• Order the DVD of this Sunday Forum.
  
• Watch this Sunday Forum online any time you like.
  
• Listen to or download this Sunday Forum (mp3).
  
  

While allowing that the mainline Protestant churches have gone through a period of decline, Willimon expresses optimism for the future of these traditions. “We’re in need of a kind of theological refurbishment,” he says, and then asks what the church talks about that other organizations do not discuss. “I would submit: God is a thing we do that others don’t do…People come to church to meet and be met by God,” he asserts in calling for a renewed examination of the church’s role.

Contrary to widespread belief and expectation, many Americans today have not grown up living and breathing a faith. Formation must be deliberate, and preachers must respond with caution when they are pressed to make the gospel “relevant.” Willimon declares, “We’ve been far too deferential to talking about what people are interested in.” The church needs to reassert its very identity: its beliefs and practices.

Willimon, the former dean of the Chapel at Duke University, recalls a conversation with a student who felt “weird” on campus because he was an Episcopalian. Willimon perceived that, like many mainline Protestants, “Episcopalians have absolutely no training or experience for being weird. So you’re going to have to…blaze new territory here… It’s a shock to American mainline Christians to wake up and feel like strangers or missionaries in the very culture we thought we owned. We thought we had devised a way that you could be a Christian in America without anybody getting hurt for following Jesus.”

Christians are now “swimming against the stream” in American culture, Willimon believes. More education is needed to help believers both understand their faith and respond to an unanticipated need to evangelize in their own culture.

Learning and living the faith will bring adventure to believers’ lives. “Christianity is this rich, bubbling, thick faith where God actually speaks to individuals by their very own names and calls them in different ways,” Willimon says.

About the Guest

William H. Willimon is bishop of the United Methodist Church North Alabama Conference, former dean of the Chapel and professor of divinity at Duke University, editor-at-large for The Christian Century, and author of nearly 60 books on Christian ministry.

• More about Bishop Willimon
• Read recent articles and sermons by Bishop Willimon
• Read Bishop Willimon’s online blog, “A Peculiar Prophet“
• Order Bishop Willimon’s books from Amazon.com