Rediscovering the Milieu

Rediscovering Lost Treasures - Part Eight

“I look upon the world as my parish.” – John Wesley

“A charge to keep I have… To serve the present age.” For 262 years, Methodists (and many other followers of Jesus) have sung those immortal words of Charles Wesley. But what if this is not a nostalgic hymn, but a living summons? Every believer bears a charge, a holy responsibility… to serve. This is a calling to embody the love and justice of Christ. But that vocation is not abstract or generalized. It is incarnational. It must take flesh in a particular time and place, with a particular people, for the “present age.”

This is the heartbeat of placeful mission. Not a disembodied spirituality that floats above culture, nor a reactive activism divorced from prayer, but a faithful presence rooted in the soil of now. We serve not in some idealized past or hoped-for future, but here—in the midst of digital overload, climate crisis, an epidemic of loneliness, and extreme political polarization.

Here’s what the Wesleys knew that is like a treasure hidden in the sands of time today… real ministry happens in the “milieu.” Sociologically, milieu refers to the social, cultural, or physical environment in which someone lives or operates. It’s the setting or context that shapes behavior, thought, and experience.

In missional theology, milieu points to the lived context, the neighborhood, relationships, stories, and struggles, that form the social environment of ministry. To be truly Methodist is to take the milieu seriously, to enter into it as Jesus entered our neighborhood: fully present, deeply attentive, and lovingly engaged (John 1: 14).

This treasure isn’t merely about geography or chronology. It’s about how a movement rooted itself in the pain points of a broken world and saw them not as obstacles, but as opportunities for healing. As we reckon with our own moment in history—marked by trauma, isolation, and dislocation—we might ask: what does it mean to rediscover the Methodist commitment to understanding and offering faithful presence within the milieu in our own time?

Recovering the Missional Posture of Placefulness

The spaces we inhabit are not mere placeholders. They are bundles of relationships—living, breathing ecosystems pulsing with memory, meaning, and possibility.

Our porches, parks, barbershops, beauty salons, recovery rooms, running tracks, kitchen tables, are not just backdrops for mission… they are the mission. Each one is a sacred web of interconnection, where the Spirit is already present and active in the lives of those who inhabit them. Our calling is not to impose God’s presence, but to recognize it, join in, and tend to it with love and intentionality.

In an attention economy defined by deterritorialization and digital distraction, where our gaze is commodified and sold to the highest bidder, presence becomes a revolutionary act. Our attention is no longer our own—it’s constantly being hijacked by algorithms that flatten experience and fragment our ability to be present. Our place whispers, “Be here now.”

Today, a revolution is underway to recover a missional posture of placefulness. Placefulness means rooting ourselves in the physical, historical, and ecological realities of our neighborhoods, recognizing them as sacred contexts where God is already at work. It’s the opposite of the commodified, attractional church model that too often disconnects faith from real life. Instead, we envision the church as a green space in the communal ecosystem, offering healing, connection, and renewal where people actually live, work, and play.

Placefulness calls us back to the garden, to the dust and dew of locality. To incarnate the gospel is to honor the stories and stains of a zip code. To slow down long enough to hear the land speak, to look our neighbors in the eye, and to plant something good that might just outlive us. These are not sites to be used, they are places to be with.

When we give our full attention to a person, a neighborhood, a tree-lined street corner, we reclaim something sacred. We reclaim the contemplative capacity to see others as image-bearers. We become co-laborers in God’s work of renewal not in the abstract, but with real dirt under our fingernails.

The incarnational life demands that we turn from curated timelines to the uncurated lives of those around us. That we locate ourselves in the parish, the garden, the diner, the bowling alley, wherever the Spirit lingers and waits to be noticed. This kind of attention—grounded, prayerful, placeful—is not efficient. But it is a practice of holy love.

Methodism Formed from the Margins

The early Methodist movement emerged not in the halls of power but primarily among the poor, the imprisoned, and the working class. In an age riddled with inequality, crime, and institutional decay, the Wesleys carried their message into miners’ camps, debtors’ prisons, and urban slums. Their commitment to the milieu was defined by radical proximity to human suffering.

Sociologist Howard Becker’s labeling theory, first explored in his book Outsiders, posits that deviance is not inherent in an act but is a social construct created by how society labels behaviors and individuals. Marginalized identities are socially constructed and reinforced and being aware of this helps us appreciate how the Methodists subverted dominant narratives: they embraced the so-called “disreputable” and built beloved community with them.

This wasn’t disobedience for its own sake—it was holy dissent. Methodists resisted not just bad laws, but the social and ecclesial norms that sustained cruelty and exclusion. They lived out what theologian Shelley Rambo, drawing on trauma studies, calls a post-traumatic theology—one that acknowledges pervasive societal wounding and seeks communal healing. In this sense, Methodism was, and must be again, a trauma-informed, justice-driven way of being.

Sacred Disruption and the Power of Place

Charles Wesley’s charge “to serve the present age” is both theological and sociological. It invites us to understand ministry contextually. As the Wesleys did, we are called to read both Scripture and society, to dwell in the word and the world. Len Sweet and I call this the Issachar Mandorla. Contextual intelligence is the sweet spot that combines a hermeneutic and a semiotic together: interpreting the Scriptures (hermeneutic) and reading the “signs of the time” of a specific context (semiotic). The following Venn diagram highlights the “CQ” sweet spot of the Issachar mandorla.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus—the ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions shaped by one’s environment—illuminates why early Methodism was so transformative. It offered a different habitus: one rooted in the ethics of love and justice rather than conformity to “the powers and principalities.” It flowed from a commitment, “to reform the nation and particularly the church.”

Where dominant institutions sought self-preservation, Methodists practiced self-donation. The Methodist social constructs (societies, classes, bands) are collectively a demonstration of what Durkheim called moral communities, a group of people who share a collective conscience, who adhere to a common set of moral and ethical principles. Methodism restored a sense of cohesion and sacred purpose among fragmented lives.

In a time when children were dying by the thousands and vice industries preyed on despair—when the transatlantic slave trade flourished through the capture and sale of human beings, and colonization wrought the attempted erasure of Indigenous peoples—early Methodists rose as an embodied protest against despair itself. They did not merely critique the evils of their age… they formed a counterculture community of grace within it.

These Spirit-fired communities offered not just a theology but a way of life, a socially supported compassion rooted in class meetings, field preaching, and justice-seeking action. Their faith was not escapist but embedded, not theoretical but tactile. They lived the gospel in the margins, among the wounded and wandering, insisting that holiness must touch the street. Practical divinity is street divinity.

From Industrial to Network Society

As we increasingly shift from the Industrial Age into what Manuel Castells describes as the network society, the nature of place and community has changed. The “fields” we once walked are now integrated with digital nodes and hubs. Ministry today must engage not only in the “space of places” (geographic communities) but in the “space of flows” (digital ecosystems). In the same way the Wesleys harnessed the printing press and gathered miners at dawn, we must leverage livestreams, apps, group texts, and VR space to meet people in their rhythms of life.

This isn’t a call to retreat from the digital realm, but rather a rejection of the false dichotomy between embodied and online mission. True incarnational mission means holding both: being the body of Christ in the local zip code and in the digitally built environments of the networked global village (for more on this Fresh Expressions in a Digital Age).

Jesus, the original contextual missionary, didn’t just show up; he moved into the neighborhood (John 1:14), walked the dusty roads, ate with outsiders, and wept over cities. That incarnational pattern—self-emptying, immersion, love in action—is our blueprint too.

Fresh Expressions of Church, especially when grounded in a Benedictine-Wesleyan spirituality, provides a concrete path for living this out. It invites us into a “blended ecology” where inherited and emerging, onsite and online expressions of church live and grow together. Where we are sent as good guests, not controlling hosts. Whether it’s a dinner church at a shelter, a Twitch stream, or spiritual community in a running group, placefulness reminds us that “the world is our parish.” This is not merely an aesthetic or strategic move; it’s a prophetic re-rooting of the church in the soils of real people’s lives.

But we cannot confuse connectivity with community. Our milieu is defined by what U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calls an “epidemic of loneliness.” Rambo’s insight that PTSD now characterizes the broader human condition reminds us that our mission field is not merely physical, but emotional and existential. People are carrying generational trauma, institutional betrayal, and digital exhaustion. If the old Methodism offered communal life to a fragmented world, a new Methodism must offer networked wholeness in an age of connected but lonely souls.

The Church in the Heartbeat of Pain

The sociological lens reveals that we are in another period of deep historical transition. As social theorists like Zygmunt Bauman warn, we are living in a liquid modernity. This describes the fluid, unstable nature of contemporary life, where relationships, identities, and institutions are constantly shifting. In contrast to the solidity and predictability of earlier eras, today’s world is marked by impermanence, consumerism, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty, making it difficult to form lasting commitments or feel secure in one’s place.

Our milieu is one in which relationships seem fleeting, institutions are eroding, and identity is ever-shifting. But this is exactly the kind of environment where Wesleyan theology shines. We were made for this milieu—not to escape it, but to inhabit it with compassion, truth, and courage.

The juxtaposition is stark. One moment, our team is reviewing a $700,000 renovation bid to turn a closed church into women’s sober housing, the next, we are serving a meal in that space to neighbors with no homes or bank accounts. This is our milieu in Ocala. We want to be a church in the heartbeat of the pain. And this is the miracle: the people of God gather around tables, forming community not by wealth, but by withness. When we do this, somehow God provides the funds we need. This is not the logic of Caesar, but of Christ. It’s not the instinct of empire, but of incarnation.

A Time for Dissent, A Place for Love

The early Methodists did not wait for ideal conditions. Nor did they wait for institutional leaders to provide vision statements and permission. They moved in step with God’s kairos time, sensitive to the openings of grace in a hurting world. Their activity within the milieu was countercultural because it was calibrated to the reign of God, not the kingdoms of man or the prevailing religious institutions of the day. Today, rediscovering the milieu means showing up in the pain of the present with a holy stubbornness to love, serve, and disrupt.

Sociologist Robert Bellah once wrote that America suffers from a “crisis of meaning” due to the erosion of shared stories. In a culture increasingly defined by individualism, consumerism, and fragmentation, people struggle to locate their lives within a larger story, leading to spiritual disorientation and social disconnection. The treasure of a Methodism in the thick of the milieu is a story we must recover. It teaches us that the church is not a retreat from the world, but a revolutionary community rooted in the streets, the screens, and the scars of our time.

This is our moment. This is our place. Now is our time. Let’s join Jesus in the mess and muck of the milieu, let Charles Wesley’s Spirit-inspired words guide us all…

A charge to keep I have,
a God to glorify,
a never-dying soul to save,
and fit it for the sky.

To serve the present age,
my calling to fulfill,
O may it all my pow'rs engage
to do my Master's will!

---

An Additional Reflection for Edge Practitioners

If you’re an institutionalist who is easily offended, stop reading now.

For the past several weeks, United Methodists across the connection experienced what we call “announcement Sunday”—that sacred, trembling moment when congregations learn of pastoral moves, and clergy families begin to imagine new roots in unfamiliar soil. It’s a peculiar rhythm, this itinerant way, inherited from the circuit riders of old. But in an age of dislocation, it feels increasingly dissonant.

I do often wonder if what we consider itinerancy today is not exactly what the Wesleys had in mind. I personally try to serve every appointment as if it’s my one and only. My last appointment at Wildwood lasted for 11 years. I have no ambitions for denominational ladder climbing. I don’t politick, don’t kiss bishops… rings, and winning a popularity contest among the covenant of clergy is not part of my thought process or motivation.

In fact, this year I didn’t really even know what to announce. Do I announce another year at St Marks, where I serve alongside a dedicated team of lay-priests? Or Compassion UMC, the church I am co-planting beside my wife but not officially appointed to? Or what about the churches that gather in the burrito shop, the inpatient rehab, the tattoo parlor, or our home? Or what about all the various jobs I work outside the church, so I can financially support my congregations, rather than them financially supporting me?

Sounds complicated right? So, this year, I announced I was reappointed to serve another year at the city of Ocala and surrounding area—not a congregation. Afterall, my approach to pastoral ministry involves renegotiating the social contract. I refuse to be a purveyor of religious goods and services, or on-call personal spiritual butler. My role is to “equip the saints for the work of ministry,” mobilizing the whole body of Christ (Ephesians 4) in my place. Preparing the priesthood of all believers, to hear the Spirit’s call in their own lives, according to their spiritual gifts and abilities. And I think this is perhaps more truly Methodist for a people committed to the milieu, who believe “the world is our parish.” It’s truer in form to an itinerant ministry, than what itinerancy has become.

What does it mean to be placeful when the itinerant system itself seems to uproot with such regularity? How do we embody stability, incarnation, presence—when the calendar tells us we might need to start packing?

Maybe this is where we return to the deeper theology beneath the appointments: that we are not tourists or transplants, but pilgrims. That our call is not to see congregations as steppingstones to the bigger, better appointments with nicer salaries, but to be sent—with intention, humility, and love for the ground we tread, however temporary it may seem. And maybe our task, wherever we land, is to cultivate placefulness not in spite of movement, but as an act of sacred resistance within it.

Maybe true Methodists don’t just ride circuits… we create new ones. As we travel the trails and tracks of our places, our ministry is not confined to the church compound. We cultivate little pockets of communal life in Jesus across the lonely world that is our parish. Clergy intenerate between the micro-churches, offering support, training, and sacraments to the laity who are leading them. This is how the first Methodists understood “the charge they had to keep” and it’s the kind of Methodism today that can “serve the present age.” Maybe God is calling forth a new movement of modern-day circuit riders? Will you hear the Spirit’s voice and saddle up?

---

Get registered for #FXUM26 right here…

---

It is possible to be compassionate and not wise, but it is not possible to be wise and not compassionate. I began my research journey at the University of Florida studying the collapse of compassion in USAmerican society and its relationship with religious disaffiliation. However, as I followed the research trails, I discovered the underlying crisis is the decline of wisdom, of which compassion is one dimension. Congregations have historically been vital social centers for the intergenerational transmission of wisdom, helping their members and communities experience greater wellbeing. How does their decline and disappearance impact the social fabric of the United States? How do we measure wisdom, individually and collectively? What new missional metrics do we need to understand and encourage vitality in the 21st century? Stay tuned for the new Substack series… “What a Fool Believes."