Memphis Theological Seminary / Centenary United Methodist Church
April 16, 2020
Good evening, and welcome to the
inaugural Autura Eason Williams Lecture.
I’m Johnny Jeffords, Director of
the Methodist House of Studies at Memphis Theological Seminary, the current, and
as it happens, the last steward, of the very work we are here tonight to carry
forward.
I bring you greetings from
President Jody Hill, Dean Carmichael Crutchfield, and Dr. Farris Blount, Chair
of our Faculty and the Community Engagement Committee.
So, I begin with that word, inaugural.
It is worth a moment’s pause.
Coming from the Latin inaugurare
(in-ow-goo-RAH-reh) — which itself is derived from augur (ow-goor),
the Roman priest whose office was to read the will of the gods from the flight
of birds. To inaugurate something was, in the ancient world, to
consecrate it under signs. It was to look up, to watch the horizon, to ask: what
is coming? What do the omens say?
I find that etymology almost
unbearably apt tonight, and not without irony, given that Memphis Theological
Seminary will close its doors in approximately three months. The institution
that came to Memphis in 1964, that has formed clergy, many of whom are in this
room tonight, shaping ministry and serving the church in this city and region
for over sixty years, is ending its institutional life.
Now some of us feel some kind of
way about that, as do I.
And yet …and yet…, here
we are, inaugurating something. Reading the signs. Watching the horizon.
I want to invite you tonight to
see this irony as something that illuminates our gathering rather than
diminishes it.
And it is, I want to suggest, a
thoroughly biblical irony.
The Prophet Isaiah, speaking
into the grief and disorientation of a people who had lost nearly everything,
whose institutions had crumbled, whose holy city lay in ruins, hears this word from the Lord: “Do not
remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a
new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”
Do you not perceive it?
That is always the question,
isn’t it. Not will God do a new thing. God is always about to do
a new thing. The question, the only question, is whether we will have eyes to
see it. Whether we will be willing to stop eulogizing what was long enough to
perceive what is already springing forth.
That is what inauguration
requires of us tonight. We are not denying the reality of endings, neither are
we engaged in the performance art of optimism. I invite you into a genuine,
hard-won willingness to look up, to watch the horizon, to ask: what is the
Spirit doing now?
Because if the ancients were
right that inauguration is fundamentally about discerning what endures —
then tonight is exactly the right word for exactly the right moment. We are not
pretending that nothing is ending. We are insisting that something is not.
And I want to say something
about where we are standing as we say that.
This is no neutral space
tonight. This is Centenary United Methodist Church, one of the most storied and
consequential congregations in the history of Methodism in this city and in
this region. The people who have gathered, worshipped, wept, organized, and
refused to quit within these walls represent a through-line of witness in
Memphis that goes back generations. This congregation has outlasted
circumstances that should have defeated it. It has held the faith when the
faith was costly. It has been, in the most literal sense, a place where the
Spirit does new things — and where the people have had eyes to see them.
We did not choose this location
accidentally. We chose it because the work we are inaugurating tonight deserves
to begin somewhere that already knows how to endure.
And we chose it because the one
whose name carries this lecture is a child of this Church. So many of us here
tonight knew, worked alongside, where ministered to by, loved, and were loved
by Dr. Eason Williams, Autura. So many of you worked hard and donated much to
establish a scholarship in her name at MTS just this past year. And if given
the opportunity we could carry on awhile telling our stories about her life,
her ministry, and their impacts on the people she served — and that laugh. Oh
my, that laugh.
She was the kind of minister who
made you believe that the church could be what it claimed to be. But, and this
is important, not without rigorous honesty about what it actually was. Autura
did not traffic in sentimentality about the church. She loved it too much for
that. She understood, with clear eyes, that the church has knowingly and
unknowingly been complicit in injustices of many kinds, that the same
institution that preaches liberation has too often protected its own comfort,
baptized its own prejudices, and looked away from the suffering of the very
people Jesus named as his own. She understood that. And she stayed anyway. She
stayed and she pushed. She stayed and she told the truth. Because she believed,
not naively, but stubbornly, and at some cost, that the church could be called back to
itself. That the gap between what the church claimed to be and what it was
could be, as she would say, in the grip of God’s grace, narrowed.
That is a particular kind of
faith. A harder kind. And it is exactly the kind this moment asks of us.
This summer will mark nearly
four years since we lost her. The occasion tonight is joyful, genuinely joyful,
and it is also shadowed by that loss, in the way that the most true things
usually are. We miss her.
And so, we turn, tonight, to the
signs of what is coming.
I have been working with Dean
Bryan Stone at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University to
see the void left in MTS’s closure and to be a faithful steward of the funds
raised for the scholarship and lecture in her name. The Methodist House of
Studies at MTS has been, across its life, a place where the historic
pan-Methodist traditions, the AME, the AMEZ, the CME, and the UMC, have
gathered, studied, and formed leaders together. That work is not incidental to
our mission. It is, I would argue, one of the most essential expressions of
what a living Wesleyan witness looks like, traditions that share a common root,
a common theology, and far too often, separate tables. The MHoS has been one of
the places where those tables were pulled together. And I will tell you that
when Dean Stone encountered that work, it moved him. It sparked in him a
genuine desire to see it continue — because he believes, and I agree with him
in this calculation, that at this particular moment in the life of the church,
the historic pan-Methodist relationships have never been more important. As Dr.
Doug Meeks has recently said, the church is disfigured. That is a
hard word, and it is the right word. And disfigured churches need one another.
The truth is, we always have. The tragedy is that we have so often found
ourselves more preoccupied with institutional survival than prophetic witness,
more anxious about our own persistence than faithful to the common witness we
were called to bear together. Tonight, of all nights, we know something about
that tension. And tonight, of all nights, we have the chance to choose
differently. That cannot end here. And
it will not.
He is fully committed to that,
and I can announce tonight that the current amount raised for the scholarship,
together with additional funds to be designated by the MTS Trustees before we
close, will fully endow the Autura Eason Williams Scholarship at Perkins. This
lecture will recur in her name, and it will take place in Memphis.
Recognizing that Perkins’ most
immediate priority is the teach-out of our current students — the women and men
who began their formation here will finish it with the care and rigor they were
promised, there will run alongside that work a parallel process to establish a
Methodist House of Studies from Perkins, centered in Memphis. Dean Stone has
made clear that he does not want to determine the shape of that presence from
Dallas. He wants it framed by the people who know this territory, an advisory
board of Memphis area leaders, including the judicatory heads of each of the
pan-Methodist denominations, who will help define what this new MHoS will be
and do. And this will ensure that our mission does not simply conclude, but continues,
that this community goes on being shaped by the call to be “centered in
scholarship, piety, and justice,” and to “cultivate faith leaders in the way of
Jesus within a hospitable and diverse community to serve the church and the
world.”
Those words were ours. They
will, by God’s grace and Perkins’ commitment, belong to what comes next. I have
spoken with UMC Bishop Graves and CME Bishop Thomas, and both have already
indicated their enthusiasm for participating in exactly that kind of table. The
new thing is springing forth.
Do you perceive it?
So welcome, truly, inaugural
welcome, to an evening that is at once an ending, a beginning, and, if we will
only perceive it, a consecration.
Let us begin.
