Washington National Cathedral

The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith

The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, host

While allowing that the mainline Protestant churches have gone through a period of decline, Willimon expresses optimism for the future of these traditions. “We’re in need of a kind of theological refurbishment,” he says, and then asks what the church talks about that other organizations do not discuss. “I would submit: God is a thing we do that others don’t do…People come to church to meet and be met by God,” he asserts in calling for a renewed examination of the church’s role.

Contrary to widespread belief and expectation, many Americans today have not grown up living and breathing a faith. Formation must be deliberate, and preachers must respond with caution when they are pressed to make the gospel “relevant.” Willimon declares, “We’ve been far too deferential to talking about what people are interested in.” The church needs to reassert its very identity: its beliefs and practices.

Willimon, the former dean of the Chapel at Duke University, recalls a conversation with a student who felt “weird” on campus because he was an Episcopalian. Willimon perceived that, like many mainline Protestants, “Episcopalians have absolutely no training or experience for being weird. So you’re going to have to…blaze new territory here… It’s a shock to American mainline Christians to wake up and feel like strangers or missionaries in the very culture we thought we owned. We thought we had devised a way that you could be a Christian in America without anybody getting hurt for following Jesus.”

Christians are now “swimming against the stream” in American culture, Willimon believes. More education is needed to help believers both understand their faith and respond to an unanticipated need to evangelize in their own culture.

Learning and living the faith will bring adventure to believers’ lives. “Christianity is this rich, bubbling, thick faith where God actually speaks to individuals by their very own names and calls them in different ways,” Willimon says.

About The Rev. Dr. William H. Willimon

William H. Willimon is a Bishop in The United Methodist Church in the USA, currently serving in North Alabama. He is best known as a theologian, writer, former Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, and as one of America's best known preachers. He has also taught at the Cathedral College.

With his stress on the wisdom of the Church through the centuries, he is sometimes associated with the paleo-orthodox movement. He has also been associated with the narrative theology movement.

He was elected to the episcopacy in 2004 and has written more than 50 books, garnering a reputation as an outstanding preacher, being named in a 1996 Baylor University survey along with Billy Graham as one of the 12 best preachers in the English-speaking world.  Some of this books include Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry, Resident Aliens:  Life in the Christian Colony (with Stanley Hauerwas), Calling & Character:  Virtues of the Ordained Life, and Rekindling the Flame:  Strategies for Vital United Methodism (with Robert L. Wilson).

Bishop Willimon received a B.A. from Wofford College in 1968, an M. Div from Yale Divinity School in 1971, and an S.T.D. from Emory University in 1973. He has also received several honorary doctorates.