What are United Methodists Known For?

Craig Groeschel wrote this in a recent short blog post:

I’m thankful for the:

Social conscious of the United Methodists.

Emphasis on being born again from the Baptists.

Focus on holiness from the Nazarenes.

Power of the Holy Spirit in the Charismatics.

Evangelistic hearts of the seeker sensitive leaders.

Message of grace from the Lutherans.

Attention to right doctrine from the Bible Church leaders.

Heartfelt worship from Pentecostals.

…and much more more!

I’m thankful that God uses different Christian Churches as His light in a dark world!

What are some of the differences you’re thankful for?

Does anyone else think it’s strange that United Methodists only get props for social conscious (conscience/consciousness)? It seems to me that at our best, Methodists should embody everything on this list. After all, you can find every one of these themes in the writing and preaching of John Wesley.

I know the spirit of this post was likely just sort of the general ecumenical, “I appreciate things from all denominations” sorta thing, but I really see it as a challenge. Are we just the nice socially aware denomination, or can we recover a passionate concern for justification, holiness, the power of the Spirit, evangelistic desire, grace, rich orthodoxy, and passionate heartfelt worship? I think this is a question worth asking.

YouTube Experiment

Kevin Watson at has started an experiment to see how much social capital Methodist bloggers have. This experiment was prompted by the feeling among some Methodist bloggers that United Methodism does not always do as good of a job as it could at getting the Wesleyan message out there, particularly on-line. So, he wants to see how many views a YouTube video can get if Methodist bloggers work together to promote it. The experiment is to see how many hits the video will receive in two weeks.

If you want to participate you can: First, watch the video below. Second, copy and paste this entire post into a new post on your blog and post it. Third, remind people about this experiment in one week.

Based on the results of the experiment, Kevin will get in touch with the folks at Discipleship Resources and let them know the ways in which Methodist bloggers are often an underused resource.

Here is a link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ISKTrScpzQ

A Week in the Life

It’s been yet another busy week. We’ve started Servant Walk, our Sunday morning video curriculum, again after a couple weeks off of filming for Christmas and New Year. If you’re really interested in looking at some of the early attempts at video teaching by yours truly, hop over to YouTube and check out what we’ve done.

Next week, I’ll get back to teaching my two large group bible studies. We’ll finish up with the women’s study of Romans, and the men will be beginning studying Acts of the Apostles. Since our director of missions just took a new position as the director of mission for the Alabama West-Florida conference, I’ve been getting more of the assistance calls in the missions area, sometimes as many as three or four a day. We’ll have our first mission council meeting of the new year on Tuesday.

I’m also beginning preparations for my D.Min. project which begins the first week of Lent (a virtual classroom for the Servant Walk curriculum), getting ready to develop the parents class for confirmation in my spare time, and leading a Service of Death and Resurrection (Funeral) on Monday.

Since I don’t have anything else going on, I’ve also switched to a Mac! I was given a 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4 awhile back, and I finally upgraded the RAM to 2GB and a friend installed Leopard on it. It’s pretty darn fast now, and I’m loving it. I look forward to using Keynote instead of Powerpoint and see how that goes.

So, that’s what’s going on in my world! Anything going on in yours?