A New United Methodism?

David Burns on March 8, 2019

One conclusion that has consensus among compatibilists and, I think, most incompatibilists: our Church is broken, and we cannot continue as we are. 

Whole Foods, Cracker Barrel, and The United Methodist Church

David Burns on May 5, 2017

Back in 2011 Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report described the political divide in our country in terms of Whole Foods Market and Cracker Barrel.  Whole Foods Markets are small grocery stores offering organic, natural and fresh foods and high-end groceries.  Their stores tend to be located in larger cities.  Cracker Barrel Old Country Store is a restaurant chain serving up hearty portions of home cooked foods (dumplings, meatloaf, and fried chicken)—with gift shops selling “Americana,” including a brisk business in rocking chairs.  Cracker Barrels are often located in less densely populated areas along interstate highways.  The chain was ranked the number one family restaurant in America in 2016. In 2012, Wasserman noted, President Obama won the presidency by winning 77% of the counties in America where there is at least one Whole Foods Market.  In 2016 President Trump was elected by winning 76% of counties with at least one Cracker Barrel.  Many have picked up on Wasserman’s shorthand for describing the divide in America.  There are many criticisms that could be leveled against this way of characterizing, sifting and dividing America, not the least of which could be—depending upon who is doing the analyzing—a kind of snobbery or value judgment implicit in its use.  Further, one would have to survey Cracker Barrel and Whole Foods customers to see whom they voted for.  The presence of a store in a county does not tell us how that store’s customers vote.  Many Cracker Barrel customers are travelers.  But more to the point, Americans can’t be so easily divided.  My county has both Whole Foods and Cracker Barrel stores, and I enjoy them both. The United Methodist Church is a great example of this wide diversity.  A microcosm of the United States, we’ve got Whole Foods Market shoppers and Cracker Barrel fans.  If the consumers at these two chains tend towards particular demographics, The United Methodist Church has a significant number of each demographic and most of our churches have both Cracker Barrel Christians and Whole Foods Christians.  United Methodists differ on how they think about some social issues, and about how they interpret Scripture regarding same-gender relationships, but they tend to share far more in common when it comes to their faith, than what divides them. They trust that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  They are passionate followers of Jesus Christ whom they claim as both Savior and Lord.  They believe in, and seek to have, hearts that are strangely warmed by the Spirit’s fire.  They love the Bible, but eschew a blind adherence to biblical literalism. They love to dig into the scriptures and to wrestle at times with the text seeking to hear God speak through it, while embracing the insights of scholars. Grace is a big deal to United Methodists.  They know they are not saved by good works.  Yet they also believe they are saved for good works.  And while they understand that Calvin had some important insights, they are not fond of the idea that God predestines some to heaven and others to hell, nor the idea that the evil and suffering we see in the world is the will of God. Methodists believe that science and Christianity are compatible.  They are evangelical, borne out of the 18th century evangelical revival that John Wesley led, and they long to share their faith with others, but they tend to be more comfortable showing their faith by their compassion and kindness rather than by passing out gospel tracts.  They are people of a “both/and” rather than “either/or” faith.  They’ve found ways to love one another and to accept that people of faith might read and interpret Scripture differently and still be in the same Sunday school class.  They are people with a “catholic spirit,” people who, even if they’ve never heard the term, tend towards the via media—the middle way.  Every United Methodist knows Christian friends who are more conservative than they are, and some who are more “liberal” than they are.  They tend to be liberal conservatives or conservative liberals. Don’t confuse their ability to listen to, appreciate, and learn from those with whom they disagree as believing that “it doesn’t matter what you believe.”  Methodists share a common set of convictions around the essentials of the faith—they sing of them in their hymns, recite them using the Creeds, and preach and teach them from the pulpit and in their small groups and Sunday school classes. We’ve got conservatives and liberals who share the convictions and practices I’ve just described.   Like America itself, Methodism has a lot of folks who love Cracker Barrel, savoring its home cooking and slice of Americana. And at the same time, we have plenty of folks who love roaming the aisles of a Whole Foods market shopping for natural, organic, and fresh foods that are healthy and sourced in socially conscious ways.  In other words, a large number of United Methodists love both country fried steak and kale, cherry cobbler and Camembert cheese.  As our nation is increasingly polarized, it needs models of leadership and communities where Cracker-Barrel-ists and Whole Food Market-ites live together focusing more on what they share in common than what divides them.  That’s what the average United Methodist Church demonstrates, and what we as a denomination might model for our nation and the world.  

Five Things the General Conference Could Do Regarding Same Gender Marriage — Part Two

David Burns on May 9, 2016

Today's post is Part Two in a series. You can read Part One here.   As General Conference begins this week in Portland, so much of the focus will be on the debates regarding the church’s position on homosexuality.  If I could wave a magic wand, I’d remove all references to homosexuality from The Book of Discipline (which was how The Discipline read prior to 1972).  Imagine the United Methodist Church without the incessant fighting over homosexuality; we might actually focus our attention on “making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” But given that this is an unlikely outcome at this General Conference, here are five things I hope the General Conference might do in the next eleven days:    1. At minimum we should insert in the Discipline, both at Paragraph 161F and at Paragraph 304.3 that “United Methodists are deeply divided on the issue of homosexuality, but at this time a simple majority of General Conference delegates hold that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. …”  This insertion acknowledges where a significant minority of United Methodist stand.  Additionally, a similar insertion should be made as a footnote at the bottom of page 110 in the Discipline at paragraph 161F where the sentence reads “… only within the covenant of monogamous heterosexual marriage.”  I’ve heard from some conservatives who would support this, as would most moderates and progressives in our churches. 2. A second change would be to replace the “incompatible” language with something that is not so painful to gay and lesbian people and their family and friends. If the General Conference intends to maintain a conservative position on homosexuality, I would suggest we replace the incompatibility sentence at 161F and 304.3 with something like the following: “United Methodists are deeply divided on the issue of homosexuality, but at this time a simple majority of General Conference delegates hold that same gender sexual relations are not God’s intended will for human sexuality.”  Again, many conservatives understand the need to find a better word to describe their position than “incompatible.” 3. A third step that the General Conference could take that would require minimal changes in the Discipline would be to eliminate from the list of “chargeable offenses” in paragraph 2702 the words, “conducting ceremonies which celebrate homosexual unions; or performing same-sex weddings.”  This would not change the official position of the church, but it would encourage bishops and Boards of Ordained Ministry to find other ways of addressing violations of the Discipline regarding same-gender weddings.  Church trials for officiating at same-gender weddings harm our witness to the broader community and are likely to become increasingly ineffective as a means of enforcing the Discipline. If we did these first three, it would be an important conciliatory step for healing the divide in the United Methodist Church.  Yet these three are just a short-term fix.  Here are two more changes that I believe should be made at this General Conference and which would have a very positive longer term impact upon the church: 4. Make the United Methodist Church in the United States a Central Conference, just as United Methodists outside the U.S. are organized into Central Conferences.  With this change, the General Conference should grant all Central Conferences greater autonomy as they adapt Part VI of The Book of Discipline to best serve the needs of their mission and context.  We already make allowance for some adaptation of this part of the Discipline in the Central Conferences.  There are many important reasons to approve this aside from any connection to the debate about human sexuality, but I do hope that this structure would allow each Central Conference to have their own debate about human sexuality in their particular context.  5. Finally, I hope General Conference would stop trying to set wedding policy for local churches and clergy.  Paragraph 340.3 is right to say that, “The decision to perform the [marriage] ceremony shall be the right and responsibility of the pastor.”  Let local church pastors decide who they will and will not marry and protect that right going forward.  This would guarantee that conservative pastors would never be required to officiate at same-gender weddings.  But it would also allow those who hold different convictions to officiate at such weddings. To accomplish this, paragraph 341.6 would simply be removed.  This is a part of the Connectional Table proposal.  I’ve only addressed same-gender marriage in this post.  I agree with the recommendation of the Connectional Table that the Annual Conference is responsible for ordination and that annual conferences, not the delegates of General Conference, should be determining who they will or will not ordain. In my next post, which I’ll post after the first five days of General Conference, I’ll offer a few words about what is likely to happen if nothing changes at this General Conference. 

The Bible, Homosexuality, and the UMC — Part One

David Burns on April 27, 2016

Next month in Portland, Oregon, 800 United Methodists, delegates from around the world, will gather for the United Methodist Church’s General Conference. At this ten-day meeting, held once every four years, the United Methodist Church will set policy, priorities and denominational budgets for the ensuing four years.  Delegates will consider reams of proposed changes to the church’s Book of Discipline.  No issue will be more closely watched than the debate and decisions of the Conference regarding gay and lesbian people. Will the denomination continue to hold that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching”? Will it continue to prohibit pastors from officiating in same-gender weddings and United Methodist church property from being used for same-gender weddings? And will the United Methodist Church continue to require celibacy of gay and lesbian clergy? The deeper question, one which will largely be ignored, is what United Methodists believe about the Bible.  Our beliefs, or more often our assumptions, about the Bible shape how we view the question of the Bible and same-gender relationships. Conservatives on this issue (by the way, one can be progressive on a host of issues, yet conservative on this issue, and likewise one can be conservative on a host of issues yet progressive on same-gender marriage) base their views of the incompatibility of same-gender relationships on a particular way of reading the Bible, which in turn is based upon a particular, but often inconsistently held, way of understanding what the Bible is and how God speaks through it.  Progressives on this issue, likewise, base their willingness to embrace same-gender relationships as acceptable to God on a certain way of reading the Bible, one that is also based upon a particular, but not always clearly articulated, way of understanding what the Bible is and how God speaks through it. I’d like to use as an example a letter I recently received, signed by 12 members of a United Methodist Church in Nebraska.  They wrote asking me as a delegate to General Conference to please vote against any changes to the Book of Discipline’s policies regarding gay and lesbian people.  It began,  Dear Delegate to General Conference: As members of the United Methodist Church, we are alarmed at the possibility of changes being made at General Conference in our church Discipline regarding same sex marriages.  We believe that the Holy Bible is God’s Word, and that His Word is unchanging. … The letter goes on to cite the standard passages from the Bible that condemn some form of same-gender sexual acts.  I have no doubt that the folks who sent this letter are good people who love Jesus, seek to serve their neighbor and care about the United Methodist Church.  I visited their website to learn more about them.  The headline of their website states, “Welcoming everyone with Open Hearts, Open Minds and Open Doors.”  These fellow United Methodists seem to be stating that everything written in the Bible is God’s Word, and that it should be applied without question today because “His Word is unchanging.”  But I don’t believe this is actually how they approach Scripture.  Nor is it the way Christians have generally approached Scripture across the last two millennia.  Had the early church held these assumptions consistently, they would never have reached the decisions that circumcision was no longer required of Christians, or that Christians were no longer bound by much that is found in the Law of Moses.  We would still be worshipping on Saturdays, eating only what was kosher, offering animal sacrifices, and administering capital punishment for everything from working on the Sabbath to rebelliousness on the part of children (Jesus never explicitly taught that these portions of the Scripture were no longer binding upon his followers; this call was made by the apostles at the urging of Paul). Further if we consistently applied these same assumptions to what Paul teaches about women in the New Testament, the female members of the United Methodist Church would pray with their heads covered; they would remain silent in the church; and they would not be permitted to teach in any church gathering where men were present.  This is, in fact, how many conservative Christian bodies still read the Scriptures, hence I recently received a note from a member of a fundamentalist Baptist church who stated unequivocally that United Methodists are "unscriptural Christians because you ordain women." There are more than 200 verses in the Bible that allow slavery as an acceptable practice, even permitting the beating of slaves with rods.  The New Testament authors, as with their forebears, could not imagine a world without slavery.  If Methodist Christians consistently held that everything in the Bible is God’s Word and that it is unchanging — and by this they meant that what the Bible allows we must allow, and that what the Bible forbids we must forbid — we’d still support the practice of slavery today. While the words of Scripture don’t change, how we interpret those words does change over time. Interpretation is important because when we read Scripture we recognize that, while God speaks to us through the Bible, the Bible’s human authors wrote in particular historical circumstances, addressing specific situations, and in the light of their own historical and scientific knowledge. What they wrote was shaped by their own cultural and theological convictions.  On the issue of same gender acts, they wrote based upon their understanding of human sexuality, in the light of the prevailing same-gender practices of their time. And though we believe that they were inspired, the precise nature and extent of that inspiration remains a mystery. We do know that this inspiration was not some kind of divine dictation, but it was through the impulse of the Spirit at work in very human authors who were addressing the people and circumstances in which they lived. This inspiration did not prevent historical or scientific errors. It did not prohibit the recording of differing accounts of the same story in the Gospels. It did not keep the Bible's authors from allowing slavery and genocide; and it did not transform the biblical authors' patriarchal perspectives on women. Some time ago I was speaking on this question and a young pastor said to me, “It sounds like you are ‘picking and choosing.’”  I asked the young man if he had an account in the United Methodist Pension Fund. He indicated that he did. I then asked, “What part of Jesus’ words, ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth’ did you not understand?”  We often don't see that we all recognize Scripture is contextual. In the case of Jesus' words about wealth we're meant to take him seriously, but not literally. No pastor I know advocates eliminating savings accounts and planning for retirement.  A.J. Jacob’s wrote a book called, A Year of Living Biblically, in which Jacobs, a nominally religious Jew, described his year-long attempt to fulfill every part of the Law.  When he got to the end of the year, he concluded that it was impossible to fulfill the entire Law, and some of it made no sense today.  Then he said something to the effect of “Everyone picks and chooses; the important thing is to choose the right things.”  But in truth, I don’t believe that we are picking and choosing. I think we’re appropriately interpreting; we’re asking the question, “What was the historical and cultural setting of these words, and do they appropriately express the heart of God for us today?” And how do Christians make that determination?  We consider the words and actions of Jesus, we think of what he described as the great commandments, and we consider the major themes of Scripture. Then we bring our intellect and experience of the Spirit to bear on our reading of Scripture. This is precisely how the apostles came to set aside the clear teaching of Scripture (their only Scripture was the Old Testament) regarding circumcision and portions of the Law. This is how, centuries later, Christians came to oppose slavery despite Scripture’s allowance and regulation of it. This is how twentieth century Christians came to set aside Paul’s teaching regarding women.  Methodist seminaries train their pastors in critical methodologies for studying the Scripture. Those methodologies teach that the Bible’s inspiration is not undermined by acknowledging the biblical authors’ historical context, the ways in which the biblical text developed, and the process of its canonization. But it does teach us that the Bible is far more complex than the common dictum, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” allows.  At the Church of the Resurrection, of our 20,000 members, there are hundreds that are gay and lesbian and hundreds more whose children are gay and lesbian. Many are married. Some of these have children. Some are among the most committed members of our congregation. They attend worship every weekend, serve in mission, are in small groups, and witness to their friends about Jesus. They seek to love him with all their heart and to love their neighbors as they love themselves.  I love these people; they are part of my flock.  Most knew from the time they were children that they were “different.”  They were drawn to love the same gender in the same way I was drawn to my wife.  Do Moses’ words commanding that men who lie with men should be put to death express the heart of God towards them?  When Paul spoke of those who “gave themselves up to degrading passions” was he speaking of these couples in my church who love one another selflessly?  Or was he speaking about temple prostitution, older men molesting younger boys, and sexual exploitation, as well as unrestrained sexual acts divorced from love and commitment, that were the common expressions of same-gender acts in his time and at times, in ours? This last Sunday I had lunch with a group of senior adults at one of the largest senior living complexes in Kansas City.  We were talking about this very issue. They wanted to know if the United Methodist Church was going to split over this issue. I asked them their thoughts. These were lifelong United Methodists now in their seventies and eighties. They pointed to two same-gender couples living in their community and said, “God loves them, and so do we.”  They had lived long enough to see how our understanding of Scripture changes over time. Their great, great grandparents lived when white Christians owned slaves and felt justified in doing so by the Bible. Their grandmothers couldn’t vote in America, a practice rooted in the patriarchy found in Scripture. Their mothers couldn’t have served as pastors in the Methodist Church because "the Word of God was clear and unchanging.”  But thankfully things did change. They couldn’t imagine the church splitting over this issue. It is not only these senior adults who see things this way. A vast majority of young adults across all churches also see things this way. If the United Methodist Church can hold together for another ten years, this becomes a non-issue, as even most evangelical young adults in the United Methodist Church see this issue differently from their 40- and 50- and 60-year-old parents and grandparents. Thoughtful United Methodists understand that the nature of Scripture leaves room for us to ask the question, “Do these passages on same-sex acts in Paul and Moses actually reflect the heart of God for gay and lesbian people today?”  We may disagree about the answer, but we can at least ask the question. And, I believe, United Methodists may disagree about the answer and remain one church; we’ve been doing so for decades.  In my next post I’ll offer my hopes for what will happen at General Conference.