Saving Grace Conference

I went to a conference this weekend at Wesleyan Headquarters entitled "Saving Grace." The main topic of consideration was our doctrine of entire sanctification, although other issues popped up from time to time, including church membership, whether we were more a movement than a church, etc... This last possibility makes me laugh, not because it's a silly question but because I wonder if we should start petitioning various "churches" to ask if we can be a sectarian movement within them. How 'bout it Methodists?

If you want the Schenck summary, here's what I got out of it.

1. From Chris Bounds I learned that as long as we are to the "left" of the Keswicks, we're okay.

I mean "left" on his chart. If you don't know Bounds, his charts are to die for as a teacher. The rest of us watch his office closely when he is about to print some of them, then we all run in and photocopy them secretly before he comes to pick them up. Sometimes I wonder if he just lets them linger in the copy room to rub it in our faces--look what a better teacher I am than you all :>)

Then we secretly take them to our offices and study them. I have a special pile under my side desk for them. I study them so I can sound like I actually know what I'm talking about when I see Chris. "So Chris, I've been thinking a lot about Apollonarianism lately. Just how much of a heresy do you think it is?"

By the way, did I mention that he left for Russia today. So by the time he returns, this entry will be buried well beyond anything he's likely to read ;>)

Keswickians believe that we can be completely victorious over willful sin, but they believe it is a never ending struggle with our flesh. While we can be victorious over sin acts, we will never be free from our bent to sinning.

Bounds suggests that this position is not truly acceptable for an heir of Wesley. He suggests that a "Wesleyan" must believe that we can be free from the power of sin as well. Here he distinguished Phoebe Palmer's "shorter way" from what he called a "middle way" and what some of Palmer's day called a "longer way."

Palmer had a kind of "name it, claim it" approach to entire sanctification. Have it today. Wesley was sometimes more optimistic, sometimes less about when a person might have the experience. Bounds coined the phrase "middle way" of Wesley on his good days--the idea that you might have to wait some time after fully giving yourself to God before sanctification. The longer was is the idea that it might be just before death for most.

I could summarize Bounds' position as 1) definitely in this life and 2) sooner rather than later.

2. I personally culled from a couple other papers the idea that we need to take fully into account things like sins of omission, unintentional sins, and corporate sins/sanctification. These weren't main points of anyone or even main points of discussion, but it's my culling down of a bunch of stuff.

You can imagine that many things were said that were slightly off topic. Church membership is an important issue, but not exactly the topic of discussion. Next symposium they'll do ecclesiology. Isn't church membership what ecclesiology means?

There was a fine opening paper that left puzzled looks on the faces of many. Some wondered if he had simply reused an old paper that wasn't on topic, since he was supposed to talk about sin. What they didn't know is that they had pushed his buttons in the way they had assigned the topic, and he was doing it the "right" way.

He's a part of the trendy Trinitarian approach to theology that is all the rage. You can't start with humanity or the problem of sin, you have to start with God and the relationships between the Trinity. I've heard this approach used even with regard to husband-wife relationships--equal but with different roles. I just haven't decided yet whether my wife is the son or the Holy Spirit. Or maybe in some strange Freudian way I'm the son and she's the father?

On the other hand, I'll be using the word "capacious" a lot more than I was before.

3. Finally, a prominent pastor gave a helpful paper that suggested we should target the local church as the beach head of our Normandy invasion to reinfuse the church with holiness and holiness teaching. I agree.

He also argued that local pastors should become a Christian equivalent to Buddhist monks. I might note that he is probably the closest thing the Wesleyan Church has to a Buddhist monk :>) It will be a little more difficult for pastors without his personality and gifts, not to mention without a staff to free the pastor up for the requisite extended hours of prayer, spiritual discipline, and sermon preparation.

On the lighter side, I learned that pastors should be holy men. He is the first line of defense even though he is continually interrupted. He has to think on the run, shaped by the things he runs into. Several of us always tease about the way this pastor tends to tell everything from a guy's perspective. This one paragraph had fifteen "he's" in it :)

One funny moment was at a different point in the conference when the same pastor said we needed to write books not just for the universities but for the guy in the fourth row with his arm around some girl. I happened to be sitting next to a woman at the time and looked over to see a Cheshire grin on her face. He'd done it again.

"Of course, the girl might be able to read too," she said in low tones.

Well, no offence to any. If you were worried about the Wesleyan Church, worried that no one cared about holiness any more, worried that we didn't have anyone with a brain in our midst, don't worry... the future looks bright!

Final footnote: Mel Dieter is great. He was gracious enough to give us what he said would probably be his last major agreement to speak. He gave us precious memories that I hope someone is writing down.