The issue with this point of view (and it is quite common, so I’m not trying to single you out) is that it views church membership as transactional. The notion is that you go to a church simply because they align with your views. But for many people that falls far short of what their church means to them - for many the church is their community. Their extended family. These are people they’ve gone through life with for decades. They know their co-parishioners kids, etc.
One does not spend a sleepless night with a crying wife (as the OP did) if it was just the matter of finding a religious organization whose views match one’s own. I have UMC friends who are absolutely devastated over this. They fear the splintering of their family.
Granted, if their church (or churches in the area they live in) leaves to join a new Methodist denomination that affirms LGBTQ people, it may end up for the best. But for now, there is fear and uncertainty as to if that will happen and if their churches may survive that.
On some level it is like if in the early 2000s someone in the family came out and half the family reacted by completely shutting them out. One can say, just forget them and just deal with the half of the family that is accepting of that person, but that is a painful process.
I’m also not an expert on UMC affairs, but I personally doubt there will be a schism. In both the ELCA and ECUSA, the liberal bishops won out at the official level and got the policies they wanted. After that, some conservative congregations broke off to form new churches, or perhaps in some cases to become entirely independent. When the situation is reversed in the UMC, I don’t expect that many liberal congregations will seek to splinter from the main church body. Because there aren’t very many liberals in the church.
Or to put it another way, the clergy are far more left wing than the typical person in the pews. Take the ELCA, for instance. You have the bishops, the seminaries, and a handful of urban congregations with very left-wing beliefs, who think that lobbying for Palestine is a religious duty and having a drag show in a church sanctuary is just fine. Then you have most of the church, which consists of more conservative congregations in the rural and suburban Midwest. The entire system depends on all those conservatives, mostly female, average age probably about 70, willing to show up to church and put money in the collection plate each week. And the liberal clergy are well aware of this fact, which is why they generally don’t go out of their way to tell the rural and suburban congregations how left-wing their positions really are. The liberal clergy and the seminaries could not survive without those conservative congregations paying the bills.
So liberal clergy in the UMC have a problem. They may not like the direction that the church has decided to move, but structurally their church is pretty similar to the ELCA. A hypothetical Liberal United Methodist Church would not have much hope for long-term survival because there just aren’t enough people willing to fill the pews and pay the bills.
The American UMC is a bit different. We have largely shed most of our conservative members to Evangelical congregations. The split is about 30-50-20 with 30 percent conservative, 50 percent moderate and 20 percent liberal. The conservatives tend to be geographically isolated in the south and midwest. My state as an example is West Virginia. We’re hardly known as a bastion of liberalism, but the UMC delegates from our conference are widely believed to have voted pro-inclusion and we see that even in conservative bastions in the south that many of their lay delegates are pro-inclusion.
Pew actually did a study on this and it’s about 2/3 of American UMCs want full inclusion. If you asked me to describe the ‘typical’ United Methodist stance of that 50% moderate it’s probably something along the lines of ‘I don’t know one way or the other, but if it’s sinful and we allow it, then God’s grace will forgive us. If it’s not sinful and we don’t allow it, then we’re hurting people and that’s not OK.’ We lean so liberal that American Conservative UMC churches have been trying to break away from the rest of us for years (In hindsight, we should have let them.) since they feel the church as a whole has moved too far left. If this were just the American Church, there would not be an issue at all. We’ve had the votes for well over a decade in the American Church. The votes from Americans even now were overwhelmingly pro-gay marriage (voting is kept private, but entry polls put it at probably 75% or so of delegates.) It’s not even much of a question to argue in the American church outside of the south.
For splits, the question really is about the moderates. If they voted to leave, the church would essentially cease to exist in the US. It would be a small Evangelical grouping in the south and some parts of the midwest. It would not be able to support its obligations to Africa and basically United Methodism as we know it would die. Conservatives know this, so they made promises to Africans that moderates wouldn’t abandon them knowing that the church in Africa would suffer if they did. That’s how they wrangled African voters into voting lockstep. Their argument basically was, “Yes, they overwhelmingly want gay marriage, but they would never abandon you even if you screw them over.”
The big question is whence goeth moderates? I don’t really know. I’m inclined to agree with the conservative view that they will stay since they won’t want to abandon the global church. I can’t guarantee that though. The conservative wing was doing some shady stuff before this conference. Their main lobbying wing (the WCA) was flying in African delegates early and having ‘educational sessions’ before the conference and picking out leaders among the Africans to speak for them and tell them how to vote. They paid for pre-conferences last year for African delegates to get them on the same page and basically whipped them into bloc voting. That’s not something that UMCs as a whole endorse. Our conferences have always gotten heated over various issues, but this might be the first time we’ve seen real scorched-earth politics from one side. The general frame of mind is supposed to be ‘Grace to our opponents and humility in our views with the possibility that we may be wrong.’ Conservatives essentially denied that possibility.
The liberal side really screwed it up. They spent all their effort in the US assuming that there were so few Africans they needed to flip that surely some of them would especially when their bishops agreed and it just didn’t happen. They assumed after the bishops advocated for full inclusion that it wasn’t a political fight anymore and they were worried about preparing the church for the change and not isolating conservatives. They were wrong. Conservatives didn’t give a rip and think liberals are all going to hell anyway, so they can hit the door. Conservatives played it like a political fight and liberals played it like a love fest and conservatives won handily.
That’s really the message from this conference.
On a good note, the Conference knows that the judicial council has found parts of the proposal unconstitutional in pre-voting opinions, so that means that if they continue to find it so, the entire proposal will end up scrapped. The bad news is that that only means we’ll be fighting this fight again next year. My worry is that the council may just let it stand to avoid another blood bath, although they tend to be rather apolitical and just rule on matters of church law. If they overturn it, liberals will likely start trying to whip African votes and may end up with a win next year, but I don’t know if they have the stomach for it since largely it would involve threatening to leave the church and kill money going to Africa and liberals would have a tough moral time making that argument.
Probably very few. It was actually a joke most of the time that they were there which is why it was mentioned in the press releases. They found the ludicrousness of it amusing. They also made quite a few jokes about it being in a football stadium. As a general rule, delegates are not that class of people. The lay delegates tend to skew middle and upper middle class. The clergy delegates tend to either have doctorates or be in a protected class. I think that for our three lay delegates - one of them is an Educational Psychologist, one of them is a 23 year old in the process of getting an MFA in classical music performance and one of them is a County Assessor with a Masters.
If you believe this to be the case with the ELCA then you have never been to a Synod Assembly or Churchwide Assembly. I remember how shocked I was the first time I went to a Southeastern Synod Assembly and witnessed the Assembly voting over 90% for pretty liberal resolutions - granted there are a lot of clergy there, but lay to clergy is 2:1 at Synod Assemblys. I would also point out that the ELCA Social Statements are very public and pretty liberal (and basically everyone knows that the ELCA is fine with LGBTQ pastors and bishops, though congregations have deemed conscience when it comes to their own congregations - a good compromise in 2009). Many of our Bishops, including the Presiding Bishop, tend to be pretty vocally liberal as well.
Some churches left after 2009 and I wouldn’t say that the NALC is all that healthy (they have less than 150,000 members). Hardly any joined the LCMS (for those conservative ELCA churches, they were likely for women’s ordination but LGBTQ ordination was a step too far).
I would argue that liberal UMC churches would be healthier than the conservative ELCA churches in forming it’s own denomination. Liberal UMC churches at least in my neck of the woods (Atlanta) tend to have quite a bit of money and are subsidizing the small more conservative UMC churches in the rural areas of Georgia.
As a St. Louisan this offends me. It hasn’t been a football stadium since Stan Kroenke pulled the Rams out of here. Now it’s just a great big, multipurpose room suitable for conventions, rock shows, and monster truck rallies among other things.
That may be the bullshit reason they present as a way of shutting up guilt-ridden white Westerners but that doesn’t mean it’s what’s motivating them. If Western neo-colonialist imposition of cultural norms was their main problem, they wouldn’t be fucking Methodists.
Two comfortable middle class straight white Westerners in a mainstream church agonizing over their third world co-religionists trampling on homosexuals within that church couldn’t possibly be more of a first world problem. You knew this was coming and now you’re having to deal with a dilemma you’ve been kicking down the road. Something has to give and it will hurt.
You seem to deal with depressive thoughts by trying to understand what underlies the phenomena you associate with them. You’re also a statistician. You might try combining the two.
Sounds like your thread should be titled: “Why religion and anarcho-communism sucks.”
If you keep sucking your thumb past daycare, you’ll find your fellow thumbsuckers increasingly disturbing. The Global South can do this crap because your organization and its ownership rules are poorly thought out. While they won’t say it publicly, as that would be uncouth, it must occur to the 3rd worlders that if they become the roommates from Hell, liberal Westerners will bail and leave them with quite a lot of prime real estate. They may not intentionally pursue muscling out as a goal but that kind of incentive can tip how receptive someone is to particular arguments or confrontation. They know you’re in a tight spot, they’ve got you, you know it, and now it’s … what do you call it? “Intersubjective”? Like when they know you know and you know they know, there’s a tacit mutual understanding and it all goes very meta.
Heh, that is true. It betrays my occupation. We use protected class primarily to refer to ethnic and racial minorities and recent immigrants - eg ‘Applicant A is in a protected class.’ to mean we need written justification for why we might not be hiring them to a position.
To clarify further, there is no requirement for education or occupation for any type of people to be a delegate. Simply the mean education level of immigrant and racial minority delegates is lower than that for white delegates-although many highly educated minority and immigrant delegates certainly are elected. This is largely societal in nature and simply reflects the fact that educational attainment by non-minorities tends to be higher. Churches that elect minority delegates frequently do so because they bring a unique perspective that needs representation and they are less concerned with credentials. The real reason is that there is a giant pool of overeducated white United Methodists to pull from and the pool is much smaller for minorities and immigrants.
The reason they give is that homosexuality is ‘sin.’ They do so largely because of their cultural context though. It’s the cultural context that we can analyze to determine why Africans by and large detest homosexuality. That’s where post-colonial attitudes come in to the situation.
I don’t know that we did know this was coming. That’s why it hurts so much. The conservative side of the American Church was led by a group called the Wesleyan Covenant Association, which gets funding from a political-religious group called the Institute on Religion and Democracy. They have been spending the last decade or so advocating for allowing conservative churches to disassociate. They thought the battle was lost. When the bishops and commission all threw their weight behind the One Church Plan which would have allowed freedom of conscience, we mostly thought it was all over but the toasting. Liberal groups recognized that Africa was going to break conservative, but the overwhelming support of the European and American church meant we only needed about 10 percent of African votes for the One Church Plan to succeed and we foolishly assumed that surely at least 10 per cent of them would vote with the bishops. It was nearly inconceivable that all of them would bloc vote. The inconceivable happened largely because the WCA was much better organized and able to move Africans lockstep.
Maybe. I deal with depression by trying to understand other people. I don’t like to demonize. I prefer to empathize.
I probably could have titled it a lot of things. I was feeling oppressed at the time and quite sad. As I said above, I don’t have any real complaints about either Democracy or Globalism or religion or anarcho-communism as a whole. It’s just sometimes Democracy gets us Trumps or really bad legislation and in this case it did.
They actually don’t want us to break apart. There’s more value in maintaining a pipeline of giving and having connections on this side of the Atlantic. Also, church politics are different than government politics. It’s a lot less about zero-sum games and everyone is supposed to be acting in a spirit of unity (which crippled the left politically.) The IRD isn’t particularly United Methodist and the WCA was certainly acting very underhandedly and I believe the ‘Zero Sum’ polarization of American politics has very much infected their thinking. One of the reasons we thought we were going to get our 10% for the One Church Plan is that Africans were very much against a split. In earlier talks, that seemed to dominate the discussion. What happened is that the WCA promised them that liberals would by and large not leave the church in the US and that there would be perhaps a small group that leaves, but most of the moderates and liberals would fall in line. African delegates believed them. It remains to be seen whether those promises were empty or not.
Is a nationalist reason for telling Africa to “suck the whole root” any better?
Have you listened and understood their concerns? From what you have posted here you seem to be stereotyping anyone who disagrees with you as anti-homosexual. Some of your aggrievement seems to be coming from a feeling that the UMC belongs to white Americans like yourself and the Africans who belief in traditional morality are taking it away. Do you really believe that the African and Filipino members belong in the church the same way you do or are they being allowed in your church?
The nationalist comment was made facetiously. I thought the smiley made that clear. Being nationalist is just as abhorrent as being racist in my mind.
My aggrievement is the fact that I think a very bad decision that will hurt people was made. If the decision was made primarily by white Americans with Africans siding with me, I’d be ranting about parochial attitudes. It wasn’t. I don’t feel it belongs to anyone. It merely sucks that my people are the ones suffering because of it. If this were a political conversation and I lived in California and had to put up with a Trump elected by the red states, I would not ‘feel’ that the US belongs to California, but I’d be pretty upset at the rednecks who voted for Trump. This is a similar situation. I am not advocating that Africa be thrown out of the church or that their views be silenced. I’m saying that their views on this matter are not good. They ‘suck’ if I may use my earlier term.
I don’t actually get the response to this. One would think if this was a political issue and someone wrote a thread castigating the “South”, people would be far more ok with it. Two things can be true - African Christians (whether they be Methodist, Anglican, Catholic, etc) have suffered under Western colonialist notions of what the faith should be and at the same time, African Christians tend to be more anti-LGBTQ rights than Western Christians in those denominations. What is happening with the UMC is happening with the Anglican Communion.
Also I’m not sure why someone who is grieving a vote doesn’t get a bit leeway when it comes to who they are blaming for it. As if someone who after 2016’s US Presidential Election who had a go at the South was to be castigated and told they are being stereotypical and have you listened to the South’s concerns? I don’t really see that happening on this website.
Religion is inherently resistant to change, particularly when practiced in non-secular societies. This makes the OP’s plight ironic: essentially, Africans and Asians are not secular enough to move away from churchly thinking. Gasp! Perhaps if they lived among more egalitarian non-believers—who use reason to inform decisions and not scripture—then they too would join the band wagon in believing gay discriminaton is wrong.
Blaming this all on differences between cultures is missing the forest for the trees. If progressivism in the church requires social influences from the outside world (and it’s obvious that it does; fundamentalists seclude from others for a reason), then what is the true standing of the church as an authority on morality? It seems subordinate to the secular sphere to me; a figure head that may pose like the boss but really just defers to what the real boss says. And sometimes needs the real boss to point out the error of his ways.
The OP should use this as an opportunity to question his own need for faith. Yup, I said it.
While I respect your desire to proselytize and I hope that you get half-credit with your local atheist club fir your attempt to exploit my emotional vulnerability to advance your ideology, I find I must respectfully decline your offer. Besides the fact that it’s horribly icky and fundamentalist-like of you to prey on the grieving, I also find your argument to be spurious at best.
It relies on a caricature of religion as somehow being a dictator holding the reins of absolute truth over the heads of unquestioning acolytes. This is not how my religious tradition works. Our founder invented something called the Quadrilateral in order to attempt to understand God. It uses Scripture as its base, but requires Reason, Tradition and Experience. Methodists believe that trying to exclude any of these is grave error and to only rely on one is myopic. As such, as we gain more information and have more arguments and more discussion, we fully expect our view of God to change. It’s fairly ludicrous to believe that Nehemiah as an example would conceive of God in the same way as Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton has many different experiences that impact her understanding of God.
We are a big tent denomination that has historically relied on tolerance of dissent and respect for individual conscience. Yes, we have a Book of Discipline, but members rarely if ever agree with the whole thing. As an example, homosexuality has been forbidden since 1972, yet we have a lesbian bishop. The Book of Discipline is just a governing document with an outline of generally agreed upon shared beliefs. As a member, I’m under no obligation to agree with all of it and I don’t. If we did, then it would never change.
Of course, culture has a huge impact on our views of morality just as it did the authors of the Bible. We view our religion as a shared pilgrimage as we attempt to draw closer to God. Culture is going to impact that to varying degrees. What makes this decision galling is that conservatives are denying that basic premise and falling for your logic where culture is somehow at odds with faith rather than a condition in which faith resides. This is NOT historically a Methodist position and one of the reasons that the judicial council is likely to rule it unconstitutional.
I’m sorry you are grieving. You seem really disappointed in this turn of events and I seriously am not trying to make light of your unhappiness.
But appraising the situation more objectively might help you see what I (and others) see. There is a lesson in this.
Okay, and this changes nothing about what I posted. The cultural differences you’re attributing to the schism clearly have a lot to do with followers weighting or viewing “reason, tradition, and experience” differently. If secular humanism shapes your society’s culture, more weight will given to reason; if secularity is rare, then tradition gets the weight.
Never said you do.
Okay so let’s go with that. African believers live in a culture that isn’t at odds with their faith; in fact, the two line up perfectly. And your faith is nestled at peace within your culture too.
So what makes them wrong and you right? What is unconstitutional about their position if what you’re positing about culture and faith true? If discriminating against gays was known upfront to be the immoral and unconstitutional choice, then it should’ve never been put to a vote, right? So your confidence this will be overruled intrigues me.
If we say they arent immoral for believing what they do because culture has influenced them as God would’ve wanted, then that leads me back to my original question. What standing does your church have as a moral authority if culture helps determine whether your behavior is good or bad?
Clearly, very little of this makes sense to me and I’m totally okay with that.