by Tom Stuckey.
In 2006, as President of the Conference, I stated that we were ‘On the Edge of Pentecost’. Was this a prophetic vision or simply a catchy strap line? Given the traumatic events which have shaken the world since then together with the precarious state of Institutional Christianity in Britain, the idea of an imminent Pentecost for Methodism in Britain seems far-fetched, though the apocalyptic context of Joel (Acts 2.17-21) remains pertinent. I suggest the metaphor now is ‘HOLY SATURDAY’.
Holy Saturday is the waiting time between Good Friday and Easter Day. Contemporary Methodists are like those bewildered disciples who waited in the liminal time gap between crucifixion and resurrection. Holy Saturday is the Christological equivalent of Israel’s desert experience.
Belden Lane – who describes himself as ‘burnt out on shallow religion’– labels Mark’s Gospel as a ‘Desert Gospel’.[1]His temptation narrative is sandwiched between our Lord’s baptism and the start of his public ministry in Galilee. The wilderness provides the link between God’s announcement of Christ’s identity and our Lord’s declaration of his vision. It is the ‘how’ between the ‘who’ and the ‘what’.
The same dynamic is played out in Mark’s truncated resurrection narrative (16.1-8) where both the reader and the women are left hanging on a promise without any resurrection appearance. The disciples have to go back to Galilee, where it all started, in order to have the resurrection validated. Mark’s chapter 16 can be viewed as a commentary on Holy Saturday. Living in the context of Holy Saturday requires us to be brutally honest with where we are and to speak the unspeakable. Holy Saturday encourages us to ‘lament’, properly reclaim our past and receive God’s vision for our future. I understand the word ‘vision’ to be a prophetic gift which awaits its proper time (Hab.2.3). It has little to do with our modern get-togethers on a Saturday morning for a ‘Vision Day’.
At the end of each Conference we sing: “By Thine unerring Spirit led, we shall not in the desert stray; We shall not full direction need, nor miss our providential way.” There is irony here because I believe the Holy Spirit is driving us back into the desert so that we can re-discover our providential way.
There were 136,891 members of the Methodist Church in 2022. When I began training for the Ministry in 1965 the membership figure was 701,306. I am concerned but not worried about our falling numbers or ageing congregations. My theology recognises that the tides of the Spirit ebb and flow. If churches are to be genuine signs of the Kingdom of God then they will reflect strength and weakness, hiddenness and visibility, numerical increase and decrease, vulnerability and power. They are indicators of God’s redemptive purposes in judgement and renewal, death and resurrection. I have written elsewhere that we must rejoice in being small. I think that Methodist Connexionalism is no longer fit for purpose. Our future lies in decentralization and dispersion as we work for justice and seek secular partners.[2] Although we strive to be a ‘justice seeking church’, this should not be the overriding message. Our primary theme should be ‘grace’. Sadly we hear so little about it today. As someone reminded me recently ‘the heart of the gospel is not that we get what we deserve (justice) but that we can receive what we never deserve (grace). The only claim we have is our need’.
So what next? Like most mainstream churches in Britain, Methodism will continue to decline numerically. I suspect we will soldier-on with our gruelling ‘cut and paste strategy’ in the circuits and districts. This will probably precipitate further collapse in many more areas though some significant churches may remain. Over and against this I see the appearance of small clusters of local Christians who, regardless of the grinding mechanisms of their parent Churches, will be thrown together. In waiting prayerfully upon God they will weep and lament but their sorrow will be turned into joy. The Kingdom of God belongs to the poor in spirit and comfort is found by those who mourn. As we relive the Holy Saturday experience, God’s unerring Spirit will again move among us and usher in something entirely new.
[1] Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, OUP 1998
[2] Tom Stuckey, Covid-19: God’s Wake-Up Call?, Amazon 2021
Theology Everywhere 
Thank you Tom. I agree with all you say. The centrality of Grace is our precious treasure. In a church anxious about running out of all sorts of things, we rejoice that Grace will always (thanks be to God) in plentiful supply! And it’s all we need! This chimes so much with the overarching theme of my recent book ‘Revive Us Again: rejuvenating a movement of transformation.’ Thank you again.
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Thank you for this Tom, my take away from your post is that we need a renewed reliance upon grace, and possibly a deeper acceptance of our need for it, and that we need to move towards decentralisation, I suspect the latter will be fiercely opposed by those with a stake in the hierarchy ( yes I know we claim not to have one, but the truth is that we do).
By grace of course we can be justice seeking and by grace we can enter into necessary lament which may prove to be a catalyst for fresh hope as we learn again to seek the Spirit’s comfort and power the desert seems to be the perfect place to do this as it strips us of any notion of our own self-sufficiency.
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Thanks, Tom – as always. Was your vision in 2006 of a new Pentecost prophetic? Yes. But the reality to which prophetic visions point are not always (or perhaps even often?) perceived and accepted by more than a few. The Spirit was, I think, being poured out. The flames of God’s grace and love which can never be used up (and so like the bush Moses saw is never consumed and never goes out) were responded to in some places – some inside the institutional church, some outside it – but not in others. And yes, if we are attentive to the Spirit and faithfully committed we shall not lack for full direction, miss our providential way or stray in the desert. But, as I think Charles Wesley knew in that hymn and elsewhere, the Spirit not only guides us through the wilderness but leads us into it again and again. We may need to spend most of our time there, as the narratives in scripture and Christian history show, being stripped down and reformed in reliance on grace. The number willing or able to undergo this may be few. But there are some signs of grace bursting out all over the place, just harder to see – not least because I always want to see it burst out in my favourite ways, and so may miss it happening in ways I had not expected. Part of making things method(ist)ical is that role of tidying up after God (which makes peter at Cornelius’s house the first Methodist!).
Not everyone sees it though. The Spirit and grace have to be discerned and responded to by everybody. It is too easy to ‘other’ a supposed ‘hierarchy’ and assume that they will automatically block things. In my experience as much blocking comes actively or passively from ordinary people in churches whom I am called to serve and love because Christ does. You and I, Tom, have both been President; I have served in the Conference Office and you as a Chair of District. I suppose that makes us part of any hierarchy. But actually all the people called Methodist are the hierarchy. We are all members of the body of Christ, whatever our roles. We all have a part to play in conferring together, in discerning and deciding and then in embodying that discernment and those decisions in all our worship and mission.
The time between the crucifixion and resurrection is essential. But it is a wilderness time of waiting. And there may not be much comfort or nurture in it. The manna of God’s gracious love did not fall on the sabbath day of waiting and rest. If we have already consumed the double portions of it we were given on the Friday, we shall be in trouble. In the Lord’s Prayer we ask God not to bring us to our breaking point in the time of trial, and to give us just enough nurture and resources to get us through the next 24 hours (or 48 on the day before the Saturday of the wilderness). And God is faithful.
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