The Convention Hall seemed about 7/8s filled – the platform claimed 25,000 persons were there. This was the number registered in the previous weeks for the General Convention, so I don’t know exactly how many were there. I could not see the platform from my location; the large screens pulled you straight ahead into the service through the video screen. The highlight of the service for me was singing “Holiness unto the Lord.” Of course, the music score of the song reaches back to early 20th century “marches” and sounds cornball today (which, of course, is why it is good to sing). It is made for gospel piano, not contemporary large orchestra. The triumphalism of the lyrics has to deal with the datedness of the score in a delicious irony. The orchestra background could not take away from this irony, but added to it; the song became a proclamation of faith in the Triune God through Christ rather than the desires of a new majority to come in and take control of “history.” Immediately following we confessed the “Apostle’s Creed” together. In these two acts one could find witness to the Church of the Nazarene as a renewal movement within the church catholic with the charism to call the whole church to holiness -- what I think is best about our tradition.

If yesterday morning’s service was the “left-wing Hegelian” service, today’s was very much the “right-wing Hegelian” service. As good liberalism, the end result of a Hegelian dialectical system is individual liberty. The difference between the left and the right is how this end is to come to be in the struggle that is history – human agency of the market or government as guided by the Spirit working its way through history to an end of history.

The sermon was given by Dr. Paul Cunningham – who is retiring after many years of service to the church. My adult life in the Church of the Nazarene has been deeply affected by Dr. Cunningham. He was a friend of Jerry Falwell, and I remember when he was an “observer” for the United States in some elections in victories of rightist regimes in central America in the early 80s. His were the hands laid on Kathy for her ordination. While we would differ deeply “all the way down,” I deeply respect his faithfulness and labor and energy devoted to the church.

This was particularly poignant as the uncontrolled shaking of his hand was evident today in his sermon. Whether this is Parkinsons or some other illness, I do not know. No one has announced that he is ill, to my knowledge. But I will pray for him as he faces this new challenge in life that he will ultimately lose – but win at the same time.

The sermon took the benediction in the middle of Ephesians to speak of the “greater than we can imagine” God. The passage was interpreted through Cunningham’s pastoral experience of overcoming financial need through his own and his church’s giving to missions. At times the sermon moved toward talking about the Christian virtue of generosity, but more was the way the divine worked through the structures of society, like a wealthy banker and the city council, to help the financial situation of the congregation and advance the cause of evangelism. The message was that if we will be generous in working with the social structures of the world around us, God as a Force works with those to advance the cause of the Good within history for a separate, but ultimate eternal end. The structure of the sermon was a mild version of the prosperity gospel, with appropriate qualifications to keep it from a formula. The sermon was actually on the "revelatory" aspect of his experience through the church, not God's revelation in Jesus as witnessed to in Scripture. .

I had heard this story several times before – maybe going back to over 25 years ago to my seminary days when he spoke in chapel. The background, however, for this “final sermon” of a General Superintendent is the financial situation of the Church of the Nazarene. The “Great Recession” and the move of the International Headquarters and the resistance of “mega-churches” to pay their apportionments have led to drastic cutbacks. The Church of the Nazarene has recalled around 85 missionaries from the field in the last two years; Seminary’s budget has been drastically cut; headquarters had a 15% cut in their budgets last year with an additional 10% this year. Higher education institutions are stretched, some with the uncertainty of enrollment; others by loss of enrollment over the past several years.

The service then moved to the Lord’s Supper. Dr. Cunningham began with the familiar, for us at Mid-City, call to the Table from the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene – the oldest, unchanged part of the ritual. He then asked that the servers distribute the elements. I waited for the prayer of consecration or at least the words of institution. None came. He presented the elements with words given for partaking the elements.

We need to see this in light of the underlying right-wing Hegelian presuppositions. One remembers the death of Jesus from the past to participate in the dialectic that moves into the future. One does not participate “in the life of Christ to your souls comfort and delight” in which the temporal participates in the eternal through the body and blood of Christ in which the past and future become present. Everything remains in the realm of the immanent.

The service raises interesting questions. If the Manual requires the Lord’s Supper to begin the Assembly, and the Lord’s Supper has not been validly celebrated, what does that do to the proceedings following? What does this do to the ecclesial status of the Church of the Nazarene when its General Superintendents, an English translation for the Greek word, episkopos, the overseer or bishop, does not validly oversee the Lord’s Supper, the very rite for which they bear their authority in the first place – to ensure the integrity of its practice for the unity of the church. What outside a few, no one noticed what had happened.

Tomorrow the business of the assembly begins. The weekend has reinforced my hypothesis that the Church of the Nazarene in the United States is caught in this dialectic between the right wing and left wing Hegelians with administrators trying to manage the struggle into a creative force for the increasing market size of the church. My guess is that this is what will unfold in this week. A very conservative group, “Concerned Nazarenes” has stirred things up by their presence and attack on “emerging church” and “open theism” in the church, with an underlying push toward establishing biblical inerrancy as normative for the church – themselves getting sucked into the dialectic in their extreme form of Protestant evangelical piety, but losing any credibility because the goal is to manage the dialectic, not let the struggle to break into the open. Of course, the dialectic will not be managed but will manage as both the left and the right need each other for their own justification. The only way to “manage” the dialectic is to find a center outside of it where the God has revealed God’s own Self in the temporal in Jesus Christ, participated in through dying and rising with Christ in baptism, the celebration for the baptized of the Lord’s Supper as the center of worship, whose integrity is sustain through the office of the elder ultimately under the General Superintendent, and the reading of the Scriptures in light of this revelation of God in Jesus for the sanctification of the body of Christ in the world today.

Finally, the weekend has witnessed the profound impact that internationalization of the Church of the Nazarene will have. The movement is there and noticeable; demographically it will increase. Unfortunately, it was largely invisible today in the service – except for one verse of a song sung in Spanish. The internationalization of the Church of the Nazarene will be more evident tomorrow. I am not sure how this will affect the dialectic, whether or not those outside of North America, participate in the same cultural/philosophical/theological dynamics.