Having Trouble Feeling United as a Methodist

The United Methodist General Conference, our four-year festival of legislation, prayer and bad manners has wound up. It was expected that this one would be especially difficult, since the whole issue of human sexuality was expected to take center stage, and it did. I should offer a brief account of why I am an ordained pastor in the United Methodist Church. I grew up in a very close-knit Methodist Church that was especially kind to its children and young adults. In hindsight, the church, which was a holdover from the former Methodist Protestant denomination (Read: hated bishops!) was no doubt conservative and mostly segregated. However, I do recall times when Black children or adults were present for Vacation Bible School or special observances, which was further ahead than some other churches in town. When I was in elementary school, we were assigned a new pastor, one who had received his theological education at Boston University School of Theology. We must have seemed like such a backwater congregation to him, but he was jovial and outgoing. He took a special interest in helping out from time to time with our Boy Scout troop, and there we got to see him as just another guy. He taught inclusiveness and tolerance before those became topics in the daily news. THAT is the kind of United Methodist pastor I wanted to be. I have known that is what I wanted to do with my life since I was fourteen years old, when I had a moment of clarity while in Sunday School. I consider that moment as the beginning of my calling to ministry, and I have never wavered from that vocation. From the moment I was assigned to my first parish, however, I began to feel that I was out of place, too liberal for some. Pastors like my home pastor were being replaced by pastors who attended very conservative seminaries outside of the denomination, and more and more congregations, at least in my home annual conference, began to seem less like United Methodist and more like independent Baptist churches. Even though I had great success in my first parish, I was becoming known as a pastor who would be hard to appoint, because of my theology, which I still considered to be very middle-of-the-road. I knew from my first year serving churches that I was called to ministry in another realm, where I could grow theologically and have more freedom to proclaim the welcoming side of the Gospel. Ministry in higher education has been that place for thirty years. Meanwhile, the United Methodist Church has drifted further and further to the right side of the theological spectrum, embracing a more literal interpretation of scripture to support its condemnation of the GLBTQ community. The equivalent of political PAC money has come, in large measure, from the Institute for Religion and Democracy, a privately funded right wing think tank that underwrites much of the work of the Good News Movement, the wing of the church that says that it speaks for "scriptural" Christianity. The 2016 General Conference became the flash point for the collision of the right and left wings of the church, with those in the center feeling powerless, because they have remained compliant with the push to the more conservative side for so many years. Now the church finds itself paralyzed, seeking any avenue to preserve "unity" when, in fact, we have not been unified for quite some time. The church has chosen once again to kick the theological can down the road regarding human sexuality. The bishops of the church will create a commission to study every paragraph in our Book of Discipline that relates to human sexuality. But will we have any more success in moving ahead on this topic, with the same people voting at a special called General Conference in two years than we did at this one? I doubt it, since the delegates will be all the same people. My pastor in my home church represented what I think is the best of United Methodism: an intellectually and theologically deep faith in the power of the Gospel to create change in lives and in the world. American Methodism has become so acculturated by nationalistic fervor that John Wesley would most certainly be puzzled at the things that pass for "Methodist." A church that proudly proclaims "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors" does not seem to mean that, and the hypocrisy shines through. I am still hopeful that something good will come out of this two-year delay in action on issues of human sexuality, even as I know that, already, factions are making alternate plans, lest the status quo be threatened.