[Oe List ...] Bishop Mathews' Address at BU School of Theology (Part I)

[Marilyn R Crocker]

Dear Colleagues,

The following is the address (sent in 2 installments due to list serve
rules) Bishop Mathews gave at Boston University at a special dinner
honoring Jim and Eunice.  Joe and I, and Don and Suemi Clark were in
attendance, along with officials of the University, faculty of the School
of Theology, other United Methodist bishops and a number of pastors from
the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church.  We asked
Bishop Jim if he would make his text available so that we could share it
with you via the listserve.  The [bracketed] words are from notes I took
as he elaborated during delivery. Eunice also spoke eloquently about her
father, for whom she served many years as personal secretary.  We found
it to be a very inspiring occasion that expanded our context and
appreciation of Jim and Eunice's ministry as well as the early years of
JWM's ministry.

Grace and peace,

Marilyn and Joe Crocker

BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY  
On the occasion of a Reception and Dinner in honor of
Bishop James K. Mathews and Mrs. Eunice Jones Mathews
To celebrate the naming of the
James and Eunice Mathews Chair 
held by the E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism 
Address by Bishop James K. Mathews 
April 11, 2005
 
Mr. Chairman and Friends:
 
Eunice and I are glad to be here.  At our stage of the journey, we are
glad to be anywhere.  We are also glad for any reason to come back to
Boston.  This is our first visit here since the Red Sox finally proved to
everyone else what Bostonians had known all along: that they were World
Champions.
 
You may say: “Well, if we liked it so much, why did we leave?”  It was
because we could not stand the competition.  I still like the quip of an
elderly woman in Boston:  “Why should I travel?  I’m already here!”  We
are pleased especially with this occasion of opening officially a Chair
of Evangelism – in which Eunice and I are honored, and her later father
remembered through the support of the United Methodist Foundation for
Evangelism.
 
We are immensely indebted to Boston University.  It was 68 years ago that
I enrolled as a graduate student in the School of Theology.  I was here
for only one semester.  That was long enough to be exposed to Borden
Parker Bowne and Boston Personalism; to learn from Edgar Brightman that
spirit or soul is “self-conscious selfhood.”  It was long enough for the
sheet to be lifted off of the Holy Ghost – and behold: out stepped Jesus,
of Nazareth.  The Holy Spirit makes Jesus our contemporary.  Then
something else happened.
 
On October 31, 1937 I went to evening worship at Trinity Church on Copley
Square, where that “Prince of Preachers,” Phillips Brooks, used to
witness.  Just outside its doors you will find St. Gauden’s fine statue
of Brooks.  In the shadows behind the preacher stands the Galilean with
his hand on his shoulder – the source of his power.  That night the
preacher was a great evangelist:  Bishop Azariah of Dornakal, the first
Indian to be an Anglican bishop in his country.  I do not know how it was
with others in the crowded church, but I know how it was with me.  Once
again, the Galilean seemed to have his hand on the preacher’s shoulder. 
As the bishop spoke of needs of the church in India, I was suddenly aware
that I must be a missionary.  The very next day in McDowell Chapel on Mt.
Vernon Street a representative of our Board of Missions said that they
urgently required a preacher in Bombay.  I immediately identified myself,
and by the following March I was in Bombay.  My whole world was changed
and I was changed.  Since then I have never been homesick but have been
at home anywhere.
 
Of course, there I met Eunice.  I had traveled a long way to find her. 
Through her I was brought into close association with her father, E.
Stanley Jones.  He came along at a time when evangelism had fallen into
disrepute.  He did much to reclaim it, but now it is again called very
much into question.
 
Of him, I will make several brief remarks.
 
1.      At the height of his powers, he was the most effective, most
convincing and most winsome interpreter of the Gospel I ever heard.  I
have often said of him that his hearers did not have to “check their
brains at the door.”  His many books are crammed with creative insights
for those who would do the work of the evangelist.
2.      He successfully argued the case that Jesus was not an alien or
outsider to Indian culture.  In doing this, he established the reality
that Christ is a stranger to no country or society.
3.      In his emphasizing the Kingdom of God – as Jesus did – Jones
bridged the gap between the individual and the social.  Of course others,
including John Wesley, have also addressed this dichotomy.
4.      In his encouragement of Round Table conferences involving
adherents of various religions, Stanley Jones anticipated the World
Council of Churches program of Dialogue, so helping to set the stage for
our further addressing this issue nowadays.
 
After a term as a missionary, I spent fourteen years as an executive of
the Board of Global Missions, where for six years I was charged with
coordinating Methodist witness in some fifty countries.  Then, in 1960,
to my astonishment I was elected bishop, although I was not a delegate to
the conference that elected me.  I was even more surprised when I found
that the bishop’s office was located on Copley Square, opposite to
Trinity Church.  In 23 years I had come full circle: now my field of
mission and evangelism was New England.  Though I must admit to having
been an unprofitable servant all along, I did my best to be a conveyor of
Good News.  My intention has been the same in the four other areas I have
served [as bishop]: Washington; Zimbabwe; Albany; and New York. 
Incidentally, I have never known an Episcopal area (diocese) I didn’t
like!
 
My brother, Joseph Wesley Mathews, was also basically an evangelist. 
Only last week I finished writing his biography.  Joe was known by some
as an ardent church renewalist and even a radical revolutionary.  But if
you did not know that he was an evangelist, you didn’t know him.  I do
not mean this in any conventional sense, for he was driven to challenge
the status quo; to make use of the insights of the best contemporary
theologians and to find effective ways of addressing the secular mind-set
of our day.  He paid a heavy price for doing so, but I am convinced that
his work must still be taken with great seriousness and his thought
revisited.  I have in mind particularly his emphasis on authentic
personhood, on humanness, on awakenment, on the summons to decision and
the universal obligation that this entails.
 
To this I add the fact that Joe and I were itinerant evangelists together
during the summer of 1936.  What we may have lacked in knowledge, we made
up for in zeal, and we always regarded our efforts in southwest Virginia
as successful.  In the summer of 1937 we tried our hands together in
organizing some thirty Bible classes in six counties in north central
Ohio,  They involved about 600 students in all.  We established circuits,
visiting each class weekly, emphasizing the study of the entire books of
the Bible.  This was done in deliberate imitation of John Wycliffe and
the Lollard movement of the 14th and 15th Century.  This was biblicism
combined with Augustinianism, as in a sense was Joe’s later work.  We
were grateful to learn that after more than twenty years some of those
classes still continued!
 
I know [the term] evangelism does not occur in the New Testament. 
Evangelist does, and in Greek the word means “King’s messenger;”  “The
Town Crier” [all is well]; “The Auctioneer” [all you have to sell is your
life].
 
Through the years it has been my practice to ponder the meaning of
evangelism, just as I have tried to find effective ways to practice it. 
For example, one working definition has been: “Good news is the
permission and power of God for men and women to live fully human lives
before Him (not as archangels or beasts or demons), this for the benefit
of all.”  I like even better Rudolf Bultmann’s related phrase:
 
Salvation is nothing else than the realization of that destined goal of
life and selfhood, which are both God’s will for us and our own real
intention for ourselves, though corrupted by sin.
 
(continued in second e-mail)