Despite news, let’s consider what’s right with our church

In a recent edition of the United Methodist Witness my eyes were drawn to red flag headlines and messages about the seduction, illness, and decline of The United Methodist Church.
I have to admit that I could chime in with each article about faults and systemic issues that are pretty obvious.
There is a prophetic truth here I need to face, but also at times I feel beaten down and discouraged by such messages. 
Every chorus of doom and gloom needs its own counterpoint of gospel. I would encourage us not to live in denial of the problems and challenges that beset us but to keep a strong focus on the good news wherever we may discern it, proclaim it and live it.
On a regular basis we do well to ask ourselves, “What is right with the church?”
If we can’t find enough answers, then with God’s help we can produce some.
At every local church I have served, there have been long lists of joyous celebrations, miracles, missions, changed lives, discipleship, friendship, stewardship—lifted up in thanksgiving and praise to God. 
There have also been overwhelming lists of concerns, tragedies, wounds submitted humbly to God in prayer for forgiveness, healing, reconciliation, transformation, resurrection.
The Holy Spirit has been invoked; the holy scriptures read and studied; the word proclaimed; the sacraments administered; ministries organized and empowered; and lives eternally surrendered and committed in the hope of God’s saving grace for us in Jesus Christ.
In general the greatest malady of the church lies in the places where we become obsessed with our own human enterprises and achievements without trusting ourselves and our activities to the transcendent work of God among us.
We become like the ancient Hebrews who were tempted to trust more in chariots and horses than in the power and deliverance of God.
 Forgive me for risking oversimplification here, but the longtime strength and gift of our United Methodist movement lies in our belief in and our reliance upon God as an active, healing, life-changing, world-changing power in the here and now dimension of our lives.
We find great strength and hope in our present-day partnership with God, invoking and cooperating with God’s interventions in personal change and social change, in our ultimate salvation from the oppressive powers of sin and death in all their insidious manifestations.
United Methodists have traditionally referred to such intervention in terms of sanctification, personal holiness, social holiness and basic surrender to God’s higher power for help with those problems that are beyond our human power to overcome.
In our accommodation to the world, we are tempted to abdicate our sanctification language and our sanctification faith.
Wherever we give in to that temptation, we dance around the heart of the transcendent power for Christian ministry—a ministry of changed lives and changed social systems—change that infectiously draws others to the hope of Christ.