I am ordained as a Free Methodist minister, and have served in this denomination for the whole of my pastoral ministry. Historically, the Free Methodist Church has always placed a strong emphasis on ministry to the poor, the disenfranchised, the down-and-out. The denomination emerged in the 1860s in America, being birthed out of anti-slavery protests and calls for religious reform in the Methodist denomination of the time. B. T. Roberts, one of the founding leaders of the Free Methodist Church, was famously expelled from the Methodist Church for his work advocating—or agitating, as his detractors had it—to bring slavery to an end, and for calling out the Methodists for its complicity with the practice.
This original concern for social justice is woven deeply into the Free Methodist ethos. Traditionally the “Free” in Free Methodist signaled, among other things, that the FMC was about “freedom for slaves” and wanted “free pews,” that is, equity for the poor. It was an impulse towards compassion and social reform that traces all the way back to John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement. He is famous for his conviction that “works of mercy” are, in fact, means of grace, for his claim that “there is no holiness but that of social holiness.” By this he meant that the transformation that the gospel is meant to effect in the believer’s life must play out “socially” for them—in their relationships, their neighborhoods, their country and communities. This was a conviction that the early Free Methodists took deeply to heart.
I did not grow up Free Methodist, finding my way to the FM when I was looking for my first ministry appointment after graduating with my Masters of Divinity, back in 2008. The tradition I grew up in was much more focused on the “spiritual” dimensions of the Gospel—the justification by faith and the salvation by grace that the scriptures promise all who confess with their mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in their hearts God raised him from the dead. It actually had little time for “the Social Gospel,” and more than a little suspicion of it. Wasn’t “social justice” what the mainline denominations worried about, at the expense of evangelism, and because they’d lost their biblical moorings? Wasn’t it dangerously close to a “works-based-righteousness” that flatly contradicted the glorious truth that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and explicitly not by works? And if that were true—that good works are unnecessary to salvation—well, to put it bluntly: why bother?
I should add that for a space of time in my young adult years, I participated in a Christian Youth Ministry that was heavily focused on social justice and social transformation—the so-called “Social Gospel.” They were so focused on it, in fact, that the hand-wringing over neglecting evangelism and/or watering down the Gospel that the Christians in the churches of my childhood might have done, would have been lost on them. Worse than lost on them: it would have been distasteful. For many of the friends I made in this Youth Ministry, the Gospel was social justice, worship was social action, and anything that took things like sin, sanctification, the atonement, or the Holy Spirit too seriously risked losing sight of the real work of the believer: to be about the work of the Kingdom: giving water to the thirsty, food to the hungry, and solace to the harried.
I’ve lived in both religious extremes, is my point: the liberal Social Gospel extreme, and the conservative sola fide extreme. Which is why, when I first became a Free Methodist minister, I found this denominations “both/and” when it came to social justice and personal devotion so refreshing. In Free Methodism, both works of mercy (social action for the sake of Jesus) and works of piety (personal devotion guided by the Holy Spirit) are both means of grace, and equally important.
This may be why I’ve always appreciated the emphasis the band U2 has always placed, through their music, on making a real difference in the world: their recognition that their massive platform has given them a massive voice to speak up on social issues, and their willingness to use that platform to promote a worthy cause.
In saying this, I acknowledge that this is also a feature of U2’s music that has turned off many a would-be fan. The band—and especially their lead singer, Bono—is just too damned preachy. Their penchant for supporting the “flavor of the month” when it comes to social issues was hilariously parodied when they appeared, as themselves, on The Simpsons. When Homer interrupts their concert to discuss waste management, as part of his bid to become Springfield’s next Sanitation Commissioner. The audience boos uproariously, Bono gives him the stage, because, in his words, “waste management affects the whole damn planet!”
On a serious note, however, there’s this poignant and earnest denunciation of the 1987 Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen, Ireland.
Musically, I was raised on the Beatles and the Beach Boys, as a child, and came of age as a teen listening to acts like White Snake and Van Halen. When I first encountered U2 in the late 80s, I was listening almost predominantly to glam metal, with all its hedonistic anthems to debauchery echoing in my head. In those days, encountering a band like U2, that took its vocation as a rock band so seriously, was world transforming for me. Here was a band that believed, actually, that songs should be about something, striving towards something, calling for action to something, and that that something ought to be something important.
As my musical education grew, I would learn that this impulse towards using music, and rock music, especially, to channel the rebellious spirit of youth towards social justice traced back much further than U2, to the protest songs of Bob Dylan, Elvis’s determination to cross racial barriers, or the folk tunes of Woody Guthrie.
What U2 did, however, that none of those who went before them did—or at least, they did it more explicitly and more successfully—was to marry their passion for social change with a spirituality that was always latently Christian, and at times explicitly so. As much as it is possible to do so in a genre as full of contradictions as rock music, U2 brought together a cry for social justice and a yearning for spiritual transcendence in the same place.
A song like “Pride (In the Name of Love),” or “Sunday Bloody Sunday” are great early examples of this; songs like “Where the Streets Have No Names” are more classic examples; songs like “Crumbs from Your Table,” “Walk On,” and “Yahweh” are instances from much later in the U2 catalogue.
In a previous post, I discussed Contemporary Christian Music’s musical debt to U2. What CCM never borrowed, however, is U2’s conviction that music should not only reach up, towards the divine; it should also reach out, to the oppressed, the down-trodden, the exploited. In my opinion, the worship music of the modern evangelical church is the poorer because of this. Almost all modern worship songs adopt a “just-me-and-Jesus” posture, telling Jesus how much we love him and how much he has done for us. I can’t remember ever hearing a song telling Jesus that we were going to give a cup of cold water to a parched child, or clothing to the naked stranger, because we knew that in doing so we’d be expressing out love for him.
Maybe that’s too much to ask for, in a corporate worship setting, but if the contemporary evangelical church was going to borrow more from U2 than simply some haunting chord progression and the creative use of guitar effects pedals, it could do worse than to borrow their belief that works of mercy and acts of piety are not at odds. They are, in fact, two beautiful sides of the very same worshipful coin.
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