TITLE: Good News CONTACT: Linda Green 378(10-71B){190} Nashville, Tenn. (615) 742-5470 July 1, 1997 Good News celebration emphasizes revival and renewal LANCASTER, Pa. (UMNS) -- Revival and renewal of the United Methodist Church was the focus of this year's Good News celebration here June 23-26. From the opening ceremony to the closing session, the annual assembly of the self-described renewal movement and evangelical voice within the denomination concentrated on the theme "Stirring Up and Spurring On." More than 500 United Methodists from across the country listened as speakers used the theme to advance ideas about changing the denomination in a way Good News supporters claim is more in keeping with Scripture. Proponents also called on the church to reclaim its doctrinal identity and be centered in Jesus Christ. Thirty years ago, the organization and its Good News magazine was one of the first movements established to voice concern about the health of the larger church and the United Methodist Church in particular. The bi-monthly magazine, mailed to approximately 68,000 people, provides a forum for discussing differing perspectives on policies embraced by the denomination and seeks to witness to Jesus Christ. According to the Rev. James V. Heidinger II, chief executive, "Good News is not the only player on the block." He said that "if there was ever a time the church needed theological exchange, it is the day in which we live." Good News' directions over the years have come from the struggles in the life of the early church, he said. "We thank God for the tension the church sometimes has to go through. We need the kind of sharpening that comes from theological exchange." Citing the homosexual debate and the recent annual conference votes on the Reconciling Congregation Program, Heidinger said "the issue is not whether we are to be in ministry to those struggling with sexuality but whether the church will affirm that practice and behavior." Another sponsor of the convocation was the Northeastern Evangelical Connection. It was organized in 1994, as an affiliation of United Methodist clergy and laity in the northeast who "sense a common bond in desiring to stand for scriptural orthodoxy as it applies to the life, ministry, mission and theology of the United Methodist Church." A new connection of evangelical clergywomen was launched during the convocation. Representatives of Good News-affiliated groups also made presentations and provided displays. In the opening session, the Rev. Mark Horst, pastor at Park Avenue United Methodist Church, Minneapolis, and member of the Confessing Movement Steering Committee, gave a background lesson on the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church. He said the movement began as a broad coalition of traditionalists, Wesleyans, centrists and evangelicals to proclaim the lordship of Jesus Christ in the denomination. The movement exists, he added, to enable the church to retrieve its classical doctrinal identity and live it out as disciples of Jesus Christ. He claimed there are "cracks in the foundation" of the church today, membership decline and "bureaucratic inefficiency." The cracks have occurred because of the denomination's "inability to confess with clarity, with enthusiasm and with a decisiveness the faith of the Christian Church." Criticisms of the Confessing Movement, he said, "are probably the best signs of the cracks in the basement." In particular, Horst addressed a document titled "The Critical Challenge to the Confessing Movement," written by seminary presidents, prominent clergy and theologians. "I think the content of this [document] demonstrates that very significant leaders in our church are in danger of confusion in scripture, in creed, in Wesleyan heritage, in theological integrity and in social witness." According to Horst, "we verses they" arguments say the church has substituted Scripture and interpretation of Scripture for the word of God. He said the church has allowed issues of biblical interpretation to come between it and God's word, which "cuts like a sword, crushes like a hammer and stands like a rock in a storm against wind and wave." The church is in crisis, he continued, because leaders see "talking about Jesus Christ as an exercise on Christocentric idolatry." He said Jesus must be at the center of the church and that renewal will come when he is lifted up."There is power in the name of Jesus, in the name of God." Also speaking of a Christ-centered church, Faye Short, executive director of the women's program arm of Good News, said her RENEW network is comprised of "women of faith and principle whose Christian heritage is founded, not on mere human invention, but on divinely revealed truth." She based her address on "A Christian Woman's Declaration," to be released by the Ecumenical Coalition on Women and Society, a project of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. RENEW's ministry is two-fold and calls the Women's Division and United Methodist Women of the churchwide Board of Global Ministries to accountability and works for renewal with the women of the church. Policies and practices of the Women's Division have been "more secular than sacred, and often very politically partisan, leaning far to the left theologically," she claimed. Another speaker, the Rev. Idalmis Garcia, an Afro-Cuban pastor of Iglesia Christiana Juan Wesley Methodista Unida, Miami, Fla., declared that America is in distress and while the church constantly utters that children are the church of tomorrow, "the church of tomorrow has some scary statistics." She said, the church needs people who will stand up for "thus sayeth the Lord." She said it doesn't need "microwave" sermons but "spirit-filled people with a spirit-filled message." Other speakers for the celebration included: David Stevens, executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Society; the Rev. Violet Fisher, a district superintendent in the Eastern Pennsylvania Annual Conference; the Rev. Scott Field, pastor of Wheatland-Salem United Methodist Church, Naperville, Ill.; the Rev. Seth Asare, pastor of the United Methodist Church of Newtonville, Mass. # # #