A Plea to My Centrist Friends in the United Methodist Church

On March 23, 2016, the Methodist Federation For Social Action posted an anonymous blog that made even the most jaded among us blush.

Titled “#HandsOffMyBC” and authored by a United Methodist clergyperson, the blog made an emphatic case for universal access to birth control while also including these admissions:

Dalton Rushing, UMC pastor and self-described progressive, replied this way on Twitter: I’m in favor of universal birth control access, but this is awful. If this is progressive then I wonder what I am??

And yet the post was modest compared to some of the remarks that followed in the comments section. Most notable comes from a prospective ordinand in Oklahoma:

So this is what it has come to: a pair of would-be UMC ordinands inviting us to celebrate their premarital sexual intercourse. Just when I thought I’d seen it all, I realize I hadn’t.

Note the perspective in both Anonymous’ post and the referenced comment. It’s the church of me and of now. It’s an ecclesiology wrapped up in personal autonomy. It’s a faith in which the highest allegiance is to the self. It’s a hermeneutic which confuses “rules” with “commandments.”

It’s a future for the United Methodist Church in which sacrifice-making, cross-taking, self-denying holiness has gone the way of garters and petticoats.

And here’s why this is particularly germane in the spring of 2016 and why I’ve titled this piece “A Plea To Centrists”: the views expressed and actions declared on the MFSA blog have everything to do with the current UMC imbroglio over homosexuality.

Many of my centrist friends are heading to Portland in May and will cast votes either to retain or remove the language describing what United Methodist believe about homosexual intercourse. And I know that many centrists — even in my own Western North Carolina Conference — are still weighing their decisions carefully.

If that group includes you, I want you to know your vote is not simply about homosexuality and it’s not about justice.

It is instead about dismantling the entire sexual ethic that has helped define the Christian faith for two millennia.

Because as both Anonymous and the commenter show us, once you become more enlightened than the authors of Scripture when it comes to same-sex intercourse, then you are inevitably more enlightened when it comes to premarital sexual intercourse as well.

That’s not the faith I signed up for, nor is it the church I was ordained in. Instead, I have been steeped in the understanding that Hebrews 13:4 — keep the marriage bed pure — starts long before one ever gets married. I suspect that most of my United Methodist clergy friends believe the same and lived the same. It has always been a fundamental part of what it means to be a disciple.

If you are a United Methodist centrist and are heading to Portland still undecided in how you will vote on the Conference-defining issue, please remember: a “change the language” vote unleashes a generation of clergy who have so rewritten our sexual ethic that it will not be in any meaningful sense Christian.

And both Anonymous and the commenter will be serving as tomorrow’s youth pastors, giving sexual advice and counsel to your children and grandchildren.

As the United Methodist Reporter says, "The 2016 General Conference of the United Methodist Church will be held on May 10-20, 2016 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. The General Conference is the top legislative body of The United Methodist Church and meets once every four years to review and revise the doctrines and policies of the denomination. "

In little more than a month, the United Methodist Church will know if it is still a church within the classic Christian tradition, or if it has lost its candlestick and is now wandering in the wilderness as just another religious caricature of a homosexualist culture.

This year is a tipping point. Many devious plans have been offered for the delegates to General Conference to consider, the most celebrated of which is a so-called unity plan that 'allows' each individual church to 'make up its own mind' where it will stand. That sounds good to those who want some comfortable way out, but for those with any perception at all, they know that means that a sophistry of verbiage will have permitted open homosexualism within our denomination.

Where will the Conference come down? It's up in the air. It's 50/50. It depends on the size of the African delegation of conservatives who strongly desire a biblical, holy stance. It also depends on the millennials, youth delegates, and fatigue of everyone else with fighting this issue decade after decade. The culture is homosexualist to a large degree, the younger element of the culture reflects that acceptance of homosexualism, and their vote is up in the air.

> “So this is what it has come to: a pair of would-be UMC ordinands inviting us to celebrate their premarital sexual intercourse. Just when I thought I’d seen it all, I realize I hadn’t.”

Infiltration seems a radical supposition when supported by a mere thought based on soft observation.

But in my own experience, Seattle Pacific University had a cadre of theology students who were pushing homosexual normalization based on a civil rights pretext.

I was at an informal gathering of a part of this cadre at the home of my babysitter who had been a preschool teacher to my child. Her husband was a theology student. I hadn’t seen her for about a year but I always remembered she was a warm and positive influence on my young child. She’d been let go from the preschool and her husband who had substituted at the preschool was made persona non grata. I never inquired of the reasons why.

He was affable enough but held an inner edge of hostility to corporate structures. He had been fired from a job at Trader Joes for personal attitude problems and he seemed reasonable in his explanation of it to me. As an aside, I imagine Trader Joes is not a top corporation to work for but it’s often a first job situation for many college kids, and it does advance selected workers to management if they want to go there. I have sometimes detected an undercurrent of dissent as I’ve shopped there.

But nevertheless, I had always found my young theological student friend to be intelligent and quite knowledgeable about theology studies. I am a good listener in person and usually encourage people to be open, so I was considered as non-threatening in such a setting. There was never any outward deliberate sign of my conservative credentials as such outward appearances were not worth engaging in at this setting. Instead, I usually pose questions that make people think but which may sometimes reveal my inclination just by my asking the question. (We’re talking about being in the thick of progressives here, who happened to be associated with a Christian university)

I was somewhat put off by the pins in the nose and tongue, the multiple rings through piercings on the upper rim of the ears, the tattoos and the unwashed hair, all of which had seemed to have accumulated to my young friends in the last year since I had seen them. It was obvious the couple I knew had taken a different turn in life.

So the above describes the setting. Oh, and the gathering was at a student housing home as the couple I knew had had a child. So my meeting with them was also in celebration of their new child.

At the gathering was a woman with black ‘Goth’ type hair, a bit overweight and guarded. It could have been a man dressed in drag but it wasn’t. She was obviously intelligent but very guarded. She started to talk about how it was that ‘gays’ could not enjoy the same rights and privileges as ‘straights’ (I use the more accurate ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’). There was some discussion as to a recent decision by the college Board of Trustees disallowing homosexual ministers. As the discussion continued, I heard the ‘Goth’ woman say that blacks had suffered in civil rights demonstrations in the 60s, and she suggested that students might have to suffer similarly.

I then interjected and asked if the homosexual movement was extrapolating from the Black Civil Rights movement of the 60s and she looked at me and repeated the word ‘extrapolating’ as if I had revealed a bit about my inclinations. She accepted the word ‘extrapolating’ and agreed it was suitable to say that. But her gaze at me let it be known that I was like an ‘antibody’ inside the group.

To project some age authority and wisdom on the group, I declared that I would not pick sides because in my view many movements are taken up by people that don’t know what they are doing and don’t know where they are going and that it’s sometimes best to wait and see how things unfold. I noticed I got the attention of my babysitter who often sided with reason. I declared that many movements are led by people that are content on marching others off the face of a cliff. I ended by pointing out that America was not homogeneous and this fact added to its strength because its variability allowed for innovative approaches to prosperity.

That was like too much for this group. My young theological student ‘friend’ said it would be good to have ‘variability’ on the college’s Board of Trustees. He was indeed intelligent. I wasn’t going to convince or persuade this group of a damned thing. I had been willing to engage against my better instincts because this was a fricken Christian university setting and I thought there might be a reasoned discourse among a small gathering of the body of Christ, or so I hoped.

But these were leftists at very stages in development, some still malleable, some hard-core.

I left and decided against using the former preschool teacher as a babysitter in the future.

The last I heard of the couple was that he had left the university, not completed his studies for his degree, the couple had moved out of university housing and had started an in-home preschool at a rented home.

But I was a bit surprised to see that students at a Christian university become so embedded in hard-core leftist culture. I expect the college faculty put these leftists out and that’s just fine with me.

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