I curse the day UMC allowed women pastors. Whenever and wherever that happens, the gay takeover begins and doesn’t end until the congregation of true believers is destroyed. But not before they — and the God they worship — are repudiated, stripped of their leadership roles, shamed, humiliated, denied access to historic records or gravesites, and their children scarified.
>>I curse the day UMC allowed women pastors.
That speeds up the process of destroying a denomination, but the real problem lies in the fundamentals of Wesleyan theology. Wesley lived in a time and place where the poor were excluded from church and were used and discarded by the wealthy elites who sat in their expensive purchased pews every Sunday. So, he brought the gospel to people that the elites had dismissed as unworthy. When Asbury and Coke brought Methodism to America, they brought that egalitarianism with them.
America was born later and flourished. The Methodist Episcopal Church was a big hit on the frontier in those days when the Appalachians were the frontier and it grew at an amazing rate.
Fast forward to the 20th century. America is doing a pretty good job at bringing the poor in to sit at the table. Churches no longer require you to buy a pew. We have safety nets, easy transportation, free schools, and plenty of jobs. And the rural ME Church becomes the suburban UM Church.
The Wesleyan drive to “create” social justice has to search far and wide to find anything that even looks like an injustice and they find fringe causes like woman pastors and gay marriage.
The pastors (male and female) preach that “the church needs to get outside of the walls” and “serve the community” even though the community doesn’t want them. Your outreach programs turn into handout programs to people who want free stuff but get offended when you preach to them.
The liberal pastors preach about the Sermon on the Mount, the loaves and fishes, and Acts 2 all the time.
Well, Jesus gave the loaves and fishes to people who came to hear the message. It wasn’t a “community outreach” program to supply food. It was a call to salvation and people got hungry because they listened the preaching all day.
And in Acts, the church took care of its own needs first so that it would have the resources to reach out to the community—to spread the gospel, not sandwiches or free clothing. That was for those who came in to the church.
So, the UMC continues to tirelessly search for ways to create social justice, while ignoring the gospel because “that might offend those that we are trying to reach” (a quote from one of my Methodist pastors back in 2010). Once again, ignoring Jesus who said that he came to divide.
And then there is the Wesleyan conundrum that says that you obtain salvation by faith not by works, but you can lose your salvation by not doing enough. The liberal clergy uses that fear to scare you into being a social justice warrior by using the words of James (”faith without works is dead”), but if you point to all the other scripture that says that you are secure in your salvation, they accuse you of proof texting—like those damnable Calvinists do!