Free Methodist News

Make Disciples

The following article, authored by Bishop Keith Cowart, beautifully reflects our call to Make Disciples, the third of three points of our FMCUSA Mission.

I remember a time when it was rare to find a mission statement posted in a corporate environment, much less in the church. Today, we find them everywhere, from Fortune 500 companies to fast-food restaurants, and most definitely, in churches. A stated mission can be a strategically important tool that helps create culture and provides much-needed clarity, focus, and directional guidance. Or it can be nothing more than a marketing tool that looks great in print but has almost no impact on the company or organization.

The mission of the Free Methodist Church is to “love God, love people and make disciples.” It is a wonderfully simple, yet profound call rooted in the very words of Jesus in His Great Command (Mark 12:30–31) and Great Commission (Matthew 28:18–20). It is clear, concise and sound. Our challenge is to devote ourselves to living it and not just talking about it.

My colleagues have taken us through the first two components of our threefold mission. My task is to tackle the final piece: making disciples. Unfortunately, decades of research provide striking evidence that while there has been no shortage of ink spilled or airways filled with talk of discipleship, the church has largely failed to deliver the goods. Church attendance is waning. The behavior and lifestyle of self-identifying Christians is not demonstrably different from those who claim no faith at all. Most troubling, millennials and post-millennials reared in the church increasingly reflect a worldview that is decidedly more secular than biblical.

Convicted by such findings, researcher George Barna spent six years interviewing more than 15,000 Americans in the hopes of identifying both the nature of spiritual transformation and the dynamics that impact that journey positively or negatively. He shares his findings in his book, “Maximum Faith,” in which he identifies 10 “stops” on the journey to transformation (see the accompanying graphic summarized from his book, which can be ordered at fmchr.ch/barnafaith). He also reveals the percentage of Americans who report progress to each stop along the way. The most obvious finding of Barna’s research is that few self-identifying Christians in America have moved beyond initial conversion and even fewer have progressed beyond involvement in church activities.

Of particular concern for those of us in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition is that stops 7-10 reflect a thoroughly Wesleyan understanding of the sanctified life we are ultimately called to live as Christians. A mere 11% of Americans report movement into that realm and a paltry 1% claim to have progressed to the kind of life Barna describes as “profound love of God” and “profound love of people.” Sound familiar? Unless Free Methodists make up a big chunk of that 1%, we’ve got some serious work to do!

While we could surely find this information depressing, I prefer to see it as a wakeup call that provides an opportunity to reclaim a thoroughly biblical view of and commitment to biblical discipleship. The days when it was beneficial or even popular in our society to be identified as a Christian are long gone … and that’s a good thing. History and the voices of our brothers and sisters around the world today tell us that Christianity tends to thrive most when it is unpopular and even opposed. The church has a way of sharpening its focus and strengthening its resolve when the safety net of social acceptance is removed and the only option is to embrace the dangerous, but life-giving path of biblical discipleship.

The Great Commission

Sometimes a scripture becomes so familiar that it loses its punch. I’m afraid that may be true of the Great Commission, so let’s take a moment to review the critical elements of this scripture that is so foundational to our understanding of discipleship.

First, we have to ditch the siloed view of evangelism and discipleship. The only true verb in the Great Commission is mathēteúō, which is Greek for, you guessed it, “make disciples.” This is Jesus’ central command, which by the way, is quite different from the aim of merely making converts or good church members. We are to invest our lives in helping others become fully devoted followers of Jesus, the ultimate fruit of which is profound love of God and people.

The way we are to fulfill that command is articulated by three participles that define the means of discipleship: going, baptizing and teaching. The command to “go” is the call to evangelism. As many have pointed out, the best translation is “in your going.” Evangelism is best carried out by ordinary people in the natural rhythms of everyday life. But the primary insight here is that in Jesus’ view, evangelism and discipleship are inseparable. You can’t make disciples without evangelism, and the whole point of evangelism is to make disciples. Evangelism without discipleship is like giving birth to a baby with no intent of bringing it home, caring for it, and nurturing it to maturity. Barna calls it “spiritual abuse.”

Second, we must understand the central role of community in discipleship. Why would Jesus link baptism and discipleship in the Great Commission? Without question, baptism allows a new follower of Jesus to publicly profess his or her faith and be received as one who now belongs to “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” But biblical scholars also point out that baptism was viewed as an initiation into the community of faith.

It might be surprising to some that Jesus focuses on baptism and initiation into Christian community before commanding us to teach, but it really shouldn’t be. The creation story reveals that God’s very nature is inherently relational — “Let us make humans in our image” (Genesis 1:26 GW). When Jesus launches His public ministry, he didn’t ask His disciples to read a book or attend a class. He invited them to “follow me” and “come and see.” Jesus’ approach to discipleship was to shape the lives of His followers in the whole-life context of personal relationships.

One of the most challenging implications of this insight is that we are to invite people into a relationship with Jesus and the community of faith at the beginning of their spiritual journey, not after they’ve demonstrated sufficient knowledge or right behavior to warrant it. While we have to hold this insight in tension with other scriptures that highlight the importance of repentance, obedience and accountability, we must embrace the truth that transformation is best viewed as the fruit, rather than a required condition, of authentic Christian community.

It is important to point out, however, that “going to church” and engaging in community are not the same things. Of the many qualities of biblical community, I’d like to highlight three that are critical to the journey of discipleship. The first is authenticity. The most fertile ground for growth in discipleship is a grace-filled environment in which honesty, openness and transparency are both modeled and encouraged. The second is mutual ministry. Life in community provides the opportunity to actually do the stuff we talk about on Sundays. As believers “do life together,” concepts like love, forgiveness and mercy are made concrete, providing the necessary means for shaping character. The third is diversity. While homogeneity may be a good church growth principle, it’s not a good discipleship principle. If we spend all of our time with people who are like ourselves, we have no one to show us our blind spots. However, when we engage in diverse community, we discover the gift of different perspectives, background and life experiences that stretch us and challenge us to move beyond what we already know. Together, these three qualities can significantly accelerate growth in discipleship.

Third, we must recover a commitment to transformational teaching. I once heard a popular author and proponent of the missional church movement make the statement, “Jesus wasn’t a teacher.” Really? Wasn’t that one of the names given Him by His disciples? Didn’t people marvel and say, “We’ve never heard anyone teach with such authority?” Aren’t the gospels filled with His teachings?

On the one hand, I get it. We have rightly witnessed a significant pushback to traditional, classroom-style teaching that often accomplishes little more than the transfer of information. Jesus made it clear that our aim in teaching is transformation, not information, when He commanded us to “teach them to obey” (Matthew 28:20 GNT). But in light of studies that call this generation of believers “the most biblically illiterate in history,” shouldn’t we consider the possibility that the pendulum has swung too far? In our attempts to emphasize community and mission, have we neglected the vital role of teaching God’s Word in a transformational way? Could it be that one of the reasons so many self-identified Christians are conforming to the world is because we have failed to give them the necessary means by which to renew their minds?

Our drift away from teaching the Bible has left our children and youth, in particular, highly vulnerable to the secular catechism of Hollywood, the music industry and social media. There is an all-out blitz to make secular values mainstream in our nation, and one of the ways that’s being accomplished is by casting Christian values as backward at best and bigoted at worst. Quite frankly, the world is doing a much better job of discipling our youth with its secular ideology than the church is at providing a strong, biblical foundation. It’s time for the church to answer the wake-up call and get serious about biblical discipleship.

The Cost of Non-Discipleship

Back in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the plague of “cheap grace” that had crept into the church of his day. The book was titled “The Cost of Discipleship,” something Bonhoeffer not only advocated in print, but embraced in life. He was one of the few German theologians who dared to take a stand against Hitler, and it ultimately cost him his life. This is how he described cheap grace:

“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate” (fmchr.ch/cheapgrace).

Interestingly, Barna’s research supports the idea that we do believers no favors when we emphasize the benefits but minimize the cost of discipleship. He found that only those believers who are willing to persevere through “spiritual brokenness” to the crisis point of “surrender and submission” ever progress to the ultimate aim of profound love of God and profound love of people. Unfortunately, most Christians in America choose to retreat to the safety and comfort of nominal Christianity, tragically unaware that avoiding the cost means they are also forfeiting the treasure of a wholly transformed life.

In “the Spirit of the Disciplines” (fmchr.ch/dwillard), Dallas Willard argues that the cost of non-discipleship is at least as great as the cost of discipleship: “Non-discipleship costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God’s overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil. In short, it costs exactly that abundance of life that Jesus said He came to bring (John 10:10).”

At the risk of being overly simplistic, it seems to me that the American obsession with membership and attendance growth has enticed us to “lower the bar” on discipleship, resulting in mostly nominal Christians who end up finding lukewarm spirituality to be wholly unsatisfying and unconvincing. Those who hold on for dear life remain in the fold but offer no compelling reason for their children, neighbors or colleagues to join them.

But what if we were to return wholeheartedly to our mission of making disciples who love God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength and demonstrate their love for others in tangible, meaningful ways? What if our very lives, transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit, became our greatest witness to a watching world? What if you believed these questions were not for someone else, but you?

Bishop Keith Cowart, our lead bishop, oversees Free Methodist ministries along the Eastern Seaboard, in the South Central United States and also in Europe, and the Middle East. He was elected a bishop of the Free Methodist Church – USA at General Conference 2019 and reelected in 2023. He previously served as the superintendent of the Southeast Region after 21 years as the founding lead pastor of Christ Community Church in Columbus, Georgia.

Love People

The following article, authored by Bishop Emeritus Matthew Whitehead, beautifully reflects our call to Love People, the second of three points of our FMCUSA Mission.

When our daughters were small, they loved watching “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Our youngest daughter, Melissa, said Mr. Rogers was one of her favorite people on earth. In fact, when the program was over, she’d kiss the TV because she loved him so much. Mr. Rogers’ love and respect for children was evident to most everyone who watched the program.

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is a powerful movie released in November and based on Fred Rogers’ relationship with a troubled journalist who was assigned to write a magazine article about Rogers. The journalist character in the movie is based on the real-life journalist Tom Junod. Junod reports he was initially skeptical about the assignment but came to experience the unconditional love shown to him by Fred Rogers. Writing in the December issue of The Atlantic, Junod makes this observation about his relationship with Fred Rogers:

“A long time ago, a man of resourceful and relentless kindness saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. He trusted me when I thought I was untrustworthy, and took an interest in me that went beyond my initial interest in him. … [The movie] seems like a culmination of the gifts that Fred Rogers gave me and all of us, gifts that fit the definition of grace because they feel, at least in my case, undeserved. I still don’t know what he saw in me, why he decided to trust me, or what, to this day, he wanted from me, if anything at all” (fmchr.ch/atlantic).

Mr. Rogers began every program the same way. He would put on his sneakers and change into a cardigan sweater while singing the show’s theme song, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is another way to think about the second part of the threefold mission of the Free Methodist Church: love God, love people, and make disciples.

Loving people compels us to lay down our preferences.

Each of us have preferences. We prefer different types of music, like particular foods, and enjoy very different forms of recreation. It’s a good thing that we don’t all agree. Wouldn’t life be boring if we all liked the same things?

Unfortunately, some people confuse preferences with foundational truth. Foundational truths are those bedrock pillars of our faith that must never change. For example, people confuse preferences with foundational truth when they strongly believe that music in a worship experience can only be one specific style and that all other forms of worship are not valid. The bottom line isn’t what we prefer but what is pleasing to God and what will draw people to consider a relationship with Jesus.

Jesus was so good at creating a welcoming environment for people. Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well (John 4) and engages her in a life-changing conversation. Jesus perfectly models truth and grace as He talks with her. Jesus never soft-pedals the truth but makes her feel so comfortable that she opens up to share the deep secrets of her life.

The response of this woman — transformed by meeting Jesus — is so powerful. She lives out what it means to tell others the good news about Jesus, “‘Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?’ They came out of the town and made their way toward him” (John 4:29–30).

Every local church needs to wrestle with this question of preferences. This is such a complex issue. Local church leaders need to ask: How do we both serve the people who are already a part of the church family and create a welcoming environment for those who are not yet here?

Our founders were committed to simplicity in dress and modesty so the poor would feel welcomed among us. In our culture, it’s hard to tell if someone is wealthy by the way they are dressed, but the principle is the same. We desire our churches to be welcoming places for people and to eliminate all the roadblocks that would prevent them from feeling at home.

One provocative question I believe is so helpful as we think about this issue is: Who gets served first? Of course, local churches should create environments where people can grow and mature who are already there, but church members must also think and pray about making sure their church is ready for company and willing to remove any roadblocks that prevent new people from being welcomed and feeling comfortable.

In my previous role as a superintendent for over 20 years, I’ve worked with pastors and local church leadership teams as they wrestled with these questions. In most cases, local churches want to be welcoming places, but the process of getting there can be painful. This requires a prayerful strategic effort on the part of pastors to cast a vision for this kind of a local church and leaders’ will to embrace the change that must take place.

Loving people demands a radical commitment to listen.

Really listening to people is a hard thing to do — especially to listen to people who may disagree with us. But the ability to talk graciously with someone who we may disagree with is a sign of spiritual maturity and sanctification. The closer we become to Jesus, the more we want to engage with people and listen to their stories and even the pain they’ve experienced.

Our society is so divided and so factionalized. It seems like it is no longer possible to disagree agreeably. When we only talk with people who agree with us politically and watch the same cable news programs we do, we miss the opportunity to hear other people’s perspective and live out a call to listen.

As Christ-followers we are called to stand in the gap and live out James’ admonition: “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry” (James 1:19). This is so hard to do; isn’t it? Some of us are very good at talking but not very good at listening. As Dr. Phil McGraw said, “We need to be long on ears and short on mouth.”

While having lunch with a friend recently, we talked about the incredible impact of the life of Fred Rogers and the recent renewed interest in him. As we talked, we both admitted we didn’t really get Mr. Rogers at the time. His unpretentious ways of communicating and simple sets and puppets seemed odd to us adults. We completely missed his profound respect for children and the powerful message he proclaimed.

The radical commitment to listen is one of the places where I think we miss the point today. We can mistakenly believe that to listen to someone different from us compromises who we are. Nothing could be further from the truth. Listening communicates acceptance in ways that most of us do not fully understand.

Loving people motivates us to take the gospel down the street and around the world.

Before the Free Methodist Church was a decade old, we began planting churches in different parts of the country, and by our 20s, we were sending missionaries around the world. This motivation to share the good news of Jesus came from the biblical mandate in Acts 1:8, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

An improper reading of this text leads to the faulty conclusion that once we have all the bases covered in Jerusalem we can go on next to Judea and so on. Rather, the scriptural admonition in Acts 1:8 is that these things should be happening at the same time and not one after the other.

Our worldwide missions movement now dwarfs the Free Methodist Church in the United States. The Free Methodist Church is now ministering in more than 80 nations around the world. This explosive growth outside the United States is something that should bring us pride as a ministry family.

But we also long for the day that kind of impact is being experienced here in the United States. We see the seeds of kingdom harvest on the horizon. We know this kind of rapid spread of the gospel is possible.

Loving people propels us to meet people’s needs and stand for justice and reconciliation.

Our ministry family traces its roots back to people who were profoundly committed to proclaiming the gospel and meeting the needs of people. This coupling of a personal and social holiness is in the DNA of who we are as Free Methodists.

Our amazing God is no respecter of persons. God deeply loves every person in the human family. There is nothing we can do to make God love us any more and nothing we can do to make God love us any less.

Justice and reconciliation are part of who are, but at times we’ve been silent when we should have spoken up. At times we should have been quiet and listened to the pain of people who’ve experienced racism and sexism in our ministry family.

It’s amazing to look around the Free Methodist Church today and see the needs that are being met in so many ways. We are living out this part of our DNA better than we ever have before.

Remember the words of the prophet Micah:

“He has shown you, O man, what is good;

And what does the Lord require of you

But to do justly,

To love mercy,

And to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8 NKJV)

The church that I pastored in Seattle developed a ministry to homeless women. We welcomed women into our church facility to sleep every night. This ministry became a vital part of who we were as a congregation. Because our family lived in a parsonage next door to the church, these women became our friends and neighbors.

While this ministry helped to meet the needs of homeless women in Seattle, the impact on our congregation and our family was profound. We realized that these women had so much to teach us. We learned about what it was like to be poor and homeless. The ministry was messy and full of complications, but, looking back, I think the most lasting change was in us.

We know many of the women in the shelter were fleeing domestic violence, and we suspect some of the others may have been battling their own drug and alcohol addictions, or were in the grips of mental illness. I asked our daughters looking back what that was like as young girls to be around that type of ministry, and one of my daughters recalled that she was never scared of the women; she was scared for them.

Our daughters were able to experience a gritty but real-life version of ministry. They have both grown to be women of God with huge compassionate hearts for the marginalized. We all trace that back to living next door to the shelter and frequent interactions with our homeless friends living next door.

Jesus defines what it means to meet people’s needs in the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 10:25–37). Jesus responds to a question from a teacher of the law that prompts Jesus to tell this powerful story. The text tells us that this religious leader asked Jesus this question to test him. He could not have imagined how Jesus would respond.

Jesus turns the tables and makes the religious people the ones who miss the point in this story, and the most compassionate and godlike response comes from the most outcast people group of Jesus’ day.

Loving people requires us to share the good news of Jesus.

We have a passion for people to come to know Jesus. We believe that a relationship with Jesus is the best decision a person can ever make. Social justice is in our DNA as a ministry family, but we also must know that was always coupled with strong proclamation of the gospel. One cannot be separated from the other. The Great Commission and the Greatest Commandment are the foundation of who we are.

The meeting of needs without sharing the message of Jesus is inadequate, and the proclamation of the gospel without the commitment to take a cup of cold water in Jesus’ name is irresponsible.

Jesus lays out this kingdom priority just before He returns to heaven, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:19–20).

Both evangelism and discipleship are critical in following God’s mandate for us and are both a part of what it means to love people. The proclamation of the gospel and making disciples are inseparable. You really can’t have one without the other. Local churches should intentionally provide opportunities for people to be presented with the good news of new life in Christ and then offer an appropriate way for people to respond. God-honoring local churches will also provide clear avenues for people to grow in their faith and become deeply rooted in the body of Christ.

People all around us are desperately looking for persons and local churches to love them and help them discover what it means to find a life-giving relationship with Jesus.

Love God. Love People. Make Disciples. Won’t you be my neighbor?

Bishop Emeritus Matt Whitehead was elected the lead bishop of the Free Methodist Church – USA at General Conference 2019 and served through July 2023. He previously served more than 20 years as the superintendent of the Pacific Northwest Conference after 17 years as a local church pastor.

Love God

The following article, authored by Bishop Emerita Linda Adams, beautifully reflects our call to Love God, the first of three points of our  FMCUSA Mission.

Our Free Methodist mission statement says simply that our reason for being comes down to three things: love God, love people and make disciples. The first and foremost of these three — the foundation of it all — is to love God.

This primary call of a Christian can be misunderstood by exaggerating any aspect of it. For instance, some take the call to love God above all else as pure demand, to be dutifully obeyed by whatever determination we can muster. It is a command, after all. Jesus quoted verses from Deuteronomy when He named it the greatest commandment: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:30–31).

To those who equate love with duty, aligning all the powers of our will with reverent regard for God and obedience to His law is what God requires as our chief aim.  Love equals right actions, with no regard for relationship or emotion. Our proper response to God is to know the right thing and do it.

The opposite tendency is to hear the word “love” sentimentally. If love for God is a feeling, then we should constantly try to conjure up the right emotions. Logically oriented personalities can never or rarely achieve this heartfelt devotion; poetic descriptions by others leave them baffled. If loving God is all about feelings of adoration and worship, we may chase this experience through repetitious praise music or other attempts to recreate the memory of a transcendent connection we once felt. To bring our “heart, soul, mind and strength” to God means to be all in, all the time, with all our powers so we can always feel devoted to God. Right actions and obedient choices take a back seat to our emotional state in defining how God wants to be loved.

If we’re not familiar with other religions, we might not realize how radical it is for the Christian to relate to God in terms of love in the first place. Deities normally demand appeasement or submission, not love.

Most radical of all is the Christian claim that the invitation to love God springs from God’s very being as a sacred community of three whose creative energy is love. God is not solitary but has existed from eternity past in a mutually loving Trinity. Jesus alluded to this as He prayed, “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world” (John 17:24).

Genesis 1 reveals the Spirit of God brooding over Creation, drawing forth life, beauty and goodness, climaxing in the creation of human beings in God’s image. The love of the triune Godhead overflows to the created ones. Made in the image of a God who exists in eternal love, we were made by love and for love. Therefore, our love for God is grounded in God’s extravagant prior love for us.

The Old Testament continues to reveal God’s essential nature as love, expanding the meaning of the term. In Exodus we read: “Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin’” (34:5–7).

Mutual Faithfulness

This God invites the people of Israel into a covenant relationship in which God offers love and loyalty and asks for a corresponding exclusive devotion from the people. This is the pattern: God loves and commits first and offers a relationship based on mutual faithfulness. Many passages throughout the Bible reveal this order of things, but perhaps the most succinct is the Apostle John’s statement, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

If our capacity to love God is reciprocal, offering back to God that which has first been given to us, how can we describe that first love? For thousands of years, mystics and theologians, preachers and everyday “beloved ones” have tried to capture in words the indescribable. They have used potent images like God pouring energy into the soul — drawing out greater vitality and love — and forceful terms like “hungry love” and “stormy love” (the words of 14th century Flemish mystic John Ruysbroeck) that elicit storms of love in response. Like 20th century British theologian Evelyn Underhill, they describe love that encompasses “agony, passion, beauty, sternness and pity” and results in selfgiving love or charity in the recipient (fmchr.ch/eunderhill). Following biblical imagery, God’s love has been envisioned as that of a caring shepherd, a good father, a protective mother bear, a loyal friend, and even a divine lover and bridegroom. Each metaphor reveals an aspect of this God who is Love.

The supreme example of love is Jesus, who freely gave His life in sacrifice for our sake. In Philippians, we read that Jesus humbled Himself “by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross” (2:8). And in Romans, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (5:8).

Transforming + Empowering

Ordinary people transformed by this divine love can respond in heroic acts of self-giving. The biblical story and the story of the church down through the ages are filled with examples of the transformative power of God’s love in the human heart. Love for God emanates in humble service to the poor and powerless, works of justice and mercy near and far, forgiveness for those who have caused harm, carrying the mission of God to the ends of the earth, bold proclamation of the gospel of grace even under persecution, battling the forces of evil in their many guises, and countless examples of compassionate, sacrificial service to one’s family, church, community and world.

Completely comprehending this divine love cannot be accomplished by human wisdom or reason, even in a lifetime of effort. The Apostle Paul prays that the Ephesian Christians and all of God’s holy people — by extension including us — will be supernaturally empowered to grasp this incomprehensible love: “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:17b– 19).

His sequence is this: First, we become grounded (rooted, established) in the experience of love. Let that soak in for a minute! Advancing toward grasping the enormity of God’s love begins by first experiencing love at ground level and below, down to our roots. This essential starting point prepares us to receive the power, in community, to comprehend at increasing levels the expansive dimensions of Christ’s love for us and, by implication, for one another. This growth leads to the seeming impossibility of knowing something that surpasses knowledge, this ultimate love. Why? Not just to apprehend a fact, but so that together we can be filled with the overflowing fulness of God.

Knowing Leads to Loving

I hope you’ve been privileged to know someone so winsome and attractive that people comment, “To know her is to love her.” Does a name and face come to mind for you? Far more profoundly than in the case of a lovely person, this is true of the Living God. To know God is to love God. This should be our quest. All our acts of worship and spiritual disciplines have as their aim this fuller and deeper knowledge of God, so that as we know God more, we will love God more.

As Jesus taught, the commands to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves cannot be separated. Loving God leads to loving people — even ourselves! To know God is to know love and to become loving. The Apostle John put it this way, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:7–8).

To love God with our heart, soul, mind and strength is a big enough challenge for a lifetime. The longer we live and press on to love God, the more we yearn to place our integrated selves — body, emotions, intellect and will — at God’s disposal, available for God’s purposes, as our act of responsive love. Our fragmented and distracted selves come together to will one thing; in this centering we find peace.

What holds us back from receiving God’s love? Often it is fear. If we can catch a glimpse of the goodness and love at the heart of God, we can lose our fear and surrender to this power that pursues us. In his “Confessions,” St. Augustine wrote of his regret for wasting the early years of his life before his conversion, “Oh Beauty so old and so new! Too late have I loved Thee!”

Like the Prodigal Son in Jesus’ parable (Luke 15:11–32), Augustine had run from the Father’s love and squandered years of his life. Yet when he came to himself and found the courage and humility to return to the Father, he discovered mercy, welcome, honor and belonging. All he had sought in the far country had been waiting for him back home in the Father’s house. Although in his humiliation, the Prodigal Son offered to become his Father’s servant, the Father would have none of that! He fully restored him to sonship, with all its rights and privileges.

In the same way, God gives the Holy Spirit to us so we can escape the prison of fear and know that we are God’s very own, beloved children. “The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (Romans 8:15- 16).

John Wesley, founder of Methodism, championed this “inward witness of the Spirit” (fmchr.ch/jwesley). By a powerful personal experience of God’s indwelling Spirit, he realized that God works to make the believer “perfect in love.” Wesley testified of his own transformation and taught on this New Testament theme, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18). What a hope-filled doctrine! The One who loves us perfectly desires to overcome our fear with love, completing us and freeing us for His holy use. We will never advance to perfection in performance or overcome the possibility of failure, but our motive can become pure love.

“Do You Love Me?”

At the very end of Jesus’ time on earth, standing on the seashore like the first time they had met, Jesus asked a pressing question of his friend Peter. “Do you love me?” And Peter answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus repeated the question and Peter repeated his answer. The third time Jesus asked, Peter was hurt. He replied, “Lord, you know all things. You know that I love you.” Jesus’ response all three times was to call him to ministry on Jesus’ behalf, “Feed my lambs.” “Take care of my sheep.” “Feed my sheep.”

This is an amazing, poignant scene (John 21:15–19). Imagine! The incarnate God “popping the question” to a mere human in the most vulnerable way. Like Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof ” asking his wife, Golde, “Do you love me?” Jesus wants to hear from Peter the most personal words, “I love you.”

In the “Fiddler” lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, Golde reviews their 25 years of shared marital life with all its work and hardships, then ends with, “For 25 years I’ve lived with him, fought with him, starved with him, 25 years my bed is his. If that’s not love, what is?” Tevye triumphantly proclaims, “Then you love me!” She admits, “I suppose I do.” “And I suppose I love you too” (fmchr.ch/fiddler).

Both Peter and Jesus could have listed Peter’s actions showing his love — he had left all to follow Jesus. For three years he had been apprenticed to this rabbi, observing and learning and being mentored in the deepest truths of life. But beyond the realm of teaching and learning, following and taking on the role of disciple, preparing for even greater leadership in this movement in the future, Jesus wanted to hear in Peter’s own voice what was in Peter’s heart. “Do you love me?”

I hope you never get over the astonishing reality that the God of the universe wants your love. Whether expressed in rapturous song or mundane sheep-feeding faithfulness, I pray you’ll never grow tired of offering yourself back to the Lover of your Soul in wholehearted devotion. It’s your reason for being.

Bishop Emerita Linda Adams, D.Min., was elected to the Board of Bishops at General Conference 2019 after serving 11 years as the director of International Child Care Ministries. She previously served as a pastor in New York, Illinois and Michigan. Sher currently serves the Free Methodist Church in Canada as their bishop.