New Methodist Conference
Our Faith Journey
Wesley asked only two questions of anyone who sought to join his churches: 1. Has Jesus the Nazarene become the Christ for you? and 2. Does your daily life reflect that the Christ is at work in you? In this spirit, the NMC asks only these same questions.
Beyond this, we know (and Wesley insisted) that faith is not mental agreement with a set of doctrines; it is a radical trust in the transformative love of God as encountered through the Christ. On our faith journey in the NMC, we generally agree with the following reflections on our faith. We root our Christian understanding in the great Wesleyan-Anglican-Celtic wisdom tradition.
We believe in Original Blessing. All the worlds and all living beings are made in God's Image, and are
therefore good. We do believe each of us "falls" into sin (but not because of some mythical fore-parents named
Adam and Eve).
Sin for us means the acts and intentions that alienate us from God, each other, and ourselves.
Sin, no matter how grave,
can never destroy God's image engraved in the very fabric of our being.
We believe in God's Kin-dom. As God's Image is within us, so are the signs of God all around us. The great saints and mystics all teach us that when we open our eyes and use our ears (i.e., when we Wake Up), we can discover this Kin-dom, hiding in plain sight behind the collective veneer of our society.
We believe in Jesus the Christ. Jesus revealed the prodigal love and grace of God to the world in a unique way that calls us to personal commitment. [But we would not presume to say that only through Jesus can a person know God's will and grace.] We find that the Gospel is the most profound way to encounter the Christ as the Sacrament of God.
We believe in "things seen, and unseen". Science is slowly beginning to catch up to the spiritual masters. We know that the material world - what we can see and smell and touch - is but a small portion of the vast worlds around us. We can encounter unseen worlds. The great mystics attest to many kinds and orders of beings in these other realms.
We believe in the reality of evil. Evil is much more than "the absence of good". We don't pretend to know
if there is a personal Devil - though we certainly deny the dualist view of the Devil as God's equal opponent.
But we are acutely aware that as followers of the Christ,
we are called to do spiritual warfare against evil in
our daily lives, in all its banal and frightful manifestations.
We believe that all will be saved. In other words, we believe it is impossible for any human soul to be beyond reconciliation to God. There is nothing we can do - or leave undone - that can permanently separate us from God. And we affirm that God always stands ready and waiting for our home-coming.