The dissonances are deafening.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe that at Calvary something was happening that changed the divine/human equation forever, but in a very different way. The point about sin is that it goes deeper than a dirty deed or a forgotten ritual. The word sin means ‘to miss the mark’, to be less than I am meant to be. If I am created supremely for relationship with God, then sin is much more than the breaking of some impersonal law; it is the breaking of a lover’s heart – God’s heart. It alienates me from the relationship that completes me as a truly human being. A whole raft of destructive actions may flow from this alienation, but the fundamental need remains the mending of the relationship.
I still remember my dad telling of the one-sentence sermon that Japanese Christian Toyohiko Kagawa15 used to preach over and over again on street corners in his native Kobe: “God is love – love like Jesus.” It was as if no more need be said. God was, in the Apostle Paul’s words: “… in Christ, reconciling the world to Godself.”16 If this is so, then on Calvary Jesus, far from being a robotic substitute slaking an angry God’s need for retribution, was instead revealing God’s real heart to the world – a heart of vulnerable love. The Calvary event was God, present in Jesus, suffering in Jesus, forgiving in Jesus and loving to the end in Jesus. What happened in that place, at that time, is timeless: it exposes what we do to God everywhere and always; it also reveals how far God will go for us everywhere and always. If this is so, then once I truly comprehend what my – and all humankind’s – ‘missing the mark’ does to infinite love, and see God’s willingness to suffer rather than stop loving, I find myself overwhelmed with gratitude and wanting to respond. “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”17
It was this kind of God who won me, a divine lover whose belief in me was infinitely more significant than my failing efforts at faith in (him), a God who would never give up on me or the world (he) so loved, a God who wooed rather than threatened, whose vulnerability was more winsome than (his) omnipotence, and who transformed me not through fear, but by the “expulsive power of a new affection.”18 And yes, this God came to me in the story of Jesus, who lived and died in exactly that way. His resurrection is a mystery I cannot fathom, but I do know that it was God saying a resounding “No!” to the power of death and an even more resounding “Yes!” to the Jesus kind of life. Nothing we humans are capable of can succeed in killing it off. It rises again and again and his Spirit continues to confront us with its ‘unutterable beauty’.19
It was the Methodist Church that nurtured me on this faith-journey. There is really no such thing as a ‘no name brand’ Christian. For better or worse, we find ourselves in communities with unique histories and traditions a little distinct from the others and emphasising slightly different dimensions of the faith. The Methodist Church has as many warts as any other, but I will always be grateful for certain of its emphases that were crucial in forming my faith priorities. It was born out of a spiritual renewal led by Reverend John Wesley and his brother Charles in the mid-eighteenth century. Loyal Church of England priests of considerable intellect and passion,20 they chafed under the dry hand of an institution in serious decline at the time. Too many clergy were lost in the shallow distractions of English classism and had lost touch with the poor masses. By contrast the Wesleys, with John as leader, were searching for a truly holy life and at Oxford University they joined a group of serious-minded seekers known as the ‘Holy Club’. Members held each other accountable for spiritual disciplines such as prayer, searching the Scriptures, regular attendance at worship and Holy Communion. However, the Holy Club differed from other such ‘pietist’ groups because of its equally rigorous practice of ‘works of mercy’. England’s poorest classes at the time lived in utter wretchedness and degradation and it was to these hurting people that Wesley and his comrades went, feeding the hungry, visiting debtors and condemned criminals in prison and aiding the sick and homeless. At Oxford their strict, methodical ways earned them the scornful nickname ‘Methodists’, and the name stuck. Methodism might have remained a fairly obscure movement had it not been for a powerful spiritual encounter which both John and Charles experienced within days of each other in May 1738. John’s famous phrase “I felt my heart strangely warmed within me” described an overwhelming sense of the grace and love of God flooding his life, accompanied by a deepened faith in Christ and a new attitude of forgiving love toward “those who had despitefully used me”.21 His experience in that London meeting house in Aldersgate Street set him free from the constraints of self-obsession and ignited a passionate concern to share this ‘awakening’ with others. His first attempts to do so in the comfortable confines of Oxford Christianity were underwhelming: he was accused of ‘enthusiasm’, something not to be tolerated by the cynical religious establishment of the day. He was marginalised by them but this rejection didn’t trouble him over much, because he was already becoming increasingly conscious of the call to focus on England’s poor.
He responded to that call with unparalleled passion. Within a year he was preaching in the open air and reaching great numbers of desperately poor people. We are able to follow the fortunes of the movement in detail because of his careful journaling. In the 53 years between the Aldersgate experience in 1738 and his death, Wesley preached an average of two or three times each day, the first being usually at 5 am. His travels on horseback through the British Isles totalled the equivalent of nine times around the world. He wrote 230 books and pamphlets and established hundreds of new ‘societies’ – groups of new Christians – and personally appointed some 10 000 ‘Class Leaders’ to watch over their growth. While remaining a renewal movement within the Church of England, the Methodists became a formidable spiritual force in the land. The break came around 1784 over the matter of ordaining preachers for the newly independent American colonies. Wesley had fine volunteers but couldn’t find a bishop willing to ordain them, so he did it himself and there was no going back. There are today some 70 million Methodists around the world.
They arrived in South Africa with a touch of civil disobedience. During the second British occupation of the Cape, some Methodist soldiers in the colonial garrison requested spiritual oversight and a Reverend Barnabas Shaw was sent from England in response. On his arrival in Cape Town in 1816 he was forbidden to preach by the British Governor but he went ahead anyway and the first Methodist or ‘Wesleyan’ chapels and churches began to be built. Large numbers of the 1820 Settlers were Methodists too, swelling the ranks of what was to ultimately become the Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA). The remarkable mission work of its first 150 years made it the largest multi-racial church in Southern Africa, 80% of its members being black. Certain Wesleyan emphases were to be crucial in developing the MCSA’s role in the South African story.
First was the all-ness of God’s grace. In Wesley’s day various forms of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination were rampant, claiming that a sovereign God had pre-determined people’s station in this life and their fate in the next, and there was nothing to be done about it. Wesley fought this tenaciously, insisting that “prevenient grace” – a primal memory of God as our soul’s true home – operated in all people. All could freely respond to the offer of wholeness in Christ and none, no matter how degraded, was excluded. There were often emotional scenes as he declared this message in the fields and marketplaces of England. The poor of the land could