According to this news article the United Methodist Church is splitting into two parts: A conservative anti-gay marriage and gay clergy half, and an inclusive half. The United Methodist Church is the second largest Protestant congregation, and the fact that they couldn’t come to an agreement over this doesn’t bode well in my opinion.
All opinions welcome, but I wouldn’t mind hearing from Methodists about this.
Bode well …for who?
It’s an internal issue,let 'em decide it for themselves.
Nobody is forcing you to be a Methodist, and nobody expects that Methodists will force their policies on the wider public.
Like Catholics or Orthodox Jews not allowing women to be clergy.
I don’t like it,so I don’t join 'em.
I’m formerly a Methodist, in both liberal and conservative congregations, as well as varied religious genera. I note that religions, sects, and congregations fissure and schism for many reasons, from theology to funding. Seeing Welseyans scatter hither-thither is no surprise. I suspect those holding outdated views will go extinct, like Shakers. Survivors will find something else to bifurcate over.
As a kid raised partly Methodist, until my mother had a fight with some other Methodist woman and decided to go Disciples of Christ (which was right across the street so we could still park in pretty much the same place), I learned there were two kinds of Methodist. There were the sort of high-church Methodists, who were okay with sprinkling people instead of dunking them entirely in water and who didn’t care if their church members danced, and who were on the whole pretty liberal–which is the kind of Methodist we were. And then there were the other Methodists, who most emphatically did not dance, and who seemed to me almost like Baptists. (The DC seemed like somewhere in the middle. Dancing okay, but dunking not sprinkling, and they did not say the creed during the service.)
(Note that while most Methodists seemed pretty liberal and also none too hearty about religion in general, I mean, they believed, but they didn’t go all crazy about it, my mother was kind of crazed and born-again, so I’m probably lucky she didn’t go straight evangelical and try to raise me in some snake-handling sect.)
Anyway I wasn’t paying a lot of attention but it seems I recall hearing that there were various Methodist churches, which had various schisms over the years, and some were reunited in the 1920s under the name Methodist Church. (There were also Southern Methodists, who did not unite with the rest of them.) And then at some point after we left the Methodists merged with the United Brethren and became United Methodists–but not all Methodist churches did that. It seems to me that the Methodist church was very much “pick what you like from the bible and find a church that agrees.”
So Methodists have a long history of splitting, then merging, then splitting. Sometimes over issues of theology and sometimes over other issues. Slavery, temperance, and now LGBT issues.
Nothing to see here, just Methodists being Methodists.
For gay people, both in and out of the closet, who are Methodists and who thought that progress was possible. If the Methodist church they belong to decides to join the Conservative branch their choice will be to either live a lie or abandon the community they were trying to bring into the 21st century.
There are so many Methodist Churches (let alone Christian Churches of all sorts) in the USA and all over the world that a new schism will barely change anything, imho.
I take the other view – it is a good thing. Because clearly enough people care about LGBT rights to make a split work. It also exposes the ugly bigotry of the stayers, and offers a real choice to people who want to stay Methodist and be gay or gay-accepting. It will make the power of the bigoted-Methodists smaller.
My question is, will one of the parts still call itself “United”?
United, except for those splitters.
“Northern Conservative [DEL]Baptist[/DEL] Methodist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912”*
I agree with the above posters that this is ultimately a good thing for LGBT members, in the US at least. They can go where they are welcome and accepted, and the bigotry of the splitters will be exposed for all to see.
In other countries, where the Bigoted Church of Methodism probably dominates, it will be much more troubling for LGBT church members, I imagine, because now their pastor’s hatred and bigotry will be obvious to them, and they may not have other options. It was probably obvious before this anyway, though.
- Credit to Emo Philips for that quote above
I’m queer and I take the opposite view. If the status quo was that Methodists weren’t homophobic and always supported marriage equality, then this would be bad news. But until very recently, Methodists were officially homophobic and felt that marriage should be reserved for straight people. Now a significant number of Methodists give enough of a shit about not being hateful bigots that they’re willing to break ranks with the hateful bigots. I’d say that bodes very well for queer people, and very poorly for the bigots.
Just change it to “Untied Methodist Church.”
Yeah, that’s my point of view. It moves things from discussion of exclusion to a place where inclusion is valued. That’s a net improvement in the overall situation. Just because it isn’t universal doesn’t mean it’s of no value.
Yep. Wheat from the chaff. A lot of people said enough is enough and split from the intolerance. The rest will live for the rest of their lives knowing that they chose bigotry.
I’m surprised, I had thought (at least from last year’s news) that it was the liberal branch that was splitting off. Now it’s the conservatives who are branching off.
That’s not how they will feel about it. They’ll go the rest of their lives feeling, “I chose truth, morals, principles and the right thing versus those godless heretics.”
If by “outdated views,” you refer to the anti-gay-marriage faction, this is almost certainly wrong.
The consistent pattern of the 20th century is that churches/denominations that liberalize decline, and conservative churches either grow or at least decline less. The Episcopalians are pretty much dead, and the liberal Lutherans (ELCA), Presbyterians (PCUSA), and Baptists (American) are right behind them. The conservative branches of those denominations (LCMS, PCA, Southern Baptist) have done much better.
The pattern holds across pretty much every Christian denomination you want to name, including the Catholics. Individuals, congregations, and sometimes whole denominations do drift theologically leftward … but those groups tend to do poorly in both recruiting new members and getting the next generation to stay in the church.
It may seem intuitive to liberals that since young people are more pro-LGBT, churches that are more pro-LGBT do better with young people, but it’s more complicated than that. Tell a liberal millennial that the church down the road has a lesbian pastor and they may think that’s cool … but it doesn’t mean they’re going to attend and get involved.
The Methodist situation is complicated because the two factions are heavily divided by race and money, with the pro-gay-marriage being much richer and whiter and controlling more of the physical infrastructure, (which matters a lot in church splits).
But the much more likely scenario, based on history, is the liberal churches continuing to decline and the conservatives holding steady.
They’ll be wrong, of course, and it would be weird for them to refer to their just separated fellow parishioners as godless. Anyway, it would be wise to remember what Jesus Christ said about homosexuality:
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Good for the liberals.
But don’t you think it is time that God issues a Bible rev 2 (or 3 if you prefer.) If computer manuals were written like the Bible, we’d be having long threads about the placement of the CTRL key.
IMHO, two factors are at play:
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There has been rapid Christian growth in Africa and Asia, two traditionally conservative regions. It was mainly Africans and Asians who voted for traditional marriage in last year’s United Methodist schism conference (if I recall right,) while the Americans and Europeans were liberal and pro-gay.
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If someone is liberal, and supports LGBT, they don’t need to come to a liberal Christian church to hear a pro-LGBT, liberal message - there are countless atheist/non-religious political groups, social groups, organizations, etc. that are liberal and pro-LGBT. What’s the purpose or need of the Christian church in that situation? It’s people who want to hear something *different *than what the rest of the society is saying, that would come to church. That means conservative, anti-gay churches, and that is why they are likelier to have growth while liberal churches undergo contraction.