2009 Fall All-Church Adult Study
BEING METHODIST: THE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES
If you’re like many people who are members/friends of United Methodist churches today, you may not know much about the founder of our denomination or it’s rich history. If someone were to ask you about the differences between Methodists and Lutherans, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, etc., would you have much to say?
To really get the most out of our 150th anniversary celebrations this fall, it’s important that we get beneath all the facts and figures, dates and events, to the deeper reasons of how God has used Methodism to touch and transform so many lives over these years, including our own.
We’re learning more and more about the particular history of our own congregation, beginning with Jacob Adriance, the 19th century Methodist circuit rider who got us started. But what was it about the Methodist form of Christianity that inspired him to risk the hazards of mission work at the edges of the American frontier in those days? Are some of these same things still vital for our faith journeys as 21st century persons? What other things need to be revised to be relevant to our time? And what things should simply be left behind as we enter the postmodern age? There are no easy answers.
We’ll be exploring these and other key questions in our six-week fall study/discussion class lead by Keith Thompson. There will be two identical sections of the class, starting the week of September 14; Monday evenings, 7:00-8:30 pm and Thursday afternoons, 1:00-2:30 pm.
We will be using Evangelism and Theology in the Wesleyan Spirit by Albert Outler as the main text. Both it and the other short resources we’ll use are available for purchase (discounted to $15) on Sunday mornings after worship or from the church office. You can also register for the class and pick up the reading assignments at the same time.
So sign up today! And put the dates on your calendar now! Discover more about how being “Methodist” has indeed made a difference for the staying power of FUMC Boulder in our first 150 years and how your continuing growth “as a Methodist” will get us off to a great start of the next 150 this December!
Is this class really worth your time??
Actually, yes! Here are just three of the many good reasons:
•First, it will give you a much deeper understanding of why you are attracted to the form of Christianity you experience here at FUMC—our kind of worship, music, preaching, teaching, fellowship, and social and ecological concerns as well as the way we relate to other Christians, other religions and secular persons, etc. In other words, you’ll feel even more “at home” here knowing how our unique heritage relates to the 2,000 years of Christianity in its other forms.
•Second, you’ll be learning about Wesley and Methodism from Albert Outler, a master of the subject and considered by many to be the premier Wesley scholar of the last century. Keith Thompson had the privilege of being his student at S.M.U. during the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Outler was a distinguished scholar, teaching at Yale, Duke and Southern Methodist Universities. He was also a committed church person, who served on the World Council of Churches and as one of the few Protestant observers at Vatican II, among many other significant positions.
•And third, the content of this little book written in the 1970s foresaw the decline of mainline churches and what it will take to renew them. Ezra Earl Jones says it well in the introduction to the new edition: “Today, I believe the ‘new’ is centered in a spiritual quest...Signs of spiritual renaissance are found everywhere. Other signs, however, indicate that many present-day major denominations continue on ‘activity quests’ rather than ‘spiritual quests.’
“John R. Mott saw this trend decades ago. His words were: ‘an alarming weakness among Christians is that we are producing Christian activities faster than we are producing Christian experience and Christian faith. The disciplining of our souls and the deepening of our acquaintance with God are not proving sufficiently thorough to enable us to meet the unprecedented expansion of opportunity and responsibility of our generation.’”
This class really has the potential of helping us experience the presence of God in our lives in ways that will speak to the increasing number of persons around us who have dropped out of institutional religion and consider themselves to be “spiritual, but not religious.” Check it out!