BONUS BLOG: “Methodists have a problem”
Lawson Stone is a long-time friend who’s a highly respected seminary faculty member. He wrote and shared the following earlier today. It’s with his graciously expressed permission that I share it with you as food for thought —
Methodists have a problem in that we are strong pietist revivalists, so experience is a big deal, one we almost make a criterion of theology.
But as revivalists we are also by heritage very anti-intellectual, which has the effect of reducing our ability to work well with ideas, exegesis, logic, etc.
Then we try to “join head and heart” and the result is always we submerge the head under the heart, and we handle experiential and now, therapeutic categories as if they are the equivalent of theological truths.
This goes back IMHO at least to Schleirmacher, who was a Moravian, the sect that Wesley sojourned with in germany for a while. Wesley and Schleiermacher came with a couple decades of each other passing under the influence of the Moravians at Herrnhut. So it’s in our DNA to sacrifice theology to experience.
The Global Methodist Church, for example, has virtually no theological standards for the training of ministers. You can go to a wildly revisionist seminary if you want to and GMC is okay with it.
After fighting this huge battle, the GMC is going to find itself in trouble in 20 years. Activist, emotional, and heterodox.
—- What say you?
joescheets 
The Global Methodist Church is an ideology. The United Methodist Church is a cultural practice.
LikeLike
The GMC has yet to have a convening General Conference. The BoD being used begins with the word “Transitional” as it’s current purpose is merely as a wholistic framework utilized to exit from the UMC. Pretending that the GMC’s current stances on theological training for ministers is definitive when it’s taken from a book clearly labeled “Transitional” is just a lazy attempt to take shots at something you obviously don’t agree with. That’s fine. You don’t have to agree, but please make your “20-years out” arguments about something substantive, not “transitional”.
LikeLike