[Oe List ...] Bishop Mathews' Address at BU School of Theology

[Marilyn R Crocker]

Dear Colleagues,

The following is the address 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.
 
I have often tried to distinguish implicit evangelism in which Jesus
Christ is the Evangelist, and explicit evangelism in which Jesus is the
Evangel and we are the evangelists.  Implicit evangelism aims at “the
true humanization of all humankind.”  This seeming exaltation of humanity
has its warrant in the central doctrine of the Christian faith:
incarnation.  Wherever the humanization of life is taking place, there –
in some sense – God is at work.  I mean, that wherever life and hope are
given, whether in slum clearance, economic betterment, better housing,
prison reform; wherever racial and economic justice are being addressed;
wherever there is healing for the body and mind, help for the alcoholic,
educational improvement; wherever life is laid down for the welfare of
mankind (even as in Gandhi’s Salt March) – there God is somehow engaged
in a totally redemptive task.  Wherever the future is calling into
question the past – there Jesus Christ is.  Explicit evangelism is to
identify all this for what it is: God’s work.
 
This suggests that implicit evangelism goes on even where explicit
evangelism may not be possible, as in some Communist lands.  God
continues to embarrass us because His love is so undiscriminating and
because His grace is so frequently anonymous, showing up in the most
unexpected places.
 
Nowadays the typical evangelist, it has seemed to me, is so anxious to
speak that he/she too quickly turns to the Word of the Gospel.  In the
New Testament all four of the Evangelists do just the opposite.  They
first speak of the Deeds of Jesus – addressed to real human needs, but
which raise also the question: Why?  The Word of the Gospel then becomes
relevant:  “God is at work in the world forever showing love for all. 
Won’t you play your part?”
 
Meanwhile, I have often been deeply troubled that much which passes for
evangelism today (especially televangelism) would equip people for
practicing Victorian moralism, not for the living of these days.  I am
reminded of the assertion that the British General Staff was always
prepared for the previous war.
 
Seminary courses in evangelization must be directed toward correcting
this serious fault.  The other day I came across the phrase, “If you are
not living on the edge, you are taking up too much room!”  We must be on
this cutting edge.
 
I simply list a few “hints” of the modes that might be explored in
pursuit of this goal of effective contemporary evangelization:
 
·        The teaching of Presence
·        [The Meaning of] Liturgy [and I reference] Archbishop Michael
Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church
·        New Congregations
·        New Hermeneutic [scripture interprets us]
·        Correlation preaching (Mark 2)
·        New Paganism
·        [Religion] and the Arts (Han Snel) [“I aim to bring out the
great in everyone.”]
·        Kingdom Emphasis
·        Lord – Servant – Others
·        Boston Personalism – “John Paul II Loves you”  – you, the
person, “a divine creation, intrinsically inclined toward God.”
·        Love and Justice, the plural of love – [Word and Deed]
 
Here we are at a great modern university.  It offers a particular
challenge and opportunity.  I recall years ago that I heard Billy Graham
preach at Cambridge University.  I was standing in the rear next to two
dons.  One commented to the other, “Graham is from Jerusalem.  This is
Athens.”  Well, this is Athens.  I have found myself hoping that at
Boston University we could see interdisciplinary registration; or perhaps
credit courses open to all, which would afford a concentrated glimpse
into the various fields of learning.  Perhaps Bryan Stone [ E. Stanley
Jones Professor of Evangelism at BU School of Theology] could be a
catalyst toward such a goal.
 
May I recall that more than thirty years ago my father-in-law was a kind
of “adjunct Professor” of Evangelism at Boston University School of
Theology.  He taught several students from his hospital bed – for he was
suffering from a stroke.  I believe that at least one of his students may
be here tonight.
 
Then I recall that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a former doctoral student
here.  President Harold Case held a reception for him just before King
left for Scandinavia to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.  When Eunice was
introduced to Dr. King he told her in substance, “It was your father’s
book on Mahatma Gandhi that triggered my interest in non-violence.”  Let
me read to you the very passage which prompted King:
 

the Mahatma repudiated with all his might the idea that the method of
truth and nonviolence was used because you are weak and cowardly.  He
insisted that it was the method of the strong, and only the method of the
strong.  (p.88)
 
And so it is, that into a world replete with bad news, Good News has a
way of breaking in, repeatedly.
 
Thanks be to God that this is true.