METHODIST OFFICIAL: “I NEVER HAVE ASKED JESUS TO DEFINE MARRIAGE”

First Things ^ | July 4, 2015 | Matthew Schmitz

[NYer]

One measure of the decline of mainline social justice activism can be found in a recent Facebook exchange between the Methodist civil rights leader Maxie Dunnam and the Methodist civil rights official Bill Mefford. Dunnam was a heroic opponent of Jim Crow as a young pastor in Mississippi and went on to become the president of Asbury Theological Seminary. He also happens to believe in the historic Christian understanding of marriage, so in response to Obergefell v. Hodges, he made the following post on his Facebook wall:

To which Mefford, the “Director of Civil and Human Rights” for the United Methodist Church's General Board of Church and Society, replied:

It is hard to see why anyone who professes a faith in which Christ is lord would say, “I never have asked Jesus to define marriage.” 

Harder yet is the question of why someone who confesses the Trinity would pit the Holy Spirit against Jesus Christ while elevating the U.S. Supreme Court to the status of a new Word. 

This is not Mefford's first such performance. On January 22, 2015, he responded to the annual March for Life that seeks to end the legally sanctioned killing of the unborn by holding up a sign that said “I march for sandwiches.”

Contrast this statement with another, from January 1963. Dunnam, then a young pastor in Mississippi, invited three other Methodist pastors to his river camp in order to draft “Born of Conviction,” a historic challenge to Jim Crow amid one of its darkest moments. Only a few months before, rioting had broken out when James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. A few months later, a white supremacist shot and killed Mississippi NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers (whose wife would later honor Dunnam). 

“Born of Conviction” cited the official Methodist teaching that all men were equal, denounced resegregation under the cover of Christian schooling, and rejected the charge that the civil rights movement was Communist. Several of the twenty-eight Methodist pastors who subsequently signed the statement were forced to leave the state. Some received death threats.

The distance between Dunnam's statement in 1963 and Mefford's in 2015 provides another measure of the loss of moral seriousness in mainline social justice activism. The comparison is not, I think, an altogether unfair one. Mefford's official position makes it impossible to dismiss his comments as the mere product of one man's glibness, rather than to admit them as evidence of a church bureaucracy that has lost touch with scripture, tradition, and the believers it purports to represent.

[TalBlack]

Well, lucky for us all Jesus didn’t wait around to be asked all these 2000 years.

[Bryanw92]

>>I have been a former Methodist for 26 years-

I’ve only been former Methodist for 1 year so I’m still in detox.

[piusv]

Love has really won today.

No, Satan has really won today. I hope you enjoy your newfound "love".

[stanne]

Was just thinking. How they spell idiot in Irish dialect. Takes a minute to figure it out

Ijut. Or ijiut

I think it’s the second one

[stanne]

Most reasonable people have at least heard the story of the wedding at Cana

[chajin]

I’ve only been former Methodist for 1 year so I’m still in detox.

As a Methodist, I attended a Lutheran Cursillo in 1980, where I learned how much of Wesley's teachings (many of which had been left behind, forgotten, or corrupted over the years) meshed with Luther's. I didn't know it at the time, but God was preparing me for the switchover to LCMS in His timing, nine years later, and I was led to it by, of all things, a former Southern Baptist missionary to Jordan, who began to question his own faith, and ended up as LCMS. Whatever your journey is to be, God has already laid out the path and lined up the necessary gifts, supplies, and supporters.

[Alex Murphy]

I’ve only been former Methodist for 1 year so I’m still in detox.

I've got just a handful of years more than chajin has. I got out when my local congregation started teaching pantheism in the weekly Bible study, long before the denomination went south. You're in good company.

[chajin]

Love has really won today.

Joseph Fletcher would be pleased. God, not so much. Psalm 2:4 comes to mind.

[skeeter]

I believe that what Medford has done here is known as ‘grieving the holy spirit’.

[Intolerant in NJ]

Gee, I guess Jesus didn’t care whether or not Mr. Mefford asked him, because he went ahead and defined marriage as between one man and one woman several places in the Bible - so much arrogance and self-importance today, Jesus would have a difficult time making any headway with his teachings of humility and self-betterment.....

[Bryanw92]

>>As a Methodist, I attended a Lutheran Cursillo in 1980,

Decolores! I went to Walk to Emmaus in 2008 and it started me questioning all of Arminian theology after that (i.e. if God is great, then why is he waiting by the phone for us to call?). My wife attended Via de Cristo in 2012, so I switched over to that community and served on several teams. My questions led me to the PCA, where like you in the LCMS, the questions finally began to have satisfactory answers.

[Catsrus]

These people are so deceived. I don’t think they are going to experience “love” where they are headed. Nope - they will experience weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, without the benefit of a drink of water or air conditioning.

[Greysard]

How is if that he never read Mark 10:6 and Matthew 19:4?

The science of the question was settled well before Jesus. In Matthew 19:4 Jesus refers to concepts of gender and marriage as axioms for a logical proof.

[lightman]

>>I am astonished the United Methodist Church has not just come out openly for gay marriage.

They can’t until they change their Book of Discipline at next year’s General Conference.

The UMC General Conference is now dominated by orthodox Christians from Africa who out-vote the North American revisionsts.

The North American heterodox are openly talking schism and separation because they know they cannot "win"

[EandH Dad]

I guess I could be called a former Methodist although I used say “I am a Christian who attends the Methodist church”. Saw the homosexual agenda getting a stronger grip even in the south about 10 years ago. All starting from the administration and most of those from the North East. The Southern Conferences have been the ones holding the others back from going full homo. They are losing.

[RginTN]

Jesus DID define marriage.

Matthew 19:5
And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?

These United Methodists must read another Bible.

[Bryanw92]

>>The UMC General Conference is now dominated by orthodox Christians from Africa who out-vote the North American revisionsts.

>>The North American heterodox are openly talking schism and separation because they know they cannot “win”

They don’t want schism, but they will campaign for new rules to allow conferences to follow the cultures that they are in. Kinda breaks the whole “in the world, but not of the world” thing, but the UMC isn’t really concerned with those “guidelines” found in “a 2000+ year old book written for cultures that no longer are relevant”, are they? They say that God is still speaking (but he just stopped writing).

[Bryanw92]

>>The Southern Conferences have been the ones holding the others back from going full homo. They are losing.

Because people are fleeing to bible-believing churches. #Godwins

[Junk Silver]

“...but I have sensed the joy of the Holy Spirit today as so many of our brothers and sisters...celebrate that their love for each other is recognized at long-last.”

Dude, I think that was Richard Simmons you were sensing, not the Holy Spirit.

[IronJack]

It is pretty obvious that many of these so-called church leaders are less theologically driven than the majority of devout laymen. They are at best fools, at worst, tools of Satan. They should have no credibility and certainly no authority within any church worthy of the name.