Take the following passage for example, which is from the year 1774:

[Wednesday, November 16th.] In the evening, I returned to Norwich. Never was a poor society so neglected as this has been for the past year. The morning preaching was at an end, the bands suffered all to fall in pieces, and no care at all taken of the classes, so that whether they met or not, it was all one. Going to church and Sacrament were forgotten, and the people rambled hither and thither as they listed.

On Friday evening, I met the society and told them plain I was resolved to have a regular society or none. I then read the Rules and desired everyone to consider whether he was willing to walk by these Rules or no. Those in particular of meeting their class every week, unless hindered by distance or sickness (the only reasons for not meeting which I could allow), and being constant at church and Sacrament, I desired those who were so minded to meet me the next night, and the rest to stay away. The next night, we had far the greater part, on whom I strongly enforced the same thing. Sunday 20, I spoke to every leader concerning everyone under his care and put out every person whom they could not recommend to me. After this was done, out of 204 members 174 remained. And these points shall be carried if only fifty remain in the society.”

This entry is remarkable for a number of reasons. For one, you see so many components of what Wesley believed authentic discipleship to be about—even though here he is being critical because in the Norwich Society at the time they seem to be falling apart. He talks about the regular morning preaching in the local Society, and he refers to the dedication to go “to church and Sacrament.” He also mentions the General Rules as the foundation of common life within the Society, as well as the bedrock small groups in which most Methodists met: classes and bands. And he alludes to the crucially important role played by class leaders in maintaining discipline and providing regular pastoral guidance for the members of the Society.

I would argue that this Journal entry is really about pastoral care. It is a reflection by Wesley on the kind of pastoral work necessary to help guide and sustain a group of people in their discipleship, as they strive to love God and one another. As usual, Wesley does not mince words on what he thought such a process required. As he says, he was “resolved to have a regular society or none.” The logic behind such a view may seem harsh on the surface, but it is actually full of compassion.

You see, in Wesley’s mind, we actually do spiritual harm to people if we allow them to delude themselves into thinking they are pursuing the way of salvation when they are actually just treading water spiritually (or worse—sinking so subtly they don’t realize they are drowning!). So the proper pastoral approach is to discipline your people, but to do so pastorally. You display for them all the resources of ministry that your community has to offer. And then you allow them to decide if they really want to be a part of that. If they do, then there is a reason for rejoicing. If they don’t, then you allow them to do something else. But what you don’t do is waste everyone’s time and allow them to believe anything spiritually beneficial is occurring through their nominal connection to a form of discipleship that requires a full bodied commitment.

Read the Journal entry again, and then think about your own church. How do we practice truly Wesleyan pastoral care today?

Phyllis Tickle

Phyllis Tickle has injected an idea into contemporary conversations about the church that has gained an enormous amount of traction. It’s the idea that once every 500 years some revolutionary thing happens in the Judeo-Christian tradition that “changes everything.”

Tickle uses this idea to fuel her thesis about “emergence Christianity.” It is a movement or conversation that has gone by a number of related terms in recent years. Emergent, emerging, or emergence: all these terms refer to the loose religious coalition that refers to an attempt to refashion traditional forms of church and is led by people like Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, and Tickle herself.

It is remarkable to me how widespread the idea of the 500-year cycles has gotten, and the credence that is automatically given to it as an authoritative interpretation of Christian history. I’ve heard Tickle talk about the idea herself in a recent graduation address. It came up not long ago in a conversation with a General Board of Discipleship executive. I’ve heard it in an extended cabinet meeting in my annual conference. And I encounter it not infrequently in online contexts.

As an example, check out the comment at right from a recent post on Rachel Held Evans’ blog.

The commenter on Evans’ blog says that Tickle’s proposal is “very compelling.” But is it? That’s what I’d like to explore in the paragraphs below.

I’ve not read the book where Tickle apparently develops her 500-year concept in the most detail. But I have read an interview by her where she references it and viewed this lecture where she argues for it. And as I said, I’ve heard her describe it in person in a graduation address. The idea goes like this:

Once every 500 years, Christianity experiences a huge upheaval where old ideas are rejected and new ones emerge to take their place. It can be an unsettling experience for those who witness it, but the result is always a fresh and revitalized expression of the faith. Tickle mentions a number of these, including the Great Transformation (Jesus), the Great Decline & Fall (Rome), the Great Schism (i.e., of 1054 that split the eastern and western churches), the Great Reformation (of 16th century Protestantism), and now the Great Emergence.

On the surface, the 500-year cycle idea can be captivating. It certainly was when I heard her describe it. She is a winsome speaker, with a great deal of energy and rhetorical flourish. It is interesting to me that when I’ve talked to people in person about Tickle’s idea, they act as if they have received some hidden wisdom or been let in on a great secret that helps them make sense of their world. And that’s the allure of the Tickle Thesis: it claims to have great explanatory power to interpret both church history and the present situation in church & society.

And now, here’s the “but.”

But as a historian, I’ve got to point out some things that are real problems with what Tickle is suggesting. The sum total of these suggests a very bad “historiography” on her part—that is, the method whereby she is reaching her conclusions and her historical claims. I’ll enumerate these for the sake of clarity as what I see as the the major problems with the Tickle Thesis:

1) Numerology: People have been fascinated by the power of numbers for the entirety of recorded history. Hence, the notion that there is something magical about a 500 year period that produces a crisis (with an inevitable outcome, no less). But here’s a historiographical rule that any serious historian would have no problem agreeing to: Numbers are not magical. In that sense, numerology is to history as astrology is to astronomy. Thus from the standpoint of real historical analysis, Tickle’s take on history and its inevitable 500 year cycles is about as compelling as Dan Brown’s retelling of church history in The Da Vinci Code. But remember, Dan Brown was writing fiction. Tickle is claiming to offer fact.

2) A “Whiggish” interpretation of history: The idea that history is an inevitable story of progress from primitive states to the advanced and sophisticated present has been rejected by all serious historians. Yet it is at the heart of Tickle’s idea, where—surprise!—we today are the advanced and sophisticated inheritors of all that came before us. It is also characteristic of the Tickle Thesis that the real providential movement in history has happened in a Western, Eurocentric direction; in fact, it has moved toward people like Phyllis Tickle.

Think about this last point carefully in regards to Tickle’s proposed revolutionary events since the advent of Christianity. And note the way in which history is moving, according to the Tickle Thesis:

• First, we have the birth of Jesus and establishment of the church, which takes all Christians into account.
• Next, there’s the “fall of the Roman Empire,” which led to a different future for the church in the West. Now, take note: Tickle doesn’t account for the fact that half the Roman Empire did not in fact fall, and that the Empire in the East continued another 1000 years. (Generally, historians today are very reticent to speak about a specific “fall” of anything in 476 A.D. because the idea of a cataclysmic ending of the Roman state doesn’t fit neatly into the actual political and social developments that occurred in different places and at different rates.) But at any rate, this leads to an emphasis in Tickle’s thesis on the Christian West rather than the Christian East.
• Third, we have the Great Schism of 1054. This decisively separates West from East not only politically but ecclesiastically as well, with an attention on Western Christianity. It also cuts out the Christianity of non-European areas, since the church in Asia Minor, the Middle East, and northeast Africa was divided from Western Catholicism.
• The Protestant Reformation. This separates the Catholic powers in Southern Europe from the Protestant areas in Northern Europe—parts of Germany and the Low Countries, parts of Switzerland, Scandinavia, and Britain. In other words, the real way in which God is moving is toward people that are ethnically and religiously like Phyllis Tickle. And now, here at the Great Emergence, we have Phyllis Tickle herself to interpret it all for us!

3) The Arbitrary Factor: Something “revolutionary” happens in practically every century of Christianity. For instance, if we’re talking about the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, why wouldn’t we instead use the conversion of Constantine and the progressive Christianization of the Empire in the fourth century? Or the rise of Benedictine monasticism in the sixth century? The reason Tickle doesn’t do that, I assume, is because it doesn’t fit her thesis. But, then, determining a thesis and then selecting events that fit into it is simply arbitrary. It’s just bad history. It isn’t clear at all to me that selecting events roughly 500 years apart has any significance at all, exactly because highly significant events have occurred in practically every century.

For what it’s worth, I’m also not at all convinced that the various events Tickle attributes to the magical 500 year Big Events are positive for the church. And I’m not convinced they admit of like (i.e., apples to apples) comparisons. How was the Great Schism of 1054 anything but an ecclesiastical and theological failure of the church catholic? And the same thing for the Reformation? Also, in what way is the fall of the Western Roman Empire comparable to the Great Schism, other than the fact that they are “things that happened that affected the church.” These are the kinds of questions we need to ask if we want to move beyond catchy rhetoric and into real historical analysis.

My Conclusion: If the unsettled present leaves you, well, a little unsettled, and if you really need a “magic key” kind of explanation to put your mind at rest, then feel free to buy into Tickle’s 500 year cycle thesis. It’s the kind of idea that sells books. But it isn’t serious history. And it tells us nothing about the kind of future that events in our own present are going to lead us into.

I mention all this because I think the idea of doctrine in Methodism may be in the process of making a real comeback. All the doctrinal settings I cited above have their analogous examples in the Christian faith. The faith does (and must have) an intellectual content in order for it to be viable in the world. Our faith also has behavioral norms, which we would see as anything from the moral instruction we receive biblically to the missional trajectory of the church herself. And disciples also must practice a form of discipline, in their study and their worship and their relational disposition toward one another.

In other words, the Christian faith requires the embrace of doctrine on a number of different levels. And all of them are vitally important.

I write about the idea of a comeback for doctrine in Methodism in my current column in the United Methodist Reporter. Since it is my final Reporter column also, I chose the topic with care. My primary academic work is essentially the historical retrieval of doctrine in Methodism. So yes, this is something about which I care quite a bit.

The reason more and more Methodists tend to be interested in the historic role of doctrine, I think, is because it has become so painfully clear that ministry in the church the way we’ve been doing it is a dead end. A part of this is the monstrous influence of individualist consumerism, which causes us to think of our faith as a product to be used as we see fit and tailor-made for each individual person.

There is a larger theological influence at play as well, though, which has been devastating to Methodism since the late 19th century. It is the framework of liberal Protestant theology, traceable from Schleiermacher and entering Methodism through the Boston personalist movement. This view privileges religious experience as the chief epistemological criterion for truth (and thus sharply diminishes the unique significance of Christ in salvation, the doctrine of the Trinity, and a whole host of other Christian essentials). The Wesleyan tradition places a great deal of value on experience, but it isn’t experience of this kind—which is one main reason why the Quadrilateral is so misunderstood.

I ramble, and some of this points me to essays for another day. But check out the column and see what you think. As always, your comments and questions are welcome.

Why teach a course in Wesleyan leadership? I teach on the faculty of Memphis Theological Seminary, and my primary academic area is historical studies. (I did my dissertation on the means of grace in John Wesley’s theology.) But a part of my role with MTS is to teach in Wesleyan Studies more broadly. That means that I’ve been exploring ways to develop courses that fall generally into what you’d consider practical theology. My own understanding of practical theology, in this vein, is that it is the appropriation of the Christian tradition as a way to inform the practices of the church in the present.

My first attempt at this kind of course development in Wesleyan practical theology was through a course I called, “Evangelism and Discipleship in the Wesleyan Tradition.” That course was enough of a success last year that I am teaching it again this fall. The Wesleyan leadership course in my seminary’s summer term earlier this month represents my second attempt. With it I am trying to key in on the current interest in leadership studies that runs across academic disciplines (in business, education, etc.) but through a lens that is specifically theological and oriented within the Wesleyan tradition.

Plan of the Course: This leadership course was scheduled to be taught in an intensive format, over the course of 5 days during our first summer term in May (8 hrs/day X 5 days = 40 hrs of contact time). To make a course feasible in that format, required readings had to be distributed significantly in advance, and the major writing assignment for the course was given a due date of 1 month after the end of the final class session.

I decided to name the course “Models” of Wesleyan Pastoral Leadership for a couple of reasons. One is that I am not at all convinced that there is any one dominant version of Wesleyan pastoral leadership on offer. So I wanted to prod my students to explore different models as a way to come to a greater understanding about how Wesleyan leadership could be conceived and practiced in the present. The initial consideration of Wesleyan leadership models came primarily in the form of the assigned class readings and the discussions that followed from them. We had four main reading texts, all of which were from authors with Wesleyan backgrounds and all of which exhibited to some degree a “sacred-secular tension” (meaning a tension between leadership-as-theological category and leadership-as-secular-concept-imported-into-church-life).

Another reason I went with the pluralistic “models” notion of Wesleyan leadership is that I wanted to present various models to the class in the form of ministry practitioners who would meet with our class. To that end, the five day course featured four main guest speakers who, like the authors, were all from Wesleyan backgrounds. The kicker was that the guest speakers would all represent significantly different areas of experience and expertise in pastoral ministry.

So our assigned reading texts–which gave us material for significant class discussions–included:

• Lovett Weems’ Leadership in the Wesleyan Spirit (the “historical model”)
• Adam Hamilton’s Leading Beyond the Walls (the “congregational model”)
• John C. Maxwell’s 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership (the “heroic model” or “pragmatic model”)
• Kenneth Carder and Laceye Warner’s Grace to Lead (the “virtue model” or “theological model”)

In terms of guest speakers, we were fortunate to welcome these folks into our course for conversations about their calling, career in ministry, and understanding of leadership–all with reference to their distinct ministry settings:

• Dr. Cynthia Davis, McKendree District Superintendent in the Memphis Conference (Leadership in the Superintendency)
• Dr. Maxie Dunnam, Pastor Emeritus of Christ United Methodist Church in Memphis, TN, and former president of Asbury Theological Seminary (Leadership in the Large Church)
• Dr. Johnny Jeffords, Senior Pastor of Covenant United Methodist Church in Cordova, TN, and former pastor of St. John’s UMC in Memphis (Leadership in the Urban Church)
• Rev. Chris McAlilly, Pastor of Brewer and Shannon UMCs in the Mississippi Conference (Leadership in the Rural Church)

Rev. Chris McAlilly speaking about leadership in the rural church

Accompanying all this wonderful material were some supplementary components to the course. For instance, I did lecture presentations each of the five days. This included material on leadership from Will Willimon, Gil Rendle, and John Wigger, as well as a basic presentation on the Greek understanding of virtue and the possibility of locating leadership within a virtue framework. We also engaged in class discussion on what I called “Key Questions” and “Key Considerations,” including examinations of biblical models of leadership, students’ personal understanding of leadership as it related to their own spiritual gifts, and preliminary explorations into a Wesleyan understanding of leadership as the students conceived of it. I think it is a testament to the richness of this material that I typically had to cut conversations short for time considerations–in other words, we never ran out of topics to discuss despite our marathon class sessions!

What about evaluation? Clearly, in any seminar of small size and intensive format, the attendance and participation is going to make up a significant percentage of students’ overall grades. But I rarely teach a class where I don’t have some kind of substantial writing assignment as the major instrument of evaluation. (For a number of reasons, I find such assignments to be better formation for ministry than either exams or reflection papers, although in normal semester-length courses I assign a mixture of evaluation instruments.)

The writing assignment for the leadership course is what I decided to call a “Leadership Credo.” It is a 12-15 page writing assignment where students are expected to articulate a working statement of their understanding of Wesleyan leadership in practice. Its four sections include a “thick description” of social location and ministry context, an evaluation of biblical models of leadership, a significant engagement with one of the assigned course texts on Wesleyan leadership, and a constructive statement of how the student sees him/herself as a leader in the Wesleyan tradition (along with challenges, areas of growth, etc.). By the nature of the assignment, the Leadership Credo is intended to be part self-evaluation and part mission statement. My hope is that it will be theologically robust but will also have real practical benefit to my students as they continue to be formed as Wesleyan pastoral leaders.

How’d it turn out? The class sessions are over, but students have not turned in their writing assignments yet. So the jury is still out. But the in-class feedback was very positive. I’ve already begun thinking about how I might restructure parts of the course if I teach it again in a few semesters, including other readings I might use. I’m trying to develop a significant portfolio of courses in the area of Wesleyan Studies that our students at MTS can take advantage of. And I think the leadership course will likely become a staple in that portfolio.

Any questions? Comments? Feel free to leave them below.

I think there will be a lot of energy at the annual conference this year, and the conference staff has been working to put together a program that will help to equip us to do faithful ministry in each of our local contexts. In this video, Bishop Gary Mueller offers and invitation to this year’s annual conference and explains his hopes for a “3-D Faith” focus for our time together in Little Rock:

For more information on the upcoming session of the Arkansas Annual Conference, go here.

You can read an announcement about the Board of Directors’ decision to cease operations on the Reporter’s website. The decision affects both the United Methodist Reporter newspaper and its parent company, UMR Communications.

In addition to the official announcement by the company, I want to add a personal word.

I’ve written a column for the United Methodist Reporter since 2005. For most of its history, that column was called “Gen-X Rising” and in it I examined issues of church and culture through a generational lens. I found over time that my own theological interests were moving ever more toward a deep appreciation for the Wesleyan tradition. So in the last few years, the column has been as much about articulating a Wesleyan theology of discipleship as it has anything else. (In late 2011, my recognition that the nature of the column had changed led me to drop the “Gen-X” moniker from it.)

My column has been a significant part of my ministry over all the years I’ve written it. It has put me in touch with people all over the Methodist connection I wouldn’t have known otherwise. In my years of doctoral study, the discipline of writing it was a constant reminder that the academic work I was doing needed to have relevance for the lived reality of Christian discipleship. And the process of writing the column has been a continual spur to creativity in my thinking, speaking, and writing elsewhere.

A lot has happened in my life in the time since I first began writing for the Reporter: marriage, two major moves, a couple of pastoral appointments, doctoral study, and the arrival of three children. Through it all was my work for the Reporter. My bi-weekly column was a regular part of my ministry and, indeed, my life. I’ve written well over 150 individual columns, as well as a number of book reviews and a couple of feature pieces. I even managed to win an award from the Associated Church Press back in the early days of Gen-X Rising.

It goes without saying that I am profoundly sad that the Reporter is ceasing publication. I am, of course, grateful to UMR Communications for providing me a platform (in print and online) from which to write. But I’m mostly grateful to the people at UMR who kept the newspaper going in a tough environment and who embodied the highest standards of journalism in the process. I can’t say enough about the three editors under whom I wrote: Cynthia Astle, Robin Russell, and Sam Hodges. Other people past and present on the Reporter staff were equally wonderful to work with, even if it was always from afar — Bill Fentum, Mary Jacobs, Amy Forbus, and many more.

Eight years ago, the Reporter took a chance on an associate pastor in a little town in Arkansas with barely a writing credit to his name. I honestly don’t believe many of the writing opportunities that have opened up for me since that time would have occurred without the Reporter believing in me first. I will be forever grateful for that, even as I grieve the demise of a company with a long history, a proud legacy, and a record of journalistic excellence.

“My harp is turned to mourning, and my pipe to the voice of those who weep”  – Job 30:31

The Catechism Lesson, by Jules-Alexis Meunier

My new column in the United Methodist Reporter is on the practice of confirmation.

Confirmation is one of those practices that has enormous formative potential for youth. Sometimes churches take confirmation very seriously. When that happens, confirmation does a lot of work in helping to initiate adolescents into a mature form of discipleship.

But all too often, confirmation is looked upon as a burden—one of those practices we feel obligated to do but to which people don’t really want to commit themselves fully. The results are predictable: confirmation becomes a rite of passage with no real substance underneath. Churches still practice it because of the vague sense that it is important, but no one (pastors, parents, or children) take it seriously as the chief avenue of adolescent Christian formation.

I’ll offer a rather extreme example of the latter, which is an anecdote I share in my column. I know a pastor who discovered upon arriving at a new appointment that all the children in the church from the second grade and up had been confirmed. He interviewed the sixth graders to see what they had learned from their ‘process.’ He found that none of them were familiar with even basic terminology from the Christian tradition (like “Trinity”) or Methodism (like “John Wesley”). They had apparently gone through a confirmation liturgy one Sunday, but it wasn’t clear to my friend whether there had been any class sessions at all. My friend refused to speculate much on what had happened — perhaps out of respect for the congregation—but it sounds to me almost as if his predecessor was looking to pad membership stats on a charge conference report one year.

If confirmation becomes simply an empty ritual performed once a year—form with no content—then we are much better off simply not doing it at all. The danger of having a confirmation service with no actual catechesis is that we’ll communicate the message to youth that there is something spiritually beneficial in just going through the motions. Clearly, that is not the case.

On the other hand, if we actually invest time and energy into making confirmation a central, vital part of our ministry with adolescents, then the result could be important indeed. Sarah Arthur has written about just such an approach with confirmation in the chapter she contributed to Generation Rising: A Future with Hope for the United Methodist Church. She argues that it takes an investment by an entire congregation to reach confirmation’s full potential.  The church has to see confirmation as central to what it is trying to do with youth. And along with that, Arthur suggests that confirmation should be seen as a way to integrate youth into the full range of the church’s ministry (bucking the tendency to treat youth ministry as some semi-independent operation that the rest of the church doesn’t have anything to do with).

We’re all well aware of the challenges of ministry with teenagers and young adults. But we tend to make that ministry more difficult than it has to be by treating people in those age groups as if they don’t want to be a part of the larger church. What if the church was what they desperately wanted and needed, it was just that the developmental stages they were experiencing in life made everything in their lives more difficult? I suspect that to be the case. And while confirmation is not a cure-all for all problems in youth and young adult ministry, it is an important way to ground teenage boys and girls into the life of the church at a crucial point.

But all this requires confirmation to be a truly catechetical, truly formational process. That will take a real commitment by the congregation to achieve. But you know what? Our kids are worth it.

I am finding fatherhood to be a singularly remarkable experience.

Like many new parents, I’ve experienced the wonder at new life, the thankfulness for the blessings of God and the intense love for a child of my own making.

But one of the most remarkable parts of all of it is in witnessing the relationship of mother and baby. Never was this impressed upon me more than when I saw Alice and Emily together in the days and weeks after Alice’s birth.

From conception to birth, and from birth to the present day, Alice has relied on her mom for everything she needs. In the broad sense, all life is a gift from God. But in the narrower and even biological sense, life is a gift that a mother gives her child.

To be present at each stage along the way is to bear witness to this astounding reality. Human babies are among the most helpless of all God’s creatures, both at birth and for a long time afterward. Without the enormous investment of the mother’s love, they simply couldn’t survive.

I’m not trying to diminish my own role in Alice’s life, or any father’s role in the life of his child. But I am saying that the order of creation puts mothers in a unique place with respect to the welfare of their children. For life and for the sustenance that life requires, the mother’s role is indispensable.

Necessary to faith

This recognition can give us a key insight into our connection to the church. We too often tend to see the church in functional terms: as a voluntary association, helpful to the Christian life in a variety of practical and spiritual ways but not absolutely necessary to our faith.

But the functional view of the church is a deep error, best seen when we look at how the church is understood as our mother in Scripture and tradition. In fact, the motherhood of the church is one of the most needed Christian teachings we should seek to better understand in the present.

The New Testament sees the church as the “New Jerusalem” that God is establishing to serve as the home for all his people. The Apostle Paul speaks of the church in this way when he says that, whereas those still under the law are in chains, “the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother” (Galatians 4:26).

The church’s motherhood is established first because the church is the bride of Jesus Christ. So in Revelation, John of Patmos tells us, “I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2).

We experience the church’s motherhood in our own lives first through baptism. Our confession about baptism is that it is a sign of new birth, which comes through water and the Holy Spirit. Baptism is a birth that comes through a sacrament of the church, so that the church is the mother of all Christian men and women.

Feeding her children

The early church fathers recognized the significance of the church as mother in a way we often do not. St. Augustine, for instance, writes that “those born of [the] flesh are not Christians, but become such afterwards through the motherhood of the Church.”

But the motherhood of the church extends beyond the sacrament of baptism as well. Just as a mother feeds her newborn baby by her own body, the church feeds her children through Scripture, prayer and especially through Holy Communion.

Life is given to us through our baptism, and the sustenance that life requires thereafter is given through the ministry of the church throughout our earthly sojourn.

If we reflect on the church as the mother who gives us birth and nurtures us as we travel the journey of our lives, we can begin to reverse the long and unfortunate trend to see the church as an optional part of our faith. It is the church that gives us the food of salvation.

That conviction seems especially appropriate now, and indeed at all times for Christians who await the coming of Jesus Christ, who is himself the bridegroom and who shows us the way to the New Jerusalem.

[Originally appeared in the United Methodist Reporter on November 24, 2010. The current form has been slightly altered from the original. Used by permission.]

Alice Thompson

The faith of a child is marvelous.

My daughter Alice is 2 1/2 years old. We usually leave the house together in the morning — she to daycare and I to work. This morning, Alice walked into the kitchen holding a baby doll wrapped in a little blanket. “Look!” she said. “It’s the baby Jesus.”

“Oh,” I said, “I see.”

“Yeah,” she said. “We’re gonna put him in the manger.”

I smiled down at her. “That’s right, isn’t it? Because there’s no room for him in the inn.” Then I went off to hunt her socks and shoes while she cradled the baby doll and spoke softly to it.

When I got back she was in the laundry room by the back door. She was sitting down on the floor still holding the baby doll. “Come on, Alice,” I said. “Time to go.”

She looked up at me sharply. “I’m Mary,” she said. “And you’re Joseph.”

“Oh! Okay,” I said. “Then let’s go, Mary.”

I must have look startled when she scolded me. Because when I picked her up she looked at me sympathetically and said, “I love you, Joseph.”

“I love you too, Mary,” I replied. (Alice pronounces ‘Joseph” something like “Jofuff,” which makes the whole thing better.)

We went out to the car then. And during the ride into town, she kept calling me Joseph and referring to herself as Mary. When we got to her daycare, I asked her if she wanted to leave the baby Jesus in the car. But she wouldn’t have any of it. “No,” she said. “Maybe I can share Jesus with my friends, and then when they’re done they can give him back to me.”

I could spend days waxing on about what I think about our time together this morning. But let me resist and just offer this instead:

“At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’” (Matthew 18:1-4).

Seedbed is a multi-purpose publisher that offers ministry resources and spiritual formation tools through a variety of venues: online articles, sponsored blogs, print books, and an innovative “Seven Minute Seminary” series that offers teaching vignettes by seminary professors. The breadth of what J.D. Walt (the “chief sower”) and his staff are doing is really impressive. Seedbed offers its resources in new and old forms of media, but it is clearly a web-driven enterprise and in that sense represents something new for the Wesleyan world.

You’ve got to realize what a remarkable thing the development of Seedbed represents. In the Wesleyan/Methodist world, publishing enterprises are not growing. They’re contracting. So the fact that Methodist folk can look forward to a completely new source of print and digital media—and one that has adopted a self-consciously Wesleyan ethos—is highly encouraging.

In my view, I think Seedbed is at the cutting edge of providing Wesleyan resources for today’s church. In a time when other traditional publishing venues seem to be contracting dramatically, it is nice to see an organization like Seedbed bucking the trend. It is growing and growing in the right way: by publishing print, online, and digital media with a distinctly Wesleyan accent. The church is hungry for resources of real spiritual substance, and I think Seedbed is going to be the main avenue for those kinds of resources to reach individuals and congregations.

So I’d encourage you to check out what the folks over there are doing. The Seedbed website is rapidly developing. I’ve only been following it for a few months, but during that time it has expanded in terms of resources and scope. The ‘look and feel’ is generally pleasing and the site is easy to navigate.

And yes, I’ll admit that there is a little bit of self-interest in all of this for me. I’ve recently come to an agreement with Seedbed to write a book on the means of grace in the practice of Christian discipleship. I’ll start work on the manuscript this summer with an anticipated release date of sometime in 2014. This is a book that will be geared specifically for congregational use. And in it, I hope to make one very important part of the Wesleyan tradition accessible for contemporary readers.

I’ll post plenty of updates on the book in the coming months. Until then, check out Seedbed and let them know what you think.