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A new kind of Methodism

One of the things that the coronavirus pandemic has reminded us about is that we’ve been living in an age of ‘cheap grace’. Life was easy for most of us, most of the time. The bad things and the bad times were the exception, not the rule. So we took for granted foreign holidays, cheap food, convenient travel and gainful employment. That was the natural order of things and when it went awry it needed to be restored. Being a Christian, if we’re honest, was pretty easy. We had to remember our less fortunate neighbours and try to do something to help them, but for most of us, most of the time, life was fairly good. When tragedy struck we had to be ready to deal with it, if we could, but if we were lucky it might be long delayed.
We’re not the first people to live in an age of ‘cheap grace’. When Christianity first became the official religion its adherents had the same experience. They went overnight from being on the edge of society, not entirely respectable, persecuted even, to becoming part of the mainstream. Their leaders joined the elite, partly because the elite were quick to shower property and wealth on the Church and to send their younger sons and daughters to become priests and members of religious orders.
There were always some people who felt unhappy about this transformation, who still wanted grace to be costly and discipleship to be a struggle, because they believed that is what Jesus intended them to be. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted that the monastic life, and then even more so the life of travelling friars and orders of nuns committed to a life of poverty and renunciation, became a living protest against the softening and mainstreaming of Christianity.
That sort of protest has continued down the centuries. John Wesley is one example. He deliberately went outside of the comfort zone of respectable church worship and practice to become a new kind of travelling preacher, establishing small communities of like minded people across the country and reaching out to anyone who’d lost touch with traditional religion. The Taizé community in France, and the Iona and Lindisfarne communities in the UK are other well known examples, as are the so-called ‘base communities’ in Latin America.
The coronavirus has forced all of us out of our comfort zone. Traditional ways of being church don’t really work in a lockdown. Bonhoeffer was writing in another time of upheaval, when Christans were struggling to keep the faith under Nazi or Communist rule and many were again facing persecution. He said that ‘the restoration of the church will surely come only from a new type of monasticism, which has nothing in common with the old except for a complete lack of compromise.’ It will, he said, mean ‘a life lived in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount, in the discipleship of Christ.’ And he concluded,  ‘I think it is time to gather people together to do this.’
Perhaps the coronavirus is giving us a new, and less extreme, opportunity to do the same. Even before the pandemic, Roger Walton - our former District Chair - was working on a new type of Methodism, which also has nothing in common with the old type of Methodism except for a willingness to reconnect with people who’ve lost touch with traditional religion and to follow a life lived in accordance with Methodist principles.
He suggested what it might look like. Methodists would commit, as far as we’re able, to a personal discipline, a way of life, a Twenty-first Century sort of monasticism. We would become again a Movement rather than a Church. We would resolve to pray daily, to worship regularly and to look and listen for God each day. We would seek to learn more about God and God’s world, to practise friendship and care for others and ourselves, to honour creation and care for the environment, and to practise hospitality and generosity. This would mean being good neighbours to those in need, challenging injustice and seeking the common good. And finally it would mean witnessing, as John Wesley did, to the love of God in Jesus, speaking about faith to others, and helping each other to be better disciples.

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