by Bob Phillips

I spent 55 years as a member of the United Methodist Church, 51 of those years in ordained status. My departure from the United Methodist Church in 2023 was not my desire. I had been asked to provide part time interim ministry at a congregation on the cusp of disaffiliation to the Global Methodist Church that learned at the last moment that its pastor was not going with them. I requested permission to serve as a seven-month part time interim pastor.  I was told that “The world is my parish” did not apply to a Global Methodist Church. I thus would be required to renounce my United Methodist clergy membership, which I did with regret but a clear conscience.

That said, the vision and insights of the Good News movement were crucial to my decades of service in and loyalty to the United Methodist Church. My initial contact with the Good News movement, through its magazine, came when I was a freshman at a Big 10 university. I was a new convert to Christ, having professed my faith in June of 1968 at the Shiloh United Methodist Church. I had not been raised as a church attender but found faith and friendship in the 45 worshippers in this rural church with a holiness and revival heritage.

I departed for the university in September and quickly found myself challenged in ways both expected and unexpected. The transition that all freshmen must make to a major university was what it was. I arrived on campus encouraged that there was a United Methodist Wesley Foundation presence, confirmed by a large church/facility located on a strategic part of the campus. What I did not realize was that I had stepped into a kind of United Methodism that would have led me to leave the denomination had it not been for Good News, the “forum for renewal” within the church.

Good News made a difference in my life in four ways. First it reassured me that my United Methodist evangelical beliefs belonged and was not merely simplistic goo. In a matter of weeks my spiritual life was in turmoil. I was introduced to Sunday sermons that on occasion made no reference to God. The Gospel songs that had roused me toward lively worship were excluded from campus worship, with some being pointedly mocked from the pulpit. While an altar call would have been an unfair expectation, the worship and teaching silence from the Wesley Foundation on Jesus as atoning savior or the call to personal repentance and new birth was deafening, and deadening.

Toward the end of my first semester, in a weekend visit home, someone shared a copy of Good News Magazine. I was reassured in its articles, mostly messages from their recent convocation, that Methodism did affirm Christ as the savior “whose blood cleanses us from all sin,” and that the church exists to call others to personal repentance and conversion to Christ.  The articles affirmed the existence of some UM bishops and pastoral leaders who made no apology for their Wesleyan evangelical faith.  This provided a refreshing perspective that such traditional beliefs were not inferior or rare in the UM church of the late 1960’s.  Through subsequent decades that Good News witness continued amid larger shifts in the denomination unsympathetic to traditional and theologically conservative views and voices.[1]

Second, Good News introduced me to scholars who confirmed a person could be a thinking adult and an evangelical. The campus United Methodist pastoral leader was invited to a course I was taking on comparative religion, the most popular course in the philosophy department on campus. When asked specifically by the Buddhist instructor as to whether it was crucial for Christians to believe that such events as the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection of Jesus literally happened, this leader firmly replied that it was not. He added he personally believed that the body of Jesus had long ago decayed in an unknown tomb in Palestine. I later sought conversation with that leader, who crisply reassured me that the real problem was I was immature and narrow-minded.

I would discern years later that UM campus disdain for evangelicals in the fold reflected the aftermath of the “Fundamentalist-Modernist” battles of the 1920’s and 1930’s, ancient and irrelevant to me but still a target for combat by mainline leadership. This also helped explain the lack of bibliography resources in the university New Testament courses I took, taught by a UM elder serving on the faculty. Of course, such classes were not Bible studies, but all required readings/resources omitted any evangelical scholars, such as F.F. Bruce of Manchester or Bruce Metzger. The latter was the globally recognized dean of NT textual criticism and General Editor of the RSV, whose gentle evangelical identity was accepted at Princeton where he taught (and where I later would sit under his teaching) but was unacceptable in a classroom approach to biblical texts that resembled a literary autopsy.

Good News introduced me to Tom Oden of Drew, Mack Stokes of Candler, and a sympathetic Philip Watson of Garrett. Other scholars, such as my Asbury classmate Billy Abraham, would continue the witness. I also read Ed Robb’s scathing critique of UM seminaries (they had ceased to be Christian) and of Albert Outler’s angry response (diversity and damnation are not synonyms). Happily, the two would meet. Robb would retract his absolute condemnation. Outler would recall how his efforts to hire Timothy Smith at Perkins was derailed because of objection to Smith’s Nazarene faith. Smith, whose prize-winning dissertation on “Revivalism and Social Reform” would become one of the most significant pieces of research on American religious history in the 20th century, landed ultimately as Chair of the History department at the totally secular Johns Hopkins University, where he was judged not by the color of his religion but by the content of his scholarship. And Outler and Robb created A Foundation for Theological Education to help evangelical UM students gain doctorates from ranked universities, with hopes that some would be permitted to teach in mainline settings…and some eventually were!

Third, Good News reassured me that one could have an active social conscience and be an evangelical Wesleyan.  I read with excitement a Good News convocation address by Dr. Gilbert James, Professor of Church and Society at Asbury Seminary. This holiness Free Methodist, with his Northwestern University PhD and his McGovern for President pin, made a biblical, passionate case for the Wesleyan vision of social justice as indispensable to discipleship. He was a poster child for the dynamic singularity of personal and social holiness, and my time subsequently spent with him at Asbury (including a six-month stint in Chicago mental health ministry in the impoverished Lawndale area), confirmed Gil as the real deal, a vocal heir to the wholistic Wesleyan gospel.

His article and other articles opened my eyes to a dimension of holy living and witness that, bluntly, many evangelicals were content to ignore or dismiss as “just” politics. The magazine insisted on a clear Jesus-based foundation and refused to default into the sentimental do-goodism that rendered faith in the redeeming and risen Christ as nice but not necessary to social and economic justice. What sets apart modern Wesleyan evangelical faith from many well-intentioned vanilla American evangelicals is this.  “Love of neighbor” remains an inescapable and essential metric of authentic discipleship, separating the gospel sheep from the culturally religious goats…check out Matthew 25 for details!  Good News planted the seed of that Wesleyan vision in my faith.

Fourth, Good News offered voice and structure to witness and advocate to the larger denomination for traditional orthodox Wesleyan views.  I recall after GC1976 words of UM Bishop A. James Armstrong, that “the judgement of God” be on the church if malcontents continued to raise issues (specific to sexuality) that GC1976 had firmly and forever settled. He had Good News in mind as first among the disturbers of the brethren, not those who continued to protest (as was their right) and disobey (which was never their right).

The movement provided a voice and connection for evangelical clergy and laity. It would provide savvy and insight in understanding and advocating within a system largely annoyed by their presence.  Mobilizing votes, producing policy and position papers reflecting traditional Christian views, linking people and churches from across the denomination in common cause, and offering sage advice on how to survive and thrive in witness within a declining and increasingly dysfunctional system, all were part of the Good News mix.

Evangelical clergy remaining in the UMC (and I affirm their conscience in choice) will need to find another means of connection for unified voice and witness as the institution has now shifted (despite denials) firmly in another direction as reflected in GC2024. With the end of the magazine, only the UM News Service remains to offer the church information and opinion, together with the left-of-center UM Insight.  Healthy critiques are not official source priorities, for partly understandable reasons. Well-organized liberal/progressive groups legitimately have begun to run the table, now that many more traditional believers have departed.  Disconnected and unorganized remaining conservatives who rise at annual conference to express concern over major changes in such as the church’s sexual ethics, are dismissed as whiners who are sore losers. Note that not one ‘self-avowed, practicing’ evangelical has been elected a US bishop since 2019, and no, I am not saying that evangelicals are the only real Christians. 

As to voices of question and critique from the traditional wing of the UM church…one can hope some voice of balance will emerge in the legacy denomination but nothing coherent has appeared to date.  Absent a fresh voice as an in-house successor to Good News, theological traditionalists in the UMC will face a default irrelevance, marginalization, and functional exclusion from all but token “safe” positions of authority amid accelerating decline. The shift in UMDATA.ORG to combine in-person and online worship for attendance data may offer a cheery record of growth under the new progressive vision, until dismal and declining professions of faith and Sunday School attendance are compared. Good News pointed out such self-deceptions…” who follows in its train?”

OK, I offer this. What new group or voice can play a helpful, thoughtful, corrective voice in the new Global Methodist Church, akin to the Good News contribution to the UMC? When the stand-up is largely done and the honeymoon phase recedes and no more church transfer growth occurs, how will GMC leadership welcome and encourage its own version of a Good News witness, flowing from hearts and lips of solid evangelical faith and love for the church, with a prophetic voice that gently but clearly warns against self-deception or misplaced priorities?  ‘Sarcastics’ and professional whiners need not apply, but at some point, a reborn movement in the spirit of Good News can be a gift to the evangelical/orthodox Global Methodist Church, calling her to her best for the Kingdom.

The Good News movement kept me in the UM fold for over 50 years, reminding me and countless others that we had a right to a seat at the table and that maybe we embraced a healthy evangelical Wesleyan faith not because that is how we were raised or that’s what our culture told us or because we were intellectually immature or afraid to think. Maybe, just maybe, we embraced evangelical Wesleyan Christianity…because it’s true.  Good News servants of God, well done!

[1] Historian David Bebbington of the University of Stirling (Scotland) has identified strong emphasis on the Bible, Christ as atoning savior, the need for personal conversion and the call to evangelize as four qualities of an evangelical Protestant faith, which would include the evangelical faith of the brothers Wesley.