“The distinguishing marks of a Methodist are not his
opinions of any sort. His assenting to this or that scheme of Religion, his
embracing any particular set of notions, his espousing the judgment of one man
or of another, are all quite wide of the point. Whosoever therefore imagines,
that a Methodist is a man of such or such an opinion, is grossly ignorant of
the whole affair; he mistakes the truth totally…[A]s to all opinions which do
not strike at the root of Christianity, we think and let think.” – The Rev. John Wesley, "The Character of a
Methodist" (1739)
The United Methodist Church is
holding its General Conference, the denomination-wide assembly that meets every
four years to make decisions about church policies, practices and worship. This
year’s Conference of this Protestant body of 12.5 million members worldwide - 7
million of which are located in the United States - faces a wide range of
concerns. But the elephant in the room, as it has been for all expressions of
the Christian faith tradition in the past couple of decades, is the issue of
how to treat LBGT people within the church.
The Conference is considering 100
plus resolutions regarding human sexuality ranging from deleting its Book of
Discipline’s assertion that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian
teaching” to allowing local churches to choose whether or not to celebrate same-sex
unions and ordain and call non-celibate gay clergy to its congregations. A
report from the evangelical Protestant magazine Christianity
Today Monday predicts that any measure to change the UMC’s anti-gay
policies is likely to fail.
A procedural vote to place all
these measures directly before the assembly rather than having them tailored by
select committees prior to a final vote failed last week. The vote appears to
have largely split along ideological lines with opponents of policy changes also
opposing changes in the procedures to consider them. Change in Methodist policy,
challenged in each of the preceding 10 conferences, appears once again unlikely
this conference.
While almost all of the resolutions
for changes in policy have come from American congregations among whom less
than half of the membership actively favor retaining the current discriminatory
policies, conservative American Methodists have found reliable allies among the
40% of Methodist faithful found outside the US, three fourths of whom are
located in Africa. This has, in turn, led 750 American
congregations to form the Reconciling Ministries Network to oppose their
national body, standing with LBGT clergy who have come out of the closet and calling
upon their international body to change its discriminatory policies.
Nones, Dones and a Ditch to Die
In
From a distance, the movement
for change appears to be a losing proposition. The conservative propensity to
baptize a common social prejudice as an article of faith is tenacious. It
continues its hold over many Christian bodies from Roman Catholicism to the sea
of independent Protestant bodies which broke away from their mother church beginning 600
years ago.
While a number of mainstream
traditions such as Lutherans and Episcopalians have managed to relax their grip
on medieval understandings of human sexuality arising out of ancient
cosmologies, the core of church loyalists in many traditions today tend to be
conservative and thus resistant to changes in long-held understandings
regardless of how indefensible they may have become in light of modern science.
This core includes the bulk of the very conservative Christians in the world outside
North America and Europe.
Few expressions of colonialism
are more tenacious than religious understandings from the mother country. The visions of 19th
CE European and American evangelical missionaries continue to be guarded as
revealed truth by their 21st CE descendants. Loyalty to those
founding visions is seen as sacrosanct, particularly by those who have not worked
or studied outside their developing world contexts in which the largely
unquestioned conflation of homophobia and religion takes on an appearance of
self-evidence.
But even as third world
coreligionists have hunkered down to protect constructs of sanctified
homophobia, many first world Christians have responded by simply walking away.
The fastest growing self-identification of religious affiliation in the US over
the past decade is “none of the above,” often reduced to “Nones” (or sometimes “Dones”). Today
one in five Americans reports being non-affiliated.
Many of the non-affiliated are
found in the Millennial cohort where those reporting no religious affiliation
has climbed to one in three. Millennial Nones are clear in their reasons for abandoning
religious institutions as reported in Putnam and Campbell’s study of American
religion in the second decade of the 21st CE, American
Grace: “[M]any young
Americans [have come] to view religion as “judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical,
and too political.”
While conservative religion
continues to thrive in the developing world, churches in the northern
hemisphere are increasingly observing a depressing paradigm playing out with
regularity: graying, declining congregations desperately clinging to cherished
beliefs seen as untenable by younger family members who are walking away from
institutional religion in disgust.
As my liturgy professor from
seminary was prone to remark, this appears to be the ditch the church has
chosen to die in.
Walking Away
At some level, what happens
among the Methodists today is largely irrelevant to my life. I am, after all,
an Episcopal priest whose tradition has largely chosen to change its policies
to reflect a 21st CE cosmology, albeit with a handful of exceptions
such as the local diocese which has proven unwilling to shake off its death
grip on a homophobia confused with religion and wrapped in denial.
Ironically, it was the same
issues with which the Methodists struggle today that prompted me to walk away
from them 43 years ago. I was not always an Episcopalian. Indeed, my faith
journey began in a church which had only recently stopped calling itself the
Methodist Episcopal Church in my childhood and which during my teenage years
merged with several Brethren traditions to become the United Methodist Church.
In the small town where I grew
up, the Methodists were the best thing going. It was the only Protestant alternative
to the plethora of expressions of the Baptist tradition (including Primitive
Baptists which always evoked images of the Flintstones when I saw the sign out
front of their modest structure) as well as a host of Churches of God, Christ and
tiny churches with “independent” in their titles. The Methodist Church was the
home to most of my small town’s college educated people, many of them
colleagues of my father who taught high school in the same two story brick
building where he had himself attended school as a child.
I was a loyal Methodist,
serving as usher and acolyte, spending many happy hours on Sunday nights at MYF,
the Methodist Youth Fellowship. I developed a deep appreciation for the Wesley
brothers in my Sunday School classes. Though I was not from a working class
family, their concern for the spiritual welfare of the coal miners and the
factory workers of 18th CE England was admirable. We heard their
thought from our pulpit and sang their hymns from our pews.
To this day I believe the
Anglican Church made a major mistake in simply letting the Methodists walk away.
The result was a class-based imbalance in both traditions, the Anglicans focused
almost exclusively on the upper classes with their condescension and the
Methodists affirming the working classes and their resentments.
During my Methodist childhood,
I developed a strong social consciousness that is the mark of Methodism. In its
healthy expression, it focuses the Methodist on the outer world, concerned with
issues of justice and poverty. In its shadow expression, social consciousness
takes a much more immediate expression with competitive middle class concerns
for status and the marks of privilege - clothing, cars, homes and contributions
to the perennial covered dish luncheons. Both can be found in any given
Methodist Church today.
Truth be told, while I was a
loyal Methodist right into high school, I was always fascinated by the
Episcopal Church. Its liturgies were somewhat familiar, the Methodist rites
being an adaptation of the Book of Common Prayer. Its love of mystery, color, symbols
and beautiful language were an intriguing improvement over the whitewashed Methodist
hymn sandwiches (hymn, reading, sermon, hymn) to which I was accustomed. But it
was two failings on the part of the Methodist Church that would ultimately propel
me into the arms of Anglicanism, following the Wesley brothers, Anglican
priests until the day they died, back home.
By the end of my time in high
school, I was already beginning to be disenchanted with the Methodist Church.
By 1970, when I began my senior year, the world was on fire with uprisings in
the streets over a deadly and morally unsupportable war in Vietnam, a war
people like my next door neighbor vanished into and emerged mere shadows of who
they had once been. America’s cities burned with the rage of justice denied as a
once peaceful civil rights movement descended into conflict.
I kept waiting for our pastor
to talk about what was happening in our world, happenings that involved young
people like myself very directly and immediately. Instead we heard banal
references to cigarette commercials then playing on America’s airwaves (“I
believe the gentleman will offer the lady a tiparillo”) and safe abstract
theological assertions that flew around the sanctuary and out the window
without ever lighting on anything concrete. My Mother told me I had the choice
of whether I would continue to attend church with her once I reached high school and
increasingly my choice was to worship at the altar of my pillow on Sunday
morning.
By the time I reached the
University of Florida as a junior in 1973, my life was in turmoil. I was just
beginning to deal with my sexual orientation. I was deeply depressed, abusing
alcohol regularly and pondering suicide. More than once I climbed the stairs to
the third floor of Little Hall near my dormitory to throw myself off the
balcony to the concrete plaza below, each time chickening out at the last
minute even as I sat on the concrete ledge, legs dangling into the thin air
just below.
Desperate, I sought out the
Methodist chaplain at the church across University Avenue from campus. I wanted
to be reassured that G-d loved me, that G-d *could* love me. It was just before
Christmas break and I needed some direction before returning home to family and
girlfriend eagerly awaiting my homecoming. I told the middle aged pastor I was
depressed.
He asked me what was wrong. “I
think I may be gay,” I said.
What happened next would
change my life.
Abruptly the pastor turned
away from me to stare at the papers on the desk immediately below him. “You’re working
too hard,” he said in almost a whisper, continuing “Go home and get some rest
and then come back and see me when the spring term begins.”
I was stunned. I felt the
tears rising to my eyes and knew I needed to leave before I dissolved in his
presence. “Thank you,” I gulped. I got up to leave. He never looked in my direction
again.
As I closed his office door
behind me, I stood for a moment, examining in detail the texture of the door’s
exterior, a coat of red paint covering but not obscuring years of thumb tack
holes and staples from which important notices, no doubt, had long since been
removed. After a minute there I softly said, “Goodbye.” At that moment I knew I was
closing the door to my life as a Methodist.
And then I walked away.
Casting Their Lots
I do not expect the Methodists
to change course in their General Conference meeting nor is it my place to
suggest they do so. While I am grateful for what the church taught me and how it
formed me, it has been a long time since I thought of myself as a Methodist
even as my sister and her family continue in that tradition.
The decisions the General
Conference is making take place in a much larger context that is largely
invisible to its participants and most people outside of it. Many scholars of
religion have observed that humanity is on the cusp of a second
axial age, a time of major change when world religions as we have known
them will evolve into something as of yet unknowable. At the very least, a second
Reformation of western Christianity appears to be underway. In either
case the demands of a world in which science has revealed a new cosmology and in
which humanity must now find meaning will play a large role in determining what
proves to be credible.
A church which fails to meet
such a challenge will probably not decline and die overnight. But as once broad
denominations devolve more and more into sectarian bodies, defining their faith
by antiquated socially constructed morality and talking more and more among
themselves but rarely with those outside their circled wagons, they will have
little to offer the world around them. Ironically, that will prove
to be a betrayal of Wesley’s call to his fellow Methodist Anglicans to “Think
and let think” and the ultimate betrayal of a once admirable Methodist calling
to save the world.
John, Charles and Samuel
Wesley all, no doubt, weep.
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth living,
surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding.
Most things worth considering do
not come in sound bites.
Do not be daunted by the enormity
of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are
not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon
it. – Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the
Ages, Commentary on Micah 6:8
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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