Jesus would say Love EveryBody. No Really, I said Everybody, what’s so hard about that?
(I am not entirely comfortable with the UMC’s present stance on some of these issues, but I’m not ready to throw out the good things that come from a congregation I’ve been associating with for more than 20 years over what I see as beaurocratic hairsplitting. )
Thank you. I appreciate diversity in the world, and believe that the world needs more acceptance and encouragement of it, even as I am traditionalist enough to not want change and have a semi-rigid set of standards for what I want in a local church.
The scheduling of the vote was NOT up to the pastor. It was up to the staff of the district within the annual conference that my church resides in. (I get confused by the terminology.). It is possible that the timing was chosen to make things harder for us to get a good number of members at the meeting. Apparently in June at Annual Conference, the clergy will vote on our disaffiliation, but it’s mostly a did they do their procedural stuff correctly, pay enough money, all those things. Still, if turnout had been really poor, I could see someone saying “Wait a minute, you have active membership of 900 people but only 10% of them voted? I don’t care that all 90 people who voted voted for disaffiliation, this can’t be a representative set”.
(In practice, about a third of the active members showed up for the vote, and about 90% of that group voted for disaffiliation. I was one of them-- because ultimately, I’m annoyed by the senior pastor-- and have told him so-- but if I didn’t mostly trust and respect him and the rest of the lead time, I probably ought to be searching for a new church home, regardless of the outcome of the vote.)
Why we were looking into disaffiliation is clear as mud, but it’s a little clearer in my mind than it is in my posts. I have some history with trying to explain theological beliefs on a message board that does not make me eager to try harder.
Now imagine having to translate all of that into Swahili on the fly.
(My church has a substantial Swahili-speaking population. So on the night of the vote, several paragraphs similar to what you posted were read outloud in English, and then someone attempted to translate into Swahili. He bogged down repeatedly, and I think the biggest problem was understanding the meaning of English Methodist Church Bureaucracy well enough to render it in any form of Swahili. The fact that he was blanking on the pronunciation of numbers that evening was not helpful).
The Global Methodist Church is definitely the most obvious option for where our church will land in the future, but the church leadership has been very firm in their refusal to commit or comment on it, and keeps claiming there are many other options available to us.
We’ll see.
OK, even if it’s church leadership (by which, I’m guessing, you mean lay leadership as well as just the ordained pastor), the fact that they seem to be very insistent on leaving the UMC, but are unwilling to give you (and other members of your congregation) details on what their church will do, is something that I find to be suspicious, at least.
“Suspicious” is not a word I want used about my church’s leadership. (Er, I’m not saying you shouldn’t use it, just I wish it wasn’t an appropriate word. I’m not sure it is an appropriate word, but I’m not ).
I don’t think there’s anything nefarious going on, I just think that church leadership (and yes, I do mean a blend of the pastors and the lay leadership) is afraid that if the congregation has too much time to discuss issues there will be drama. Is drama and stress and people leaving inevitable? yes.
My handbell choir, which has been teetering on the edge of having enough members to play anything interesting since before Covid, has already lost our newest member. He hadn’t been part of our church long enough to feel committed, I guess. (He’s got a wife and kid, it sounds like they were even more sure they didn’t want to stick around for six months).
Oops, I typed this up a bit ago, and got distracted and didn’t post. Hope it makes some sense.
I have absolutely no fight with loving everybody. And forgiving, too. But I also say don’t let yourself be a patsy for someone, such as a pastor, who is lying to you.
Me, too! But in my case it was the Upper Middle Class.
I’ve been active with Methodist churches, and the whole time, whenever I saw “UMC”, I thought of the laid-back, tasty Bob Seger track…
By the way, our Methodist church was very liberal, and supported LGBT members and issues (it was a while ago, before the Q). There was a lot of just ignoring the church hierarchy… which was also done with our liberal Catholic church. They had a policy of “Shhh, don’t tell Rome…”
In case anyone is curious, we’ve now voted to affiliate with the Global Methodist Church. That vote got 99% approval. (So apparently anyone who doesn’t like the Global Methodist Church had other commitments on the day of the “important meeting”. (Those are scare quotes, air quotes, whatever. I’m mildly disgruntled about the way the important meeting was handled, and annoyed about the way that the leadership talked like people would get way more input into which denomination or network to affiliate with, and then in fact they presented a list of options, with Global Methodist Church being the clear winner. But there were a bunch of round table meetings, and then a slightly sketchy important meeting, which lasted all of five minutes, and then we left and they counted the votes and come early June, we’ll take down the flame on the outside of the sanctuary (the cross can stay) and switch our allegiance to the Global Methodist Church.)
I missed this thread the first time around.
I’m a life-long member of UMC churches. The church I had been going to voted to disaffiliate. While those in favor say many things in support of disaffiliation (in a throw everything at that wall and see what sticks sort of way), the underlying reason is the UMC is facing internal pressure to become inclusive of gender diversity. And the bigots cannot tolerate even the possibility of that happening. Nor even allowing individual congregations to take their own stances.
But the problem is that many church buildings are not owned by the congregation, but the local UMC conference. If the congregation leaves the denomination, they’re evicted from the property. Mine old congregation cannot afford to leave, so the vote was effectively inoperative.
But they’ve shown their colors. Maybe I’m getting old, but I don’t have the fight in me right now to push back against Christians who cannot recognize the planks in their eyes. We recently found a new UMC congregation.
My church did the same thing. I’m now thinking about leaving, because of it. I liked the UMC, and didn’t see an issue with the denomination previously.