hand, there was the "extreme programming"
movement, known as XP, which was led by a legendary
programmer named Kent Beck. He called for breaking a
problem into the smallest possible increments, and
proceeding as simply and modestly as possible. He thought that
programmers should work in pairs, two to a
computer, passing the keyboard back and forth. Between Beck
and Torvald were countless other people, arguing for
slightly different variations. But everyone in the software world
agreed that trying to get people to be as creative as
possible was, as often as not, a social problem: it depended not
just on who was on the team but on how the team
was organized.
"I remember once I was working with a printing company in
Chicago," Beck says. "The people there were having a
terrible problem with their technology. I got there, and I saw
that the senior people had these corner offices, and they
were working separately and doing things separately that they
had trouble integrating later on. So I said, 'Find a
space where you can work together.' So they found a corner of
the machine room. It was a raised floor, ice cold. They
just loved it. They would go there five hours a day, making lots
of progress. I flew home. They hired me for my
technical expertise. And I told them to rearrange the office
furniture, and that was the most valuable thing I could offer

them."
It seemed to Gundrum that people in the food world had a great
deal to learn from all this. They had become adept at
solving what he called "science projects"--problems that
required straightforward, linear applications of expensive
German machinery and armies of white-coated people with
advanced degrees in engineering. Cool Whip was a good
example: a product processed so exquisitely--with air bubbles
of such fantastic uniformity and stability--that it remains
structurally sound for months, at high elevation and at low
elevation, frozen and thawed and then refrozen. But
coming up with a healthy cookie, which required finessing the
inherent contradictions posed by sugar, flour, and
shortening, was the kind of problem that the food industry had
more trouble with. Gundrum recalled one
brainstorming session that a client of his, a major food
company, had convened. "This is no joke," he said. "They
played a tape where it sounded like the wind was blowing and
the birds were chirping. And they posed us out on a
dance floor, and we had to hold our arms out like we were trees
and close our eyes, and the ideas were supposed to
grow like fruits off the limbs of the trees. Next to me was the
head of R. & D., and he looked at me and said, 'What
the hell are we doing here?' "
For Project Delta, Gundrum decreed that there would be three
teams, each representing a different methodology of
invention. He had read Kent Beck's writings, and decided that
the first would be the XP team. He enlisted two of
Mattson's brightest young associates--Peter Dea and Dan
Howell. Dea is a food scientist, who worked as a
confectionist before coming to Mattson. He is tall and spare,
with short dark hair. "Peter is really good at hitting the
high note," Gundrum said. "If a product needs to have a
particular flavor profile, he's really good at getting that one

dimension and getting it right." Howell is a culinarian--goateed
and talkative, a man of enthusiasms who uses high-
end Mattson equipment to make an exceptional cup of espresso
every afternoon. He started his career as a barista
at Starbucks, and then realized that his vocation lay elsewhere.
"A customer said to me, 'What do you want to be
doing? Because you clearly don't want to be here,' " Howell
said. "I told him, 'I want to be sitting in a room working on
a better non-fat pudding.' "
The second team was headed by Barb Stuckey, an executive
vice-president of marketing at Mattson and one of the
firm's stars. She is slender and sleek, with short blond hair. She
tends to think out loud, and, because she thinks
quickly, she ends up talking quickly, too--in nervous brilliant
bursts. Stuckey, Gundrum decided, would represent
"managed" research and development--a traditional hierarchical
team, as opposed to a partnership like Dea and
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Howell's. She would work with Doug Berg, who runs one of
Mattson's product-development teams. Stuckey would
draw the big picture. Berg would serve as sounding board and
project director. His team would execute their
conceptions.
Then Gundrum was at a technology conference in California and
heard the software pioneer Mitch Kapor talking
about the open-source revolution. Afterward, Gundrum
approached Kapor. "I said to Mitch, 'What do you think? Can I

apply this--some of the same principles--outside of software and
bring it to the food industry?' " Gundrum recounted.
"He stopped and said, 'Why the hell not!' " So Gundrum invited
an elite group of food-industry bakers and scientists to
collaborate online. They would be the third team. He signed up
a senior person from Mars, Inc., someone from R. &
D. at Kraft, the marketing manager for Nestle Toll House
refrigerated/frozen cookie dough, a senior director of R. & D.
at Birds Eye Foods, the head of the innovation program for
Kellogg's Morning Foods, the director of seasoning at
McCormick, a cookie maven formerly at Keebler, and six more
high-level specialists. Mattson's innovation manager,
Carol Borba, who began her career as a line cook at Bouley, in
Manhattan, was given the role of project manager.
Two Mattson staffers were assigned to carry out the group's
recommendations. This was the Dream Team. It is quite
possible that this was the most talented group of people ever to
work together in the history of the food industry.
Soon after the launch of Project Delta, Steve Gundrum and his
colleague Samson Hsia were standing around, talking
about the current products in the supermarket which they
particularly admire. "I like the Uncrustable line from
Smuckers," Hsia said. "It's a frozen sandwich without any crust.
It eats very well. You can put it in a lunchbox frozen,
and it will be unfrozen by lunchtime." Hsia is a trim, silver-
haired man who is said to know as much about emulsions
as anyone in the business. "There's something else," he said,
suddenly. "We just saw it last week. It's made by
Jennie-O. It's turkey in a bag." This was a turkey that was
seasoned, plumped with brine, and sold in a heat-resistant
plastic bag: the customer simply has to place it in the oven.
Hsia began to stride toward the Mattson kitchens,
because he realized they actually had a Jennie-O turkey in the
back. Gundrum followed, the two men weaving their
way through the maze of corridors that make up the Mattson

offices. They came to a large freezer. Gundrum pulled
out a bright-colored bag. Inside was a second, clear bag, and
inside that bag was a twelve-pound turkey. "This is one
of my favorite innovations of the last year," Gundrum said, as
Hsia nodded happily. "There is material science
involved. There is food science involved. There is positioning
involved. You can take this thing, throw it in your oven,
and people will be blown away. It's that good. If I was
Butterball, I'd be terrified."
Jennie-O had taken something old and made it new. But where
had that idea come from? Was it a team? A
committee? A lone turkey genius? Those of us whose only
interaction with such innovations is at the point of sale
have a naive faith in human creativity; we suppose that a world
capable of coming up with turkey in a bag is capable
of coming up with the next big thing as well--a healthy cookie,
a faster computer chip, an automobile engine that gets
a hundred miles to the gallon. But if you're the one responsible
for those bright new ideas there is no such certainty.
You come up with one great idea, and the process is so
miraculous that all you do is puzzle over how on earth you
ever did it, and worry whether you'll ever be able to do it again.
T he Mattson kitchens are a series of large, connecting rooms,
running along the back of the building. There is a pilot
plant in one corner--containing a mini version of the equipment
that, say, Heinz would use to make canned soup, a
soft-serve ice-cream machine, an industrial-strength pasta-
maker, a colloid mill for making oil-and-water emulsions, a
flash pasteurizer, and an eighty-five-thousand-dollar Japanese-
made coextruder for, among other things, pastry-and-
filling combinations. At any given time, the firm may have as
many as fifty or sixty projects under way, so the kitchens
are a hive of activity, with pressure cookers filled with baked
beans bubbling in one corner, and someone rushing

from one room to another carrying a tray of pizza slices with
experimental toppings.
Dea and Howell, the XP team, took over part of one of the
kitchens, setting up at a long stainless-steel lab bench.
The countertop was crowded with tins of flour, a big white
plastic container of wheat dextrin, a dozen bottles of liquid
sweeteners, two plastic bottles of Kirkland olive oil, and,
somewhat puzzlingly, three varieties of single-malt Scotch.
The Project Delta brief was simple. All cookies had to have
fewer than a hundred and thirty calories per serving.
Carbohydrates had to be under 17.5 grams, saturated fat under
two grams, fibre more than one gram, protein more
than two grams, and so on; in other words, the cookie was to be
at least fifteen per cent superior to the supermarket
average in the major nutritional categories. To Dea and Howell,
that suggested oatmeal, and crispy, as opposed to
soft. "I've tried lots of cookies that are sold as soft and I never
like them, because they're trying to be something that
they're not," Dea explained. "A soft cookie is a fresh cookie,
and what you are trying to do with soft is be a fresh
cookie that's a month old. And that means you need to fake the
freshness, to engineer the cookie."
The two decided to focus on a kind of oatmeal-chocolate-chip
hybrid, with liberal applications of roasted soy nuts,
toffee, and caramel. A straight oatmealraisin cookie or a
straight low-cal chocolate-chip cookie was out of the
question. This was a reflection of what might be called the
Hidden Valley Ranch principle, in honor of a story that
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Samson Hsia often told about his years working on salad
dressing when he was at Clorox. The couple who owned
Hidden Valley Ranch, near Santa Barbara, had come up with a
seasoning blend of salt, pepper, onion, garlic, and
parsley flakes that was mixed with equal parts mayonnaise and
buttermilk to make what was, by all accounts, an
extraordinary dressing. Clorox tried to bottle it, but found that
the buttermilk could not coexist, over any period of time,
with the mayonnaise. The way to fix the problem, and preserve
the texture, was to make the combination more
acidic. But when you increased the acidity you ruined the
flavor. Clorox's food engineers worked on Hidden Valley
Ranch dressing for close to a decade. They tried different kinds
of processing and stability control and endless cycles
of consumer testing before they gave up and simply came out
with a high-acid Hidden Valley Ranch dressing--which
promptly became a runaway best-seller. Why? Because
consumers had never tasted real Hidden Valley Ranch
dressing, and as a result had no way of knowing that what they
were eating was inferior to the original. For those in
the food business, the lesson was unforgettable: if something
was new, it didn't have to be perfect. And, since
healthful, indulgent cookies couldn't be perfect, they had to be
new: hence oatmeal, chocolate chips, toffee, and
caramel.
Cookie development, at the Mattson level, is a matter of endless
iteration, and Dea and Howell began by baking
version after version in quick succession--establishing the
cookie size, the optimal baking time, the desired variety of
chocolate chips, the cut of oats (bulk oats? rolled oats? groats?),
the varieties of flour, and the toffee dosage, while
testing a variety of high-tech supplements, notably inulin, a
fibre source derived from chicory root. As they worked,

they made notes on tablet P.C.s, which gave them a running
electronic record of each version. "With food, there's a
large circle of pretty good, and we're solidly in pretty good,"
Dea announced, after several intensive days of baking. A
tray of cookies was cooling in front of him on the counter.
"Typically, that's when you take it to the customers."
In this case, the customer was Gundrum, and the next week
Howell marched over to Gundrum's office with two
Ziploc bags of cookies in his hand. There was a package of
Chips Ahoy! on the table, and Howell took one out.
"We've been eating these versus Chips Ahoy!," he said.
The two cookies looked remarkably alike. Gundrum tried one of
each. "The Chips Ahoy!, it's tasty," he said. "When
you eat it, the starch hydrates in your mouth. The XP doesn't
have that same granulated-sugar kind of mouth feel."
"It's got more fat than us, though, and subsequently it's shorter
in texture," Howell said. "And so, when you break it, it
breaks more nicely. Ours is a little harder to break."
By "shorter in texture," he meant that the cookie "popped" when
you bit into it. Saturated fats are solid fats, and give
a cookie crispness. Parmesan cheese is short-textured. Brie is
long. A shortbread like a Lorna Doone is a classic
short-textured cookie. But the XP cookie had, for health
reasons, substituted unsaturated fats for saturated fats, and
unsaturated fats are liquid. They make the dough stickier, and
inevitably compromise a little of that satisfying pop.
"The whole-wheat flour makes us a little grittier, too," Howell
went on. "It has larger particulates." He broke open one
of the Chips Ahoy!. "See how fine the grain is? Now look at one
of our cookies. The particulates are larger. It is part
of what we lose by going with a healthy profile. If it was just

sugar and flour, for instance, the carbohydrate chains are
going to be shorter, and so they will dissolve more quickly in
your mouth. Whereas with more fibre you get longer
carbohydrate chains and they don't dissolve as quickly, and you
get that slightly tooth-packing feel."
"It looks very wholesome, like something you would want to
feed your kids," Gundrum said, finally. They were still
only in the realm of pretty good.
Team Stuckey, meanwhile, was having problems of its own.
Barb Stuckey's first thought had been a tea cookie, or,
more specifically, a chai cookie--something with cardamom and
cinnamon and vanilla and cloves and a soft dairy
note. Doug Berg was dispatched to run the experiment. He and
his team did three or four rounds of prototypes. The
result was a cookie that tasted, astonishingly, like a cup of chai,
which was, of course, its problem. Who wanted a
cookie that tasted like a cup of chai? Stuckey called a meeting
in the Mattson trophy room, where samples of every
Mattson product that has made it to market are displayed. After
everyone was done tasting the cookies, a bag of
them sat in the middle of the table for forty-five minutes--and
no one reached to take a second bite. It was a bad sign.
"You know, before the election Good Housekeeping had this
cookie bakeoff," Stuckey said, as the meeting ended.
"Laura Bush's entry was full of chocolate chips and had familiar
ingredients. And Teresa Heinz went with pumpkin-
spice cookies. I remember thinking, That's just like the
Democrats! So not mainstream! I wanted her to win. But she's
chosen this cookie that's funky and weird and out of the box.
And I kind of feel the same way about the tea cookie.
It's too far out, and will lose to something that's more
comfortable for consumers."

Stuckey's next thought involved strawberries and a shortbread
base. But shortbread was virtually impossible under
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the nutritional guidelines: there was no way to get that smooth
butter-flour-sugar combination. So Team Stuckey
switched to something closer to a strawberry-cobbler cookie,
which had the Hidden Valley Ranch advantage that no
one knew what a strawberry-cobbler cookie was supposed to
taste like. Getting the carbohydrates down to the
required 17.5 grams, though, was a struggle, because of how
much flour and fruit cobbler requires. The obvious
choice to replace the flour was almonds. But nuts have high
levels of both saturated and unsaturated fat. "It became
a balancing act," Anne Cristofano, who was doing the bench
work for Team Stuckey, said. She baked batch after
batch, playing the carbohydrates (first the flour, and then
granulated sugar, and finally various kinds of what are
called sugar alcohols, low-calorie sweeteners derived from
hydrogenizing starch) against the almonds. Cristofano
took a version to Stuckey. It didn't go well.
"We're not getting enough strawberry impact from the fruit
alone," Stuckey said. "We have to find some way to boost
the strawberry." She nibbled some more. "And, because of the
low fat and all that stuff, I don't feel like we're getting
that pop."
The Dream Team, by any measure, was the overwhelming
Project Delta favorite. This was, after all, the Dream

Team, and if any idea is ingrained in our thinking it is that the
best way to solve a difficult problem is to bring the
maximum amount of expertise to bear on it. Sure enough, in the
early going the Dream Team was on fire. The
members of the Dream Team did not doggedly fix on a single
idea, like Dea and Howell, or move in fits and starts
from chai sugar cookies to strawberry shortbread to strawberry
cobbler, like Team Stuckey. It came up with thirty-four
ideas, representing an astonishing range of cookie philosophies:
a chocolate cookie with gourmet cocoa, high-end
chocolate chips, pecans, raisins, Irish steel-cut oats, and the
new Ultragrain White Whole Wheat flour; a bite-size
oatmeal cookie with a Ceylon cinnamon filling, or chili and
tamarind, or pieces of dried peaches with a cinnamon-and-
ginger dusting; the classic seven-layer bar with oatmeal instead
of graham crackers, coated in chocolate with a
choice of coffee flavors; a "wellness" cookie, with an oatmeal
base, soy and whey proteins, inulin and oat beta glucan
and a combination of erythritol and sugar and sterol esters--and
so on.
In the course of spewing out all those new ideas, however, the
Dream Team took a difficult turn. A man named J.
Hugh McEvoy (a.k.a. Chef J.), out of Chicago, tried to take
control of the discussion. He wanted something exotic--
not a health-food version of something already out there. But in
the e-mail discussions with others on the team his
sense of what constituted exotic began to get really exotic --
"Chinese star anise plus fennel plus Pastis plus dark
chocolate." Others, emboldened by his example, began talking
about a possible role for zucchini or wasabi peas.
Meanwhile, a more conservative faction, mindful of the Project
Delta mandate to appeal to the whole family, started
talking up peanut butter. Within a few days, the tensions were
obvious:

From: Chef J., Subject: <no subject>, Please keep in mind
that less than 10 years ago, espresso, latte and dulce
de leche were exotic flavors / products dhat were considered
unsuitable for the mainstream., And let's not even
mention chipotle.
From: Andy Smith, Subject: Bought any Ben and Jerry's
recently?, While we may not want to invent another Oreo or
Chips Ahoy!, last I looked, World's Best Vanilla was B&J's # 2
selling flavor and Haagen Dazs' Vanilla (their top seller)
outsold Dulce 3 to 1.
From: Chef J., Subject: <no subject>, Yes. Gourmet
Vanilla does outsell any new flavor. But we must remember
that diet vanilla does not and never has. It is the high end,
gourmet segment of ice cream that is growing. Diet Oreos
were vastly outsold by new entries like Snackwells. Diet
Snickers were vastly outsold by new entries like balance
bars. New Coke failed miserably, while Red Bull is still
growing., What flavor is Red Bull, anyway?
Eventually, Carol Borba, the Dream Team project leader, asked
Gundrum whether she should try to calm things
down. He told her no; the group had to find its "own kind of
natural rhythm." He wanted to know what fifteen high-
powered bakers thrown together on a project felt like, and the
answer was that they felt like chaos. They took twice
as long as the XP team. They created ten times the headache.
Worse, no one in the open-source group seemed to be having
any fun. "Quite honestly, I was expecting a bit more
involvement in this," Howard Plein, of Edlong Dairy Flavors,
confessed afterward. "They said, expect to spend half an
hour a day. But without doing actual bench work--all we were
asked to do was to come up with ideas." He wanted to
bake: he didn't enjoy being one of fifteen cogs in a machine. To

Dan Fletcher, of Kellogg's, "the whole thing spun in
place for a long time. I got frustrated with that. The number of
people involved seemed unwieldy. You want some
diversity of youth and experience, but you want to keep it close-
knit as well. You get some depth in the process
versus breadth. We were a mile wide and an inch deep." Chef J.,
meanwhile, felt thwarted by Carol Borba; he felt that
she was pushing her favorite, a caramel turtle, to the detriment
of better ideas. "We had the best people in the
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country involved," he says. "We were irrelevant. That's the
weakness of it. Fifteen is too many. How much true input
can any one person have when you are lost in the crowd?" In the
end, the Dream Team whittled down its thirty-four
possibilities to one: a chewy oatmeal cookie, with a pecan
"thumbprint" in the middle, and ribbons of caramel-and-
chocolate glaze. When Gundrum tasted it, he had nothing but
praise for its "cookie hedonics." But a number of the
team members were plainly unhappy with the choice. "It is not
bad," Chef J. said. "But not bad doesn't win in the food
business. There was nothing there that you couldn't walk into a
supermarket and see on the shelf. Any Pepperidge
Farm product is better than that. Any one."
It may have been a fine cookie. But, since no single person
played a central role in its creation, it didn't seem to
anyone to be a fine cookie.
The strength of the Dream Team--the fact that it had so many

smart people on it--was also its weakness: it had too
many smart people on it. Size provides expertise. But it also
creates friction, and one of the truths Project Delta
exposed is that we tend to overestimate the importance of
expertise and underestimate the problem of friction. Gary
Klein, a decision-making consultant, once examined this issue
in depth at a nuclear power plant in North Carolina. In
the nineteen-nineties, the power supply used to keep the reactor
cool malfunctioned. The plant had to shut down in a
hurry, and the shutdown went badly. So the managers brought in
Klein's consulting group to observe as they ran
through one of the crisis rehearsals mandated by federal
regulators. "The drill lasted four hours," David Klinger, the
lead consultant on the project, recalled. "It was in this big
operations room, and there were between eighty and
eighty-five people involved. We roamed around, and we set up a
video camera, because we wanted to make sense
of what was happening."
When the consultants asked people what was going on, though,
they couldn't get any satisfactory answers. "Each
person only knew a little piece of the puzzle, like the radiation
person knew where the radiation was, or the
maintenance person would say, 'I'm trying to get this valve
closed,' " Klinger said. "No one had the big picture. We
started to ask questions. We said, 'What is your mission?' And if
the person didn't have one, we said, 'Get out.' There
were just too many people. We ended up getting that team down
from eighty-five to thirty-five people, and the first
thing that happened was that the noise in the room was
dramatically reduced." The room was quiet and calm enough
so that people could easily find those they needed to talk to. "At
the very end, they had a big drill that the N.R.C. was
going to regulate. The regulators said it was one of their hardest
drills. And you know what? They aced it." Was the
plant's management team smarter with thirty-five people on it

than it was with eighty-five? Of course not, but the
expertise of those additional fifty people was more than
cancelled out by the extra confusion and noise they created.
The open-source movement has had the same problem. The
number of people involved can result in enormous
friction. The software theorist Joel Spolsky points out that
open-source software tends to have user interfaces that
are difficult for ordinary people to use: "With Microsoft
Windows, you right-click on a folder, and you're given the
option to share that folder over the Web. To do the same thing
with Apache, the open-source Web server, you've got
to track down a file that has a different name and is stored in a
different place on every system. Then you have to edit
it, and it has its own syntax and its own little programming
language, and there are lots of different comments, and
you edit it the first time and it doesn't work and then you edit it
the second time and it doesn't work."
Because there are so many individual voices involved in an
open-source project, no one can agree on the right way
to do things. And, because no one can agree, every possible
option is built into the software, thereby frustrating the
central goal of good design, which is, after all, to understand
what to leave out. Spolsky notes that almost all the
successful open-source products have been attempts to clone
some preexisting software program, like Microsoft's
Internet Explorer, or Unix. "One of the reasons open source
works well for Linux is that there isn't any real design
work to be undertaken," he says. "They were doing what we
would call chasing tail-lights." Open source was great for
a science project, in which the goals were clearly defined and
the technical hurdles easily identifiable. Had Project
Delta been a Cool Whip bakeoff, an exercise in chasing tail-
lights, the Dream Team would easily win. But if you want
to design a truly innovative software program--or a truly

innovative cookie--the costs of bigness can become
overwhelming.
In the frantic final weeks before the bakeoff, while the Dream
Team was trying to fix a problem with crumbling, and hit
on the idea of glazing the pecan on the face of the cookie, Dea
and Howell continued to make steady, incremental
improvements.
"These cookies were baked five days ago," Howell told
Gundrum, as he handed him a Ziploc bag. Dea was off
somewhere in the Midwest, meeting with clients, and Howell
looked apprehensive, stroking his goatee nervously as
he stood by Gundrum's desk. "We used wheat dextrin, which I
think gives us some crispiness advantages and some
shelf-stability advantages. We have a little more vanilla in this
round, which gives you that brown, rounding
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background note."
Gundrum nodded. "The vanilla is almost like a surrogate for
sugar," he said. "It potentiates the sweetness."
"Last time, the leavening system was baking soda and baking
powder," Howell went on. "I switched that to baking
soda and monocalcium phosphate. That helps them rise a little
bit better. And we baked them at a slightly higher
temperature for slightly longer, so that we drove off a little bit
more moisture."

"How close are you?" Gundrum asked.
"Very close," Howell replied.
Gundrum was lost in thought for a moment. "It looks very
wholesome. It looks like something you'd want to feed your
kids. It has very good aroma. I really like the texture. My guess
is that it eats very well with milk." He turned back to
Howell, suddenly solicitous. "Do you want some milk?"
Meanwhile, Barb Stuckey had a revelation. She was working on
a tortilla-chip project, and had bags of tortilla chips
all over her desk. "You have no idea how much engineering
goes into those things," she said, holding up a tortilla
chip. "It's greater than what it takes to build a bridge. It's
crazy." And one of the clever things about cheese tortilla
chips--particularly the low-fat versions--is how they go about
distracting the palate. "You know how you put a chip in
your mouth and the minute it hits your tongue it explodes with
flavor?" Stuckey said. "It's because it's got this topical
seasoning. It's got dried cheese powders and sugar and probably
M.S.G. and all that other stuff on the outside of the
chip."
Her idea was to apply that technique to strawberry cobbler--to
take large crystals of sugar, plate them with citric acid,
and dust the cookies with them. "The minute they reach your
tongue, you get this sweet-and-sour hit, and then you
crunch into the cookie and get the rest--the strawberry and the
oats," she said. The crystals threw off your taste buds.
You weren't focussed on the fact that there was half as much fat
in the cookie as there should be. Plus, the citric acid
brought a tangy flavor to the dried strawberries: suddenly they
felt fresh.

Batches of the new strawberry-cobbler prototype were ordered
up, with different formulations of the citric acid and the
crystals. A meeting was called in the trophy room. Anne
Cristofano brought two plastic bags filled with cookies.
Stuckey was there, as was a senior Mattson food technologist
named Karen Smithson, an outsider brought to the
meeting in an advisory role. Smithson, a former pastry chef,
was a little older than Stuckey and Cristofano, with an air
of self-possession. She broke the seal on the first bag, and took
a bite with her eyes half closed. The other two
watched intently.
"Umm," Smithson said, after the briefest of pauses. "That is
pretty darn good. And this is one of the healthy cookies?
I would not say, 'This is healthy.' I can't taste the trade-off."
She looked up at Stuckey. "How old are they?"
"Today," Stuckey replied.
"O.K. . . ." This was a complicating fact. Any cookie tastes
good on the day it's baked. The question was how it tasted
after baking and packaging and shipping and sitting in a
warehouse and on a supermarket shelf and finally in
someone's cupboard.
"What we're trying to do here is a shelf-stable cookie that will
last six months," Stuckey said. "I think we're better off if
we can make it crispy."
Smithson thought for a moment. "You can have either a crispy,
low-moisture cookie or a soft and chewy cookie," she
said. "But you can't get the outside crisp and the inside chewy.
We know that. The moisture will migrate. It will
equilibrate over time, so you end up with a cookie that's
consistent all the way through. Remember we did all that
work on Mrs. Fields? That's what we learned."

They talked for a bit, in technical terms, about various kinds of
sugars and starches. Smithson didn't think that the
stability issue was going to be a problem.
"Isn't it compelling, visually?" Stuckey blurted out, after a lull
in the conversation. And it was: the dried-strawberry
chunks broke though the surface of the cookie, and the tiny
citric-sugar crystals glinted in the light. "I just think you
get so much more bang for the buck when you put the seasoning
on the outside."
"Yet it's not weird," Smithson said, nodding. She picked up
another cookie. "The mouth feel is a combination of chewy
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and crunchy. With the flavors, you have the caramelized sugar,
the brown-sugar notes. You have a little bit of a chew
from the oats. You have a flavor from the strawberry, and it
helps to have a combination of the sugar alcohol and the
brown sugar. You know, sugars have different deliveries, and
sometimes you get some of the sweetness right off and
some of it continues on. You notice that a lot with the artificial
sweeteners. You get the sweetness that doesn't go
away, long after the other flavors are gone. With this one, the
sweetness is nice. The flavors come together at the
same time and fade at the same time, and then you have the
little bright after-hits from the fruit and the citric
crunchies, which are"--she paused, looking for the right word--
"brilliant."

The bakeoff took place in April. Mattson selected a
representative sample of nearly three hundred households from
around the country. Each was mailed bubble-wrapped packages
containing all three entrants. The vote was close but
unequivocal. Fourteen per cent of the households voted for the
XP oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookie. Forty-one per cent
voted for the Dream Team's oatmeal-caramel cookie. Forty-four
per cent voted for Team Stuckey's strawberry
cobbler.
The Project Delta postmortem was held at Chaya Brasserie, a
French-Asian fusion restaurant on the Embarcadero,
in San Francisco. It was just Gundrum and Steven Addis, from
the first Project Delta dinner, and their wives. Dan
Howell was immersed in a confidential project for a big food
conglomerate back East. Peter Dea was working with
Cargill on a wellness product. Carol Borba was in Chicago, at a
meeting of the Food Marketing Institute. Barb
Stuckey was helping Ringling Brothers rethink the food at its
concessions. "We've learned a lot about the circus,"
Gundrum said. Meanwhile, Addis's firm had created a logo and
a brand name for Project Delta. Mattson has offered
to license the winning cookie at no cost, as long as a percentage
of its sales goes to a charitable foundation that
Mattson has set up to feed the hungry. Someday soon, you
should be able to go into a supermarket and buy Team
Stuckey's strawberry-cobbler cookie.
"Which one would you have voted for?" Addis asked Gundrum.
"I have to say, they were all good in their own way," Gundrum
replied. It was like asking a mother which of her
children she liked best. "I thought Barb's cookie was a little too
sweet, and I wish the open-source cookie was a little
tighter, less crumbly. With XP, I think we would have done

better, but we had a wardrobe malfunction. They used too
much batter, overbaked it, and the cookie came out too hard and
thick."
In the end, it was not so much which cookie won that interested
him. It was who won--and why. Three people from his
own shop had beaten a Dream Team, and the decisive edge had
come not from the collective wisdom of a large
group but from one person's ability to make a lateral connection
between two previously unconnected objects--a
tortilla chip and a cookie. Was that just Barb being Barb? In
large part, yes. But it was hard to believe that one of the
Dream Team members would not have made the same kind of
leap had they been in an environment quiet enough to
allow them to think.
"Do you know what else we learned?" Gundrum said. He was
talking about a questionnaire given to the voters. "We
were looking at the open-ended questions--where all the
families who voted could tell us what they were thinking.
They all said the same thing--all of them." His eyes grew wide.
"They wanted better granola bars and breakfast bars.
I would not have expected that." He fell silent for a moment,
turning a granola bar over and around in his mind,
assembling and disassembling it piece by piece, as if it were a
model airplane. "I thought that they were pretty good,"
he said. "I mean, there are so many of them out there. But
apparently people want them better."
MALCOLM GLADWELL
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gladwell, Malcolm. "THE BAKEOFF." The New Yorker, 5
Sept. 2005, p. 000. Academic ASAP,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A137759744/AIM?u=miam1

1506&sid=AIM&xid=d8ba2232. Accessed 25
Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A137759744
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CHAPTER 17
The Integral Nature of Worship and Evangelism
Paul W. Chilcote
When my family and I first arrived in
Mutare, Zimbabwe, in August 1992, the entire
southern region of Africa was experiencing one of
the worst droughts of the century. In spite
of the fact that our formal work was at Africa
University and the Old Mutare Centre, Janet
and I both felt called to do somethingto help
the many hungry people that surrounded
us. It
did not take us long to discover that widows and
children were starving within ten miles of
the university. Through our contacts with the church
we met Rev. Elisha Kabungaidze, pastor
of the Mundenda Circuit, with responsibility for
someseven churches in one of the hard-hit
areas. With the help of Elisha and a devoted
circle of lay leaders within his

congregations, we
began to identify the “poorest of the poor”
within the bounds of his wide-ranging parish.
Some were members of his churches; most were not.
We traveled throughout the area with
Elisha, delivering food and other items
basic to life. It was a humbling experience, but
through it all I rejoiced in the holistic vision
of evangelism and its integral connection
with
worship, embodied in this hardworking servant of
God.
Each morning of worship/evangelism/mission began
with our group standing together in
a circle. We greeted one another with the name
of Christ. We prayed. One of our members
read the Word for the day. We sang. We prayed
somemore, and then we set out. We had the
privilege of walking from hut to hut with Elisha
and his parishioners, repeating the same
basic sign-act of love with him. Every day was truly
sacramental. As we approached a
homestead, Elisha would call out the names of
the family in his deep, resonant voice
and
exchange the traditional greetings. “Marara ere?”
“Did you sleep well through the night?”
“Tarara marara o.” “Yes. I slept well if
you slept well.” Elisha would explain to
the families
why we had come, for they were usually unaware of
our plans to visit.He would tell them we
knew that they had no food and that the love of
Jesus had moved us to do whatever we
could

to help them in their need. Often the
women would fall to the ground and weep,
and then
spring to their feet, dancing and singing the praises
of God. The Shona of Zimbabwe have a
saying: “If you can talk, you can sing. If you
can walk, you can dance.” And we had many
opportunities to witness and to practice both.
We always prayed together, and we almost
always sang a song as we departed. It was a
joyful song, a song of hope within the midst
of
suffering. More oftenthan not it was Makanaka Mambo
Jesu, makanaka Mambo Jesu; “Oh
how good is our greatchief, Jesus.”
Elisha livedout a model of evangelism — a
way of being in mission in the world —
that
struck me very deeply. His participation in God’s
mission reflects with integrity, I believe,
what Albert Outler once described as the trio of
dominical imperatives regarding evangelism,
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namely, heralding, martyrdom, and servanthood.1
Before Elisha did anything, he
acknowledged God’s presence and adored the Triune
One. Wherever he went, he announced
the gospel, the good news. He boldly proclaimed
the love of God for all people and pointed to
the Creator, Savior, and Sustainer he had come to
know through Jesus Christ. He provided
witness in the sense of living out his life in
solidarity with God’s people. He livedthe life of
a
servant, a life characterized by the ungrudging
outpouring of himself. When I asked
him on
one occasion where he had learned this winsome
way of life, he responded by saying, “I think
it is simply in my Methodist blood.”
Far from a partisan cry (hardly somethingI intend
here), I thinkElisha was directing us
to an essential principle, for surely, as the
Wesleys argued repeatedly, their effort was
simply
to rediscover “primitiveChristianity.” While never
using the language of “evangelism,” their
primary project was to emulate a pattern of

life in community that reflected the presence of
a
living Lord and a liberating/healing Spirit.2
Implicit in my narration of life in the shadow
of
Elisha is the integral nature of worship and
evangelism in the community of faith. I
don’t
know if Elisha could have distinguished
worship from evangelism in any sophisticated or
nuanced manner. In fact, I would submit to
you that the fullest possible integration of
doxology and disciple-making was the key to his
contagious faith. He lived what many
are
beginning to rediscover in post-Christian Western
cultures at this very time. In the past
decade or so, a growing number of church
leaders and scholars have begun to address the
connection between evangelism and worship, that
perennial question in all ages of renewal in
the life of the church.3 In such times as these,
spiritual fruit has always been abundant.
In relation to these monumental questions,
therefore, my proposal is rather modest. I
simply desire to explore the fundamental
relationship between worship and evangelism,
using the hymns and writings of Charles Wesley
(the neglected brother of the founder of
Methodism) as a vehicle for discovery.
I.
The terms “worship” and “evangelism” suffer from a
common malady. Theyboth defy simple

definition. Both can be defined so narrowly that
the profound nature of their significance is
lost; they can be defined so broadly that they come
to mean nothing. In common discourse
within the life of the church today, “worship”
can mean anything from the entirety of
the
Christian life to a set of praise music in
the context of the Christian assembly. Likewise,
“evangelism” can range in meaning from the specific
act of preaching the gospel to a group of
unchurched homeless men in an inner-city soup kitchen
to the entirety of the Christian faith.
Despite the importance of precision, I am
actually quitehappy, at this point, to leave
us in a
state of “happy ambiguity” with regard to
definition, because a part of this exercise is to
discern the interface of thesepractices in the life of
the church. Defining theseterms in too
narrow a fashion may blind us to their
broad-ranging application; applying only broad
strokes may obliterate the fascinating detail that
actually constitutes real life. While it will be
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important for me to establish some basic
parameters shortly — which I hope to
do more
descriptively than prescriptively — I think we do
well to start where Charles Wesley would
have begun, namely, in Scripture.
There are many biblical texts that leap
immediately to mind as we contemplate the
meaning of worship or the meaning of evangelism,
but one text jumps out at me as I reflect
upon the integral dynamic that links the two: Acts 2:46-
47.
Day by day, as they spent much time together in
the temple, they broke bread at home
and ate their food with glad and
generous hearts, praising God and having the
goodwill of all the people. And day by day
the Lord added to their number
those who were being saved.
However brief this description might be, it is a
fairly definitive portrait of life in Christ —
a life that directly links worship and evangelism.

True spiritual worship, as St. Paul made so
abundantly clear in Romans 12, has to do, in
fact, with every aspect of life. There can be
no
separationof worship or liturgy from the totality of
life as we really know it. Worship, in
this
broad sense then, is the grateful surrender of all
we are and all we have, a “living
sacrifice” of
praise and thanksgiving to the God of love who
has created all things and bears witness
with
our spirits that we are the children of God. It
is living in and for God and God’s way in
human history in all things. The ministry of
evangelism in this earliest Christian community,
the consequence of which was “the Lord adding to
their number day by day,” consisted of
spending time in the communalworship and praise of
God, sharing together the sacred gift
of food, and offering kindness and hospitality to
others. Just a few verses earlier in this
chapter, of course, Luke provides a little
more detail. “They devoted themselves to the
apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of
bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). There
was a certain specificity with regard to the
foundation of this evangelistic community in
Word and Sacrament. There was a peculiar
nature to the worship of God that they
practiced.
But all of this life together — including the
sharing of personal possessions so that no one
lacked the basicnecessities of life — was aimed
at living in and manifesting the reignof

God.
It is a cliché now to describe worship, and
more precisely liturgy, as “the work of the
people” and to thinkof evangelism in similar
fashion, not as the work of a single
individual,
but of “the whole people of God.” The purpose
of this corporate service — this shared labor
of love — is to form us in praise and engage
us in God’s mission. Charles Wesley seems
to
have learned early in life that worship/evangelism is
paideia — life-shaping instruction or
formation through action. For the earliest Christians —
like those we see in the Acts of the
Apostles — this classical Greek understanding of
discipline must have entailed all those
things that are done in the community of
faith that shape the whole person in her or
his
journey toward maturity in Christ. In this
process, however, nothing was more critical than
the words and actions of the liturgical assembly
that spilled over naturally into lifestyles of
good news in the world. True worship springs from
the heart, but worship (defined here in
the more narrow sense as the liturgy) also has
the potential to shape Christlike people who
become evangel-bearers for others.
The writer to the Hebrews uses the language of
paideia to describe a vision of the

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Christian life: “We had human parents to discipline
us, and we respected them … But [God]
disciplines us for our good, in order that
we may share his holiness” (Heb. 12:9-10). The
concept of a discipline that frees the human
spirit and leads the emancipated childof
God
into a life characterized by holiness of heart
and life clearly inspired the Wesleys. Charles
bears witness to the potency of the vision:
Loose me from the chains of sense,
Set me from the body free;
Draw with stronger influence
My unfettered soul to thee!

In me, Lord, thyself reveal,
Fill me with a sweet surprise;
Let me thee when waking feel,
Let me in thineimage rise.
Let me of thy life partake,
Thy own holiness impart;
O that I might sweetly wake
With my Saviour in my heart!
O that I might know thee mine!
O that I might thee receive!
Only live the life divine!
Only to thy glory live!4
Authentic evangelism both reflects and creates an
“O that I might …” modus operandi in
life
and a desire to praise God in all things. So
orthodoxy — the right praise of God —
involves a
joyful obedience and a daring surrender. It
is not too much to say that the evangelistic
ministry of the community of faith and the
worship of the assembly — and specifically
the
liturgy — shape us in such a way that
we believe in God (faith), desire nothing but
God
(love), and glorify God by offering our lives fully to
Christ (holiness).

St. Paul places this concept at the center of
his admonition to Christian parents in
Ephesians 6:4, where he commands them to
bring up their children “in the discipline
and
instruction of the Lord.” Charles picks up
this theme in one of his “family hymns”
and refers
to this process — in a profoundly evangelistic
turn of phrase — as a means to “draw
their
soulsto God.”5 In a hymn written for the
opening of the Methodist School in Kingwoodhe
expands the image:
Come, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
To whom we for our children cry!
The good desired and wanted most
Out of thy richest grace supply —
The sacred discipline be given
To train and bring them up for heaven.
Answer on them the end of all
Our cares, and pains, and studies here;
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On them, recovered from their fall,
Stamped with the humble character,
Raised by the nurture of the Lord,
To all their paradise restored.6
The more famous fifth stanza of the hymn
articulates the holistic nature of this
integrative, formational process:
Unite the pair so long disjoined,
Knowledge and vital piety:
Learning and holiness combined,
And truth and love, let all men see
In those whom up to thee we give,
Thine, wholly thine, to die and live.
My contention here is quite simple. I believe
that the Wesleys viewed the liturgy of the

church — doxological evangelism, if you will —
as the primary matrix in which this nurture
raised and restored the children of God, both those
inside, and potentially those outside the
household of faith. Through Word and Sacrament,
God sets us on our journey of faith, offers
us spiritual nourishment, and provides the necessary
guidance for us to find our way home,
especially when we require the perennial reminder
that home is wherever God’s reign is
realized in the life of the world.
II.
Another biblical text, I believe, affords a
provisional lens through which to explore the
integral nature of evangelism and worship.7 In
an effort to flesh out the foundational
concepts of worship/evangelism as doxology and
discipline I want to import a motif that is
not without some dangers, but I find it helpful
in exegeting the Wesleyan tradition
nonetheless. I refer to the so-called “Isaiah
motif ” drawn from the call of the
prophet in
Isaiah 6:1-8, a pattern at one time fashionable
for ordering the various acts of Christian
worship and also explicating the evangelistic call to
mission. A reminder of the text might
prove helpful:
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the LORD
sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and
the hem of his robe filled the
temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him;
each had six wings: with two they covered their

faces, and with two they
covered their feet, and with two they flew.And one called
to another and said:
“Holy, holy,holy is the LORD of hosts:
the whole earthis full of his glory.”
The pivots on the thresholdsshook at the voices
of those who called, and the house filled
with smoke. And I said: “Woe is
me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean
lips, and I live among a people of unclean
lips; yet my eyes have seen the King,
the LORD of hosts!” Then one of the seraphs
flew to me, holding a live coal that had been
taken from the altar with a pair
of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it
and said: “Now that this has touched your lips,
your guilt has departed
and your sin is blotted out.” Then I heard the
voice of the LORD saying, “Whom shall I
send, and who will go for us?”
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And I said, “Here am I; send me!”
The paradigm embedded in this narrative involves, at
least, a fivefold progression:
1) Adoration: “Holy, holy,holy is the LORD of
hosts,” moves the worshiper to
2) Confession: “Woe is me!” to
3) Forgiveness: “your guilt has departed and your
sin is blotted out,” and through
4) Proclamation: “Then I heard the voice of
the LORD saying,” to final
5) Dedication: “Here am I; send me!”
While thereis an abiding truth in this sequence of
devotion, it is dangerous to transpose it
mechanically either into worship or the practice of
evangelism.8 It is always important to
remember that the inbreaking Word gives and
sustains life. At times God acts unpredictably.
There is also a potential danger, I want to
admit, in mechanically imposing this structure
upon the Wesleys. But while it is artificial to
choreograph God’s presence and movementor
to plot these serially in a service of
worship or in a strategy of evangelism, much
less to

squeeze Wesley into this mold, there is a
certain “evangelical” logic in the Isaiah
motif that
resonates with a Wesleyan understanding of the
divine/human encounter. I thinkthis is well
worth exploring. So permit me to examine
briefly these specific dimensions of Isaiah’s
theophany.
Adoration
The Isaiah narrative opens with an overwhelming
sense of awe, majesty, and wonder. Our
first response to God is acknowledgment of whom
it is we worship.9 The good news about
God only becomes intelligible in this posture.
Virtually every day of Charles Wesley’s life
began with Morning Prayer, including the words of
the ancient prayer of praise, the Te
Deum:
We praise thee, O God: we acknowledge thee to be
the Lord. All the earthdoth worship thee, the
Father everlasting. To
thee all Angels cry aloud: the Heavens, and all
the powers therein. To thee Cherubim and
Seraphim continually do cry,
Holy, holy,holy,Lord God of Sabaoth; Heaven and
Earth are full of the Majesty of thy Glory.
In the 1780 Collection of Hymns for the Use of
the People called Methodists, Wesley alludes
to
the Isaian Sanctus in at least four hymns:
Meet and right it is to sing,

In every time and place,
Glory to our heavenly King,
The God of truth and grace.
Join we then with sweet accord,
All in one thanksgiving join:
Holy, holy,holy,Lord,
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Eternal praise be thine!10
Selectionsdrawn from his earlier collection of Hymns
on the Trinity emphasize the awe

with which one should approach God and the glory
of God’s tremendous and mysterious
majesty:
Holy, holy,holy Lord,
God the Father and the Word,
God the Comforter, receive
Blessing more than we can give!
Thee while dust and ashes sings,
Angels shrink within their wings;
Prostrate Seraphim above
Breathe unutterable love.
Fain with them our soulswould vie,
Sink as low, and mount as high;
Fall, o’erwhelmed with love, or soar,
Shout, or silently adore!
“All honor and glory to Jesus alone!” Charles
cries, as he stands in beatific rapture
coram Deo
— before a “universe filled with the glory of
God.”11 It is the radiance of God’s nature,
revealed most fully in the dual graces of
creation and redemption, that overtakes the
awestruck child:
Th’o’erwhelming power of saving grace,
The sight that veils the seraph’s face,
The speechless awe that dares not move,
And all the silent heaven of love!12
Little wonder that one of the most memorable
lines in all of Charles Wesley’s verses

concludes his greathymn to love:“Lost in
wonder, love, and praise.” Is this not where
true
worship, where faithful evangelism, must always
begin; in this posture?
Repentance and Forgiveness
The prophet can only respond: “Woe is me! I
am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips,
and I
live among a people of unclean lips!” When
we contemplate our own lives in relation to
this
God — or compare them with the life of Jesus
— we are overwhelmed, as well, by our
inadequacy, our brokenness, our fallen condition. In
the Wesleyan tradition, repentance is a
paramount concern because it strikes at the
very heart of salvation. Confession and
forgiveness are central to the Christian view of
what it is we need to be saved from and
what it
is we need to be saved into. For Charles, no
less than for his brother, salvation is both legal
and therapeutic; it is related both to Christ’s
redemptive work for us and the Spirit’s
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transforming work in us; it revolves around
freedom from sin and freedom to love.
Repentance is like the threshold of a door that
opens the way to our spiritual healing. It is
like
the first step in a journey that leadsus home.
Nowhere in Scripture is repentance and forgiveness
more poignantly expressed than in
Jesus’ parable of the lost childin Luke 15.
Stripped of dignity, value, and identity, the
critical
turning point for the estranged son in the story
comes with these important words, “But
when he came to himself …” Both John
and Charles define repentance as “true
self-
understanding.” The prodigal “came to himself.” In
the depth of his despair, he remembered
who he was and to whom he belonged.
Charles plays with this image in his sermon
on

Ephesians 5:14.As he turnsdirectly to the text itself,
he admonishes:
Wherefore, “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from
the dead.” God calleth thee by my mouth;
and bids thee know
thyself, thou fallen spirit, thy true state and only
concern below: “what meanest thou,O
sleeper? Arise! Call upon thy god
… that thou perish not.”13
For Charles, repentance signifies a true self-
knowledge that leads to contrition and total
reliance upon God’s pardoning mercy in Christ.
He employs this image in a hymn celebrating
God’s universal grace as it is made
manifest
in the context of the worshiping community of
God’s people:
Sinners, obey the gospel word!
Haste to the supper of my Lord;
Be wise to know your gracious day!
All things are ready; come away!
Ready the Father is to own
And kiss his late-returning son;
Ready your loving Saviour stands,
And spreads for you his bleeding hands.
The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
Are ready with their shining host;
All heaven is ready to resound:
“The dead’s alive! The lost is found.”14

In the successive stanzas Charles layers the
imagery of spiritual emotion elicited from the
struggle to know God and to entrust one’s
life to God: pardon, favor, peace; the seeing
eye,
the feeling sense, the mystic joys; godly
grief, pleasing smart; meltings, tears, sighs;
guiltless
shame, sweet distress, unutterable tenderness;
genuine meek humility, wonder.
A full paragraph from another of Charles Wesley’s
sermons is well worth quoting in its
entirety at this point. It is taken from his
sermon on 1 John 3:14,which Charles
preached at
least twenty-one times during 1738 and 1739,
just at the outset of the revival and as a
consequence of the brothers’ shared reawakening to
living faith. The sermon itself is a
depiction of the threestates of humanity, describing
those who do not know and do not seek
God, those who do not know but seekGod, and
those who know God. It is a compelling
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appeal to come to one’s self so as to
know God fully. Charles pleads:
“Therefore also now, saith the Lord, turn ye even to
me with all your heart, and with fasting and
with weeping, and with
mourning. And rend your hearts and not your
garments, and turn unto the Lord your God; for
he is gracious and
merciful, slow to anger and of greatkindness, and
repenteth him of the evil.” Oh that this infinite
goodness of God might
lead you to repentance! Oh that any one of you
would even now arise and go to his Father
and say unto him, “Father, I
have sinned against heaven and before thee, and
am no more worthy to be called thy son!”
He sees you now, while you
are a greatway off, and has compassion, and only
awaits your turning towards him, that he may
run and fall on your
neck and kiss you. Then will he say, “Bring forth the
best robe (even the robe of Christ’s
righteousness) and put it upon

him, for this my son was dead and is alive again; he
was lost and is found.”15
Charles Wesley understood that worship, in all of
its various dimensions, but particularly
in the liturgy of the people of God, has the
power to bring us into an awareness of
the Holy.
He also understood, it would seem, with Henri
Nouwen, that forgiveness is the name of
love
in a wounded world. Acknowledgment and
confession bring healing. Forgiveness liberates
people from enslavement to sin through the
power of God’s love in Jesus Christ.
Liturgy
offers the gift of this divine forgiveness as
God comes to us in Christ with “healing in
his
wings.”16 Wesley realized that reconciliation and
restoration are only possible through the
intervention of God’s grace. That grace is
offered, first and foremost, he believed, in the
context of a worshiping community that
manifests the hospitality of God and proclaims
boldly to all:
His bleeding heartshall make you room,
His open side shall take you in.
He calls you now, invites you home —
Come, O my guilty brethren, come!17
Proclamation

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