CHURCH AND STATE – Free Methodist Conversations

CHURCH AND STATE

PUTIN AND THE CHURCH

August 10, 2023 By dwayman

The Christianity of President Putin is stated by this researcher as having a union of church and state. The comparison is made between the leadership of Hitler and Putin as both seeing themselves as having the Divine right to conquer others. In Putin’s case it is to fulfill the destiny of Russia as the 3rd Jerusalem.

Rob Schwarzwalder writes:

“This mystical belief has caused Putin to believe he, himself, is imbued with the spirit of his nation. Shortly before Lent, one of his business associates asked Putin about asking forgiveness before a priest. Putin responded, “‘I am the President of Russia. Why should I ask for forgiveness?’”

When a leader believes he is the personification of the state itself, specially chosen by God to lead his country to conquest and triumph, trouble looms — as the people of Ukraine have learned with great pain. The German philosopher G.F. Hegel claimed that the state — a centralized government with power over every institution and person within the borders it controls — “is the march of God on earth.” This is precisely the approach taken by the Nazis concerning Adolf Hitler. The so-called “Fuhrer (leader) principle” was made clear by one of Hitler’s lapdog apologists, Rudolf Hess: “Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler. Whatever he does is necessary. Whatever he does is successful. Clearly the Führer has divine blessing.” This is why negotiating with Putin has proven so difficult.

FULL IMPLICATIONS OF BEING PRO-LIFE

May 31, 2023 By dwayman

Rev. David Wisener, Redeemer Free Methodist Church

I’m concerned pro-life Christians aren’t being ethically comprehensive. We need to reflect a coherent ethic that does justice to the value of all human life. We need to both recognize how wide- ranging the issues are surrounding the protection of life and be more precise with how we define the stances we choose to take.

A prime example for more precision is The Book of Discipline’s statement regarding abortion: “The intentional abortion of a person’s life, from conception on, must be judged to be a violation of God’s command, ‘You shall not commit murder,’ except when extreme circumstances require the termination of a pregnancy to save the life of the pregnant woman.”

The statement implicitly assumes all instances of terminating a human embryo occur within a woman’s body, but that is not the case. What of embryos that are created as part of invitro fertilization? In this process, several are created and frozen until a couple decides what they want to do with them: one or more are selected to be implanted to carry to term, but what about the others? The only options available are for the couple to either donate them to other couples; donate them for scientific use; dispose of them; or keep them frozen.

Yet, if we are going to use the same ethical logic from The Book of Discipline stated above, unless a couple donates their remaining embryos to other couples,

CHURCH AND STATE

ACT JUSTLY

February 9, 2022 By dwayman

At the 2022 Andrews Chair in Christian Unity lecture, the Rev. Dr. Sam Wells, pastor of St Martin-in-the-Fields church on Trafalgar Square, London, presented an insightful and inspired path Christians can take in order to ACT JUSTLY. Wells notes that we often focus on ending injustice while missing the opportunity to do justice. Presented to the faculty and student body of Greenville University, the lecture is a timely presentation in an unjust world as he calls the church to a holistic understanding of how we act to bring justice into our churches, communities and nations.

The lecture is presented here in Facebook Video format:

5th Annual Andrews Chair Lecture: Act Justly by the Rev. Dr. Sam Wells

CHURCH AND STATE

PANDEMICS AND THE CHURCH AND STATE IN HISTORY

January 7, 2022 By dwayman

It is helpful to hear from a Christian scholar from Nigeria as we often get caught up in our individual nation’s politics and lose sight of our global Christian witness, purpose and history. Here Dr. Bernard B. Fyanka, Redeemer’s University Ede, Osun State Nigeria, provides an insightful analysis of the church and state as both encounter a pandemic.

The conclusion to his analysis states:

” In my opinion, the central agitation of the church with regards to this pandemic and possible pandemics in the future should have been over the designation of the churches as entities providing essential and emergency services. This characterization should be based on the original basis of the relationship between the church and state in which the church is viewed as a charitable organization providing medical, social and spiritual relief to communities.The emphasis of the church should not have been on rights to congregate but rights to work inparallel status with doctors, nurses, police, and other emergency services in providing much-needed relief. Finally, as opined by the catholic church, ‘the Church has direct authority fromGod Himself over the exercise of religion and the meaning of faith and morals. But this authority does not preclude cooperation with legitimate governmental entities in fostering the common good, which in fact is required by the Church’s own moral teaching.”

Free Methodist Bishop Emeritus David Kendall notes: “Dr. Fyanka’s point, as I understand it, is that the church is not called to protect and advocate for its own rights,

CHURCH AND STATE

BAPTIZED CYNICISM by Matthew Ruszynski

October 18, 2021 By dwayman

Rev. Matthew Tuszynski

I’ve never read the ‘Left Behind’ series, but I grew up around the time it was most popular. That meant that, even without reading so much as the first page of the first book, I already knew most of the major plot points just by virtue of being around people who were entranced by the books. If you are old enough to remember the 90’s and early 00’s (and I still haven’t fully processed the fact that some of you reading this might not be), you’ll already be familiar with the eschatological hysteria of the period. It’s a hysteria that had been building since World War I, but something about the turning of the millenia, and some nonsense about the Aztec calendar that was all over the History Channel for some reason, got a good portion of the populous to believe that any moment now we’d live through that ‘empty clothes left where my husband/wife/brother/second-cousin twice removed was sitting just a moment ago’ scene from those novels.

That hysteria imbued much of western Christianity with an almost Gnostic nihilism about the physical world and its problems. Somewhere along the way the phrase ‘in the world, but not of the world’ was spawned, and it’s become such a fixture in Christianese that we sometimes forget that no such phrase appears in the scriptures. There are two near analogues; the first is John 17:16–18 (NASB95) 16“They are not of the world,

CHURCH AND STATE

YOUR POLITICS MAY BE RUINING YOUR MINISTRY

April 29, 2021 By dwayman

Rev. Dr. Michael Traylor – May, 2021

You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:26-29)

“As people of faith, our challenge is to rise above political ideology and lead on moral grounds. Don’t go right, don’t go left, go deeper. (Jim Wallis – On God’s Side)

This last election cycle was among the most polarized and divisive election that I have ever witnessed. The degree of violence and vitriol revealed just how sick society is. Too often the dominant political narratives of our regions and family heritage often define our church culture, which in turn defines and informs the church’s mission. In other words, many churches have become co-opted by political agendas and have lost their true identity.

University of Notre Dame Political Scientists recently published a study which sought to analyze the phenomena of the rising population of people who have no religious affiliation over the past decade (Campbell, Layman, Green, Secular Surge, 2021). What they found was that often those who described themselves as non-religious often did so in reaction to political identities of religious movements,

THE BLACK CHURCH

February 22, 2021 By dwayman

Available both as a book and as a PBS Documentary, THE BLACK CHURCH by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores the central role that the church played and plays in the lives of African American people. Here is the available introduction (read an excerpt) of his work:

“INTRODUCTION

No pillar of the African American community has been more central to its history, identity, and social justice vision than the “Black Church.”* To be sure, there is no single Black Church, just as there is no single Black religion, but the traditions and faiths that fall under the umbrella of African American religion, particularly Christianity, constitute two stories: one of a people defining themselves in the presence of a higher power and the other of their journey for freedom and equality in a land where power itself—and even humanity—for so long was (and still is) denied them. Collectively, these churches make up the old‑ est institution created and controlled by African Americans, and they are more than simply places of worship. In the centuries since its birth in the time of slavery, the Black Church has stood as the foundation of Black religious, political, economic, and social life.
For a people systematically brutalized and debased by the in‑ humane system of human slavery, followed by a century of Jim Crow racism, the church provided a refuge: a place of racial and

* Although there is no monolithic “Black Church,” just as there is no monolithic “Black vote” or “Black perspective,” for clarity throughout this book,

CHURCH AND STATE

Government Restriction on Religious Practice Increases

November 17, 2020 By dwayman

In this November 10, 2020 article by Pew Research Center, the world is experiencing an increase in government restrictions on religious practices. The article is based on research done in 2018 and says in part:

“The increase in government restrictions reflects a wide variety of events around the world, including a rise from 2017 to 2018 in the number of governments using force – such as detentions and physical abuse – to coerce religious groups.

The total number of countries with “high” or “very high” levels of government restrictions has been mounting as well. Most recently, that number climbed from 52 countries (26% of the 198 countries and territories included in the study) in 2017 to 56 countries (28%) in 2018. The latest figures are close to the 2012 peak in the top two tiers of the Government Restrictions Index.

As of 2018, most of the 56 countries with high or very high levels of government restrictions on religion are in the Asia-Pacific region (25 countries, or half of all countries in that region) or the Middle East-North Africa region (18 countries, or 90% of all countries in the region).”

“How do restrictions on religion vary by regime type?

In this report, for the first time, Pew Research Center combined its data on government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion with a classification of regime types, based on the Democracy Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

CHURCH AND STATE

CHURCH AND STATE and the STATE of the CHURCH

October 8, 2020 By dwayman

In this short work, Dr. Kang-Yup Na provides thoughts on the state of the US election with ecclesial insights.

Kang-Yup Na is an associate professor of religion at Westminster College (New Wilmington, Pa.). An ordained minister and the son of first-generation Christian parents, he was baptized 13 June 1965 in South Korea, moved to Tennessee just before turning ten, and since then has lived, studied, taught, and served churches in various places in New Jersey, Korea, Atlanta, Germany, and New York City.

An earlier version of this article was originally published in Engage (October 2016), a publication of The Institute for Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary.

From more than four dozen political parties and with over 1,200 candidates who have filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for president, it comes down once again to two people trying to persuade their fellow citizens to vote for them to preside over these United States of America.* We face the music of our republican constitutional heritage by electing our leader from among us every four years. And every four years, we seem to perform this civic dance of ours with increasing fatalism, with more and more citizens voting against candidates as much as for them, knowing that the de facto two-party system enjoys a kind of political perichoresis that will place either a Democrat or a Republican in the White House.

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Free Methodist Conversations

PUTIN AND THE CHURCH

FULL IMPLICATIONS OF BEING PRO-LIFE

ACT JUSTLY

PANDEMICS AND THE CHURCH AND STATE IN HISTORY

BAPTIZED CYNICISM by Matthew Ruszynski

YOUR POLITICS MAY BE RUINING YOUR MINISTRY

THE BLACK CHURCH

Government Restriction on Religious Practice Increases

CHURCH AND STATE and the STATE of the CHURCH

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