Restoration

RESTORATION

FOCUS

Restoration is the result of

Repentance, Faith, and Holiness

producing 

love of God and love of neighbor.

Scripture:  Mark 8:25; Luke 6:10

William J. Abraham

[John Wesley] challenged the nominalism and complacency that are the sins of all establishments not with a liberal revisionism but by a radical retrieval of lost ideas and practices.

John Wesley

God design was . . .  not to form any new sect, but to reform the nation, particularly the Church, and to spread Scriptural holiness over the land.

Dr. W. T. Watkins – 1937

But what of the future? Shall we drift into a different destiny or rise up and accept the one God has prepared for us?  This is the supremely important question Methodism faces today.  We have a great Church, but have we lost some of the world-seizing impulse, some of the evil-challenging audacity, some of the God-embracing faith, some of the epoch-creating passion of early Methodism?

The authors discuss the three keys to restoration: Repentance, Faith, Holiness

The authors raise the question: “What is true religion?” and quote John Wesley who defines it biblical “ . . . loving God with all our heart, and our neighbor as ourselves.”

The last few pages represent a summation of what has already been presented in previous chapters.

One sentence found in this closing chapter is critical to understanding what we must do to inherit the future God has for us.  The authors state: 

“Restoration is going to take 
a new form of ministry,
not another 'Conference program.' 

We need old principals 
in a new formation.”
[149]

________________________________ 

MEM COMMENTS

Again, I would respond to all of this by saying that I believe our hope for “restoration” or renewal has to do with the re-alignment of primary relationships. Toward this goal I offer the following short lists of “musts” for restoration to take place.

1.  We must have an organic relationship with God through Jesus and the witness of the Holy Spirit, and with others in a warm, dynamic, authoritative faith community.

2.  We must seek to center our denomination upon the life, witness, and message of Jesus.

3.  Somehow we must align all our energies and resources around the matter Jesus' vision of the Kingdom of God.

4.  We must seek a deeper understanding of the current cultural context in which we witness to God's grace and love present in and through Jesus Christ.

5.  We must seek the guidance of the Spirit to help us develop ways to witness of people of other faiths in whats that affirm their worth and recognize the fruits of their own heritage.

6.  We must discover how to love each other or we shall surely kill each other.  This is an issue much bigger than Methodists fate.  Yet, in the end, it might be the thing that saves. 

7.  Loving must be more important than doing.  Loving must be more important than many of the artifacts of faith than clutter our ecclesiastical attics.

7. Making disciples must serve the greater function of transforming the world.