General Conference 2020 is less than a year away. There is much work to do if we are to avoid a repeat of St. Louis when we gather in Minneapolis. Legislation that can end our fighting needs to be written in the next few months to be properly before the Conference. And then those of us supporting it must work hard to promote it and convince those who want to continue our nearly fifty-year self-destructive battle that there is a better way.
The conversations that need to occur among conservative, moderate, and progressive leaders must be honest, direct, and built on reality. An enhanced traditional plan was passed in February, and in April it was ruled constitutional by the Judicial Council. Our dialogue about the future needs to begin there. The Traditional Plan is not going away. In fact, unless a way for amicable separation is devised in the next few months, traditionalists are likely to have the time and the votes in Minneapolis to close even more loopholes and strengthen accountability to our covenant, which of course would be unacceptable to centrists and progressives. The clock is ticking. The truth is we do not have the luxury of squandering time with wishful thinking, name-calling, or an unwillingness to admit where we are in the aftermath of St. Louis.
It does not help the conversation for centrists and progressives to act as if GC 2019 did not occur. Some, though they were against it when they thought they might pass the One Church Plan, are now floating solutions similar to the Connectional Conference Plan (CCP). The models they propose would place United Methodists in different central conferences or jurisdictions leaving us, they believe, as one church but with different sexual ethics and practices. Had they supported such an option before St. Louis, there might have been room for a discussion. But St. Louis happened. The most respected leaders of the centrist movement charged us with bringing a virus into the church that would make it sick, harming the witness of the church, bribing African delegates, and with being a politer version of the hateful and despicable Westboro Baptist members who shouted vile homophobic slurs at the delegates each day in St. Louis. It is hard to understand why those with such a low opinion of us would want to remain united to us. And, for the life of me, I cannot think why we would want to embrace a faux unity with persons who despise us. Conversations about how a plan similar to the CCP might work in 2020 are simply a waste of time. Almost no traditional U.S. delegates will vote for such a plan and neither will most of the delegates in Africa or The Philippines.
Neither does it help when centrist leaders misrepresent what we traditionalists believe. The Rev. James Howell, senior pastor at Meyers Park UM Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, told the traditional members of his congregation that those of us who supported the traditional plan “aren’t your conservatives – the people that you know and love and work with. … This traditional plan, its goal is clearly to stamp out homosexuality from the church and to stamp out even those who are sympathetic to it. … They wish to be rid of centrists, of moderates, certainly progressives, even thoughtful conservatives. It’s sad. There is a real meanness to this – severe penalties that are imposed on anybody who … doesn’t act severely towards the LGBTQ community.” Of course, that’s not who we are and that’s not what the Traditional Plan does. And Howell knows it. When centrist leaders purposefully vilify us and lie about our views, it makes real, honest, meaningful conversations – the kind we need to be having right now – very difficult.
It also hurts our dialogue when centrist leaders distort the numbers. Mark Holland, the Executive Director of Mainstream UMC, has written repeatedly that two-thirds of the UM Church in the U.S. want to change our position on sexuality. I’ll give Rev. Holland the benefit of the doubt and say that he actually believes this. It is usually accepted that close to two-thirds of the U.S. delegates to General Conference voted for something other than the Traditional Plan. But does that mean two-thirds of the people in our churches favor changing our definition of marriage? Of course, not.
One-half of U.S. delegates to GC are pastors who as a group are much more liberal than the laypersons they pastor. Holland even has a partisan joke he likes to tell, “What do you call a Democrat in a Methodist church in Kansas? Pastor.” As the former mayor of Kansas City and a Democrat, Holland is attempting to use levity to point out that pastors all over the country tend to be more liberal than their congregations. But liberal pastors, numbering in the tens of thousands, elect the pastors who go to General Conference which are fifty percent of U.S delegates. Our laity, roughly six and a half million in number, are represented by the same number of delegates at GC. Using the vote at GC to determine the percentage of United Methodists who want to change our sexual ethics is, to put it charitably, a very flawed methodology.
A more accurate understanding of where our U.S. membership stands is found in the results of a recent United Methodist Communications survey in which 44 percent identified themselves as “conservative-traditional.”
Not only is it incorrect to state that two-thirds of U.S. Methodists want change, it is also completely dismissive of our brothers and sisters in Africa, The Philippines, Europe, and Asia. Do we discount the votes of our brothers and sisters around the world because they are not “our kind of people”? The Rev. Mark Holland has carried his thinking to a very sad, shocking really, conclusion and has argued that there are five reasons for the UM Church in America to rid itself of other United Methodists around the world who are “both fundamentally disconnected from and disapproving of the culture of the United States.” It is rich in irony that progressives who are so often critical of American culture now want nothing to do with delegates around the world whom they perceive to be “disapproving” of our culture.
We simply do not have time to spend misrepresenting and demonizing those who see things differently than we do. It’s time to stop playing games, trying to get the upper hand and putting forth plans that have no chance of passing. People of good faith must decide NOW if we want to repeat St. Louis or if we want to create a solution that stops our fighting and the damage that has been done to the church.
A pastor friend of mine had a member in his church who ruined his marriage, his relationship with his children, and his finances through years of alcoholism and drug addiction. By God’s grace he finally got clean and sober. As the years passed, he began to wonder if maybe he could drink again in moderation. His life had been working and he was in a very different place than when he was an active alcoholic. After all, had it really been all that bad? He took some time to think about how low he had sunk, how many people he had hurt and all the mistakes he had made. He then placed a sign on his front door that he saw every day before he stepped out into the world. It simply said, “Yes, it really was that bad.”
St. Louis. Some time has passed, but please remember. Yes, it really was that bad. No, we can’t go back and do the same thing all over again. We should never sink that low or hurt that many people ever again. And honest conversations among people of good will need to happen now to make sure we leave Minneapolis excited about the future rather than condemned to repeat the past.