Adrian College Chaplain's new book linking the Wesleyan tradition of holy love to social justice hits the shelves

• By RJ Walters, Editor •

In an era of 10-step guides and church management policies that seem to change as often as the Michigan weather, the Rev. Christopher P. Momany, chaplain at Adrian College, believes new movements of the United Methodist Church have a lot to gain from a little “old-school” Wesleyan theology.

His new book "Doing Good: A Grace-Filled Approach to Holiness", released May 1 by Abingdon Press, is a short (80 pages) four-session teaching guide written to help shepherd individuals and small groups in their understanding of John Wesley’s approach to holiness.

“We have holiness churches, holiness traditions, and often holiness is thought of as separation or being separate or set aside or of a pure realm,” he said. “I don’t deny that, but if you look at Jesus as the expression of God’s love, it’s radically participatory, so what I do is I argue for a holiness that is not removed and separate, but involved and affirming.”

Momany said the book will focus on four key areas: an exploration of the Wesleyan approach to law and grace, a look at how people can match faith with action, tools for Christian educators to use in teaching important Wesleyan doctrine and strategies to express Christianity in ways that attract others to God and the life of the church.

Momany is a strong proponent of getting people to understand their intrinsic worth in God’s kingdom and he said his book is designed to link the Wesleyan tradition of holy love to social justice.

“If I were to come at college students with a lot of management theory and magic keys to growing the church and congregational tips for measuring success and failure and all that stuff, all the people I work with who are already burned out by Christianity would, would either roll their eyes or yawn,” Momany said. “But if I come out and say, ‘This guy Jesus is terrific and look at this ethic and this way of living love because of the way God lived love for us,’ we’re getting a lot of second looks.”

The book is available for purchase through Cokesbury, as well as other online vendors such as Amazon.com.

To order through Cokesbury, visit one of their 60 retail locations, call their customer service center at 800-672-1789, or visit www.cokesbury.com.

Momany said an e-book edition for the Kindle and Nook would be released later this month.

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Student-led parable series a success at Adrian College

• From Adrian College News Services •

Throughout the past spring semester students at Adrian College have had the opportunity to preach the parables of Jesus to their fellow students during weekly services held Wednesdays at noon in Herrick Chapel on campus.

The idea to have a student led series stemmed from conversations with the students of the Religious Life Council. Students signed up for a particular parable that interested or resonated with them and then set a date to preach it. After choosing their parable students would take several weeks to prepare their thoughts on the topic.

“Everyone has taken the task seriously and has “lived” with the parable for several weeks,” said the Rev. Chris Momany, supervisor for this project. “I encouraged the students to talk with me, but I don’t look over anyone’s shoulder with a preconceived expectation. By the time they drop by and talk with me, they have already done some serious praying and studying—often consulting scholarly sources on their topic.”

Throughout Momany’s experiences he has grown to understand and appreciate how difficult it can be to prepare teaching these parables, and has been impressed with the work these students have demonstrated.

“They [the students] have offered some of the best interpretation I have ever heard around these texts,” Momany said. “I don’t think anything I have heard or learned has been deeper or more principled than the work of our student this semester in chapel.”

The series began in January and will conclude this Wednesday with a lesson from AC senior Kyle Bucholz during the noon service in Herrick Chapel.

“I suppose I am most proud of the depth and insight shared by the students,” Reverend Momany said when asked what he was most proud about regarding the student preaching series. “They are all very different people, and they all have different styles. Yet each and every person has reached down and found something we would have missed as a worshipping community had they not been there to show us. Overall, I found it to be profoundly authentic—real in a way that is hard to describe.”

Reverend Momany attended Princeton Seminary, did his doctoral work at Drew University, and then studied at the nationally-selected post-doctoral preaching program with The United Methodist in Nashville, TN.

For more information please contact Momany at cmomany@adrian.edu.

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Adrian College Chaplain: We Are Seldom Ever Prepared

By Adrian College Chaplain Chris Momany
As published on the General Board of Higher Education & Ministry website

This year I heard the best Advent sermon in more than twenty years of ministry. It was preached by one of my college students, and his message underscored the way we are seldom ready for God’s majestic love.


Joseph and Mary were hardly prepared for the reality given them. Are we any better prepared? If Advent is all about preparation, let’s be honest. We are seldom ready for the wonder of Christmas.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Preparation can be little more than a way to control our environment.

It is a splendid irony that the best preparation opens our hearts to the possibility that life is not about controlling our fate. I do not say this to excuse purposelessness. I know myself better than that. I am a certifiable control freak most of the time, and I bear a deep anxiety about disorder.

I like the rationale of cause and effect, especially when I possess power over the former. Christmas can seem like a tidal wave – the obligations, family pressures, and cultural demands. Yet the problem has more to do with my desire for control than with the event itself. We are never really prepared for the majesty of God’s love, but grace comes from a realm beyond expectation. That is why we call it Good News.

Seasons like Advent and Christmas make me ponder many things about our church. At the risk of speaking heresy, I question our increasing obsession with models of ministry that worship power and control. Many of these approaches are borrowed from the business world. There is nothing wrong with being intentional about mission, but in an attempt to remain “relevant” we risk swapping the inheritance of grace for a mess of pottage.

Especially dangerous is the conditional nature of many popular “leadership” models. There are always strings attached to the relationships involved. These approaches portray the church’s challenge as a matter of offering better services in an increasingly efficient manner. This may inspire some, but do we really need to be more like the cable company or other self-interested commercial ventures? 

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Liberation through exploration at Adrian College

By RJ Walters, Editor

More than 250 students are involved in regular spiritual activities at Adrian College — some with traditional United Methodist backgrounds and others far from that.

Take junior literature major Meela Zecevic for example. Her father was “like Muslim and Catholic” when she was growing up, while her mother was “like Muslim and Christian” before they moved to Germany and became Jehova’s Witnesses.

Adrian junior Meela Zecevic.

Now she said she guesses the family considers themselves “some form of Christian” living in the United States and Zecevic said Adrian College has been the perfect place to explore her spirituality and purpose in life.

Recently she was honored to give a speech relating to the Biblical story of Daniel and the lion’s den at a Wednesday chapel service.

Chaplain Chris Momany said students have been leading chapel for about a year now and it gives them a chance to relate with fellow students on a whole new level.

“At first I had to re-read it and then for a little while I was kind of irritated at Daniel,” Zecevic said. “So I didn’t want to bad-mouth Daniel or whatever, so I put it aside for a while and like a week before I started writing about it and I decided to talk to everybody about how the story relates to us all when times are tough and that pretty much if you believe in yourself enough you’ll get a lot of things done that you need to get done.”

She said “being on the other side” was empowering and she’d love to do more public speaking.

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Intellectually proud, doctrinally sound: Adrian College weaves together academics and theology

By RJ Walters, Editor

If a bridge was ever constructed in Southeast Michigan with the purpose of bringing together scholars and theologians, Adrian College would seem to be a fitting home for such a landmark.

Campus Chaplain Chris Momany is not only an ordained deacon and elder of the United Methodist Church, he is a history buff, social justice advocate, author, teacher and firm believer that sometimes simpler is better for the church.

And if you’ve never heard of Asa Mahan — spend five minutes in a room with Momany and you’ll quickly realize that one of the founding fathers of Adrian College in the late 1850s is alive and relevant on campus today thanks to Momany’s affection for his theoretic and principles.

Mahan was a vigorous proponent of emancipation — not surprising considering Adrian College was part of the Underground Railroad and still today is a major proponent of ending human trafficking — and Momany especially likes his writing’s about Christian perfection and holiness.

Not For Sale human-trafficking awareness group.

“It’s a joke around here that I’m always going to work his name into something, the students say,” Momany said. “He was just a phenomenal guy around the Wesleyan tradition of Christian perfection. He was big on radical perfection, or holiness…”

Posters and fliers litter campus denoting a new “Intrinsic Worth” campaign that students have spearheaded and Momany believes Mahan’s interpretations of what it means to be a socially active Christian are germane for the 21st century.

The worship team seems to agree, often donning T-shirts with Mahan’s likeness on them, affirming their desire to be involved in people’s lives through Christian love.

“The real core value is that he is interpreted holiness as love, which is a Wesleyan idea,” Momany said. “Mahan did that and then you say, OK, how do you interpret love? And he basically said love is an affirmation of the intrinsic worth of people.”

Marrying his in-depth “church knowledge” with his more academic side, Momany has written a book titled Doing Good: A Grace-filled Approach to Holiness, set to come out through the Abingdon Press sometime between March and May 2011. He said it is a relatively short four-session study guide for churches and leaders to use as they explore what the true definition of holiness is and what it should look like in the church.

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