Realizing that nothing is decided, this strikes me as just deferring the decision. The top level couldn’t agree so now each congregation will have to decide where they want to go.
The majority of the United Methodist churches in the US are and have been supportive of LBGTQ issues. This past summer when the global United Methodist met to vote on these issues, it was the African and Asian churches that overwhelmingly voted the more strict conservative line. Hence the now ensuing split by many of the US churches from the global United Methodist organization.
I’m not sure that that’s quite accurate. What it really reflects, IMO, is that roughly half of the denomination strongly feels one way, the other half strongly feels the other way, and several years of attempts at reaching compromises have failed.
Whether or not their views are good for the church is irrelevant to whether or not their views are outdated.
Thank you for explaining this. I didn’t understand why the conservatives who “won” the votes about ordaining LGBT folks were splitting off, but the money issue makes sense.
I just thought that if half feel one way, in a given congregation there could be a similar split. On further reading it looks as if the split is going to be largely geographical. There might be a few in a given congregation that disagrees with the majority but not likely to be a difficult decision for the group.
Exactly. This isn’t a new issue, and it’s been debated in UMC churches for years. I wouldn’t be surprised if, over the past decade or more, some Methodists, who found themselves members of a local church with which they strongly disagreed on the topic, had already changed congregations (or left the denomination entirely).
This is not correct:
So the local church building and local funds stay with the congregation which is leaving. The vast bulk of the total church assets are local church building and local funds–and only a relatively small portion like the headquarters in Nashville are not.
The late Brother Oral Roberts “was ordained in both the Pentecostal Holiness and United Methodist churches.” But he didn’t sound like the Methodist preachers I heard in suburban Los Angeles circa 1960. My formerly Quaker grandmother sent me to ORU. Brother Oral was quite the most charismatic person I’ve ever encountered. Should I guess on which side of the UMC divide his followers will be found?
It is not up to me which parts will flourish. My observation has been that churches that are more concerned with the opinions of people and less concerned with the opinions of God tend to do poorly in the long run.
This is in part because people who are seeking Christianity are generally seeking a standard or a path or guiding rope that will remain steady and not change - they are looking for something akin to the laws of physics, which are immutable. If your church is going to change its stance based off of popular opinion in society, then there’s not much use for it, in the eyes of these churchgoers.
It’s like how, if you’re a patient, you want a doctor who will tell you the medical truth, no matter how unflattering or scary it may be. You don’t want a doctor who thinks like this: “Well, smoking does cause lung cancer, but since society is very pro-tobacco these days, I’m not going to talk about the lung cancer risk anymore.”
Please don’t avoid the actual question asked. I didn’t say that it was up to you-I asked you what parts you would want to flourish and which parts you would want to prune off. Your statement tells us nothing as to what your actual opinion is.
But we don’t have medical journals and textbooks to determine what the facts are. All we have are many versions of a holy book-a book so filled with historical inaccuracies, contradictions and vagueness that no two people can read it and get the exact same message.
And those two people may then want to kill each other because the other person doesn’t agree with their interpretation of the message.
And my observation is that people who are more concerned with the opinions of people and less concerned with the opinions purported to be “of God” tend to do better in the long run.
That the church does better does not mean that the people do better, and vice versa. Religion in a nutshell.
I would like to see the African church flourish and the American church repent and then flourish.
Churches who try to change to accommodate people who hate religion make as much sense as Kentucky Fried Chicken changing its 11 herbs and spices recipe to appeal to vegans.
Churches in general don’t make sense. Institutions whose whole existence stems from irrational belief can hardly be chided for adopting irrational policies.
IMHO, both sides of this believe they are following the opinion of God, it’s just that one side is focusing on Old Testament lawgiving fire-and-brimstone God while the other is focusing on New Testament love-one-another, let-he-who-is-without-sin God.
Refresh my recollection which one a Christian church is supposed to focus on. :dubious:
On the other hand I also don’t want a Doctor who says, “Well my Dad was a doctor back in the 30’s and he smoked, and his father before him and his father before him, three generations of well respected doctors who smoked. I’m not going to change my mind about that just because of the latest health fad.”
More like a virus that tries to make itself less deadly by reproducing less effectively. It may well be that catering to the explicit wishes of humans to not be quite so hateful is bad for churches. But it’s good for the people. If the nd result is the church dies and the people thrive, then so be it. If, on the other hand, some people choose to remain with a more “virulent strain” of religion and they suffer, then my heart goes out to those people. I just hope they don’t hurt anyone else in their ignorance, even as I know they very likely will.