The service was advertised as the "NYI service". It began with recognition of all those under 35 -- applause, applause, but then with a wonderful reading from Scripture. The leadership knows it must hang on to its youth -- this is promising.

Then,however, a full orchestra began playing and a group of 30 well-dressed white middle aged people came out to lead in mid-western congregational music. The quality was very good -- Disneyland would have welcomed them. Then the NYI took over. A video clip spoke about an international youth work-n-witness trip to Ecuador -- in various languages, highlighting persons from throughout the world. Then a band broke out singing new praise music, including the anthem we often use for our Eucharistic service, "One Body, One Spirit". This was followed by a prayer by the head of the NYI (a British woman), then the Scripture reading (in Spanish) followed by an offering prayer in Spanish. The NYI service was basically over, and holiness camp meeting preaching was about to begin.

The transition was a bit bizarre. There was a steel drum band from Africa (never really introduced) who played the offertory. Fascinatingly, they played "The Hallelujah Chorus". The congregation followed European custom and stood during it. Post-colonial scholarship would call this a wonderful example of "hybridity" -- the colonial culture using some indigenous forms to play to the colonizing culture on its own terms.

The sermon was from General Superintendent Jim Diehl. His text was Isa 6:1-8. He preached a typical holiness camp meeting sermon -- in essenced, what the youth/church needed was an experience of the fire of the Holy Spirit to come upon them for cleansing and empowerment for service. Of course, it was given a therapeutic spin as a movement from negativity in engaging in social criticism (Isaiah before Isaiah 6) to a positive attitude for hope (Isaiah after Isaiah 6). But the most important thing was: personal experience of the Spirit!

Yet . . . . if I may speculate, there was something else going on in the sermon. I don't have a transcript, but I set up and noticed when Dr. Diehl said something like "the church does not receive the Spirit; individuals do." The major tone of the sermon was what a would call a "holiness solipism" -- rather than Gzus N Me; it was "Spirit N Me" -- we are were to the romantic bedrock of the Holiness movement where the church is only important as the mediator of the individual experience of the Spirit. William James would have been quite happy.

But there was an aggressiveness to Diehl's sermon that I, and at least one other person, thought may have been reactionary againt the Guatamela theological conference a few years back. I was not there, but from what I heard from various channels, the church as holy, what was held as "social holiness" was held up in opposition to the individualistic, personal doctrine of holiness that the Church of the Nazarene has historically embraced. This caused quite a bit of friction at the conference -- if reports were correct, even to a group of younger theologians withdrawing from the last worship service in order to write some sort of statement.

If this was the backdrop, Diehl was trying to bring the "NYI" back in line, and thus, more radically individualizing the holiness message than even the holiness movement historically has done. He ended the sermon with a story which basically told how the church is unnecessary -- an individual from Kosovo had gotten individually converted and then individually converted 100 more with the church or a pastor even present. Of course, the conversion happened out of the witness of the church in re-building housing that the United States and NATO had destroyed in the war, and of course, the group have become a church as they had banded together in bible study (if baptized, not by the Spirit, but by water). Yet that was not Diehl's spin. It was an individual helping another individual "get saved" by the "fiery experience of the Holy Spirit." Holiness solipsism."

Here is the issue for the future: a Western individualized colonial existence for the transformation of indigenous cultures into theologically sanctioned individual producers or consumers or discovering the catholicity of the church in solidarity with each other by the Father's gift of the Son through the Spirit. The NYI get it; it is, however, being opposed by those who set policy for the general organization. Yet we must never confuse the church for its administrative hierarchy, but always discover its center in Christ, the sacraments, and the faithful who live out the Kingdom through the works of mercy, and thus, are transformed by the Spirit into saints.

However, we also cannot play personal holiness off over against social holiness. These cannot be opposed to each other: Paul said "You (pl) are the body of Christ and individually members of it". To move to an abstract ecclesial holiness, even a sacramental ecclesial holiness, that does not form and produce holy persons (ie, saints) only shifts the problem to the other side of the spectrum. To oppose the public/social/political with the private/personal/individual presupposes a political liberalism that the church most reject. Indeed, we have to expand our notion of catholicity from contemporary solidarity within the Eucharistic practice of the church to one that also embraces the past and future saints as well.

More later today on my experiences yesterday. I'm off to a meeting!