Editorial: Farewell, Methodist Catholicism

The United Methodist Church has heaved with anguish since its General Conference voted last summer to maintain and enforce the traditional definition of marriage in the Book of Discipline. Church leaders hired an experienced mediator, and plans were announced a few weeks ago for an amicable separation, the final decision to be made at a General Conference later in the year.

Anglicans, Methodists, and Evangelicals

The Hanoverian Church is usually consigned to oblivion by 21st-century commentators in search of more familiar names and more “relevant” theological pickings.

The double cure

Toplady's “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me” qualifies as one of the richest hymns, with its biblical allusions, soteriological vision, and complex history.

John Wesley, Catholic forerunner?

John Henry Newman wrote, "Who would not rather be found even with Whitfield and Wesley, than with ecclesiastics whose life is literary ease at the best, whose highest flights attain but to Downing Street or the levee?"

Advent gumbo

The work of preparation involves paring or trimming things out of our lives, like using a paring knife to trim the vegetables and cut away the fat from the chicken in a gumbo.

Congregations rule

The bottom-up, congregational model is legally mandatory in Texas. So, a professedly Methodist congregation is only connectional if it chooses to be so and signs legal documents to that effect.