ACROSS THE LINES - Archive (2006-2020)

The United Methodist Church was born in a specific time and place, in the mid-twentieth century in the United States of America. Protestant denominations were ascendant, and with them a brand of "ecumenism" that would only decades later be recognized by those who championed it as culturally bound to the white "mainline." Mergers were all the buzz, including the one that created the UMC in 1968, and Methodists embraced their new denomination as partial fulfillment of a dream of "Christian unity." As the historian Robert Handy noted in his wonderful little 1971 book,  A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities , leaders of the new denomination thought of it as "a kind of unofficial national church." Because they sat at the midpoint of mainline American Protestantism in so many respects -- ecclesial, theological, liturgical -- it was easy for them to assume that as all churches became one, pretty much everyone else would eventua

Methodism was born as a movement of renewal from within the Church of England. Its founders, the brothers John and Charles Wesley, understood their mission to be that of "raising up a holy people" and "spreading scriptural holiness over the land." Holiness was the “marrow” of the Bible, John Wesley argued, and he described his teaching about holiness as “the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists.” For the Wesley brothers, the basic task confronting ordinary Christians was that of "working out their own salvation," toward the end that they might  become more and more holy through the practices of Christian discipleship.  The Wesleys believed that eventually, the truly faithful might be "perfected in love," and they believed  the most likely place to find instances of such true holiness was at the end of life. For this reason the early generations of the Methodists made a practice not just of visiting the dyin