The Penchant for Purity Will Kill the Church

by

I am watching from a distance as I see The United Methodist Church slowly disintegrate into irreconcilable factions led, kind of, by a group of paralyzed Bishops. At this point, they appear to be unable to even come to a consensus on who to put on a committee to address the issues nibbling away and destroying our connection.

The drive for purity, whether it be doctrinal purity or purity of total inclusiveness, is the core of the problem.

I observed with some amusement as the drive for purity started to play out in my personal life in a way that reflects the institutional disintegration.

It all started for me with a clogged sink.

About four weeks ago, I was recovering from a necessary cardiac procedure. After several days of post-procedure malaise, I began to see life dawn again. It was a Sunday. We had attended worship, and then came home considering how to honor the day as Sabbath. I had just written a newspaper column on Sabbath practice and wanted to live faithfully to my thoughts.

I was still moving with physical caution but sought  to do something healing both for myself and for our household, particularly as our home was showing signs of neglect during my recovery.

I washed my hands at the bathroom sink and thought, perhaps for the hundredth time, “I’ve got to do something about that sink. It drains too slowly.”

It dawned on me: this could be my healing task. So I grabbed the baking soda and vinegar, two items I always keep on hand. I went to work. I pulled out the plug, removed the inevitable hair caught on it, and started my home-made treatment.

After about ten minutes of shoving the baking soda down and drenching it with vinegar followed by hot water, I heard a sudden “glug, glug” and then, voila! the sink began to drain freely.

This little task, satisfactorily completed, started a marathon of “Do it now!” I’ve cleaned closets and drawers, redone the flower beds to make the transition from summer to fall, re-potted numerous pots that badly needed it, cleaned out my email inbox, re-ordered several thousand electronic files so I could find things more easily, handled hundreds of small tasks I normally tend to put off.

I began to exercise again, discovering to my amazement that I felt better than I had in years and years. I cleansed my diet–nothing but healthy foods enter my system.

My husband and I are leaving town for a few weeks, so I have arranged for the papers and mail to be held or stopped, for someone to take care of the yard and plants, thought through all the things we might need for the trip and have everything ordered, neat, listed, ready to pack. We have a cleaning service and had decided to ask them to do a deep cleaning while we were gone since the normal cleaning would not be necessary.

I was in control, or so I thought

I would leave a pure, orderly, everything-in-place house. I was in control. I would return to neatness and order.

Several days ago, my husband told me that a relative phoned. She and a friend would be coming to town in our absence and wondered if they could stay at the house for three days. He immediately agreed–they’ve been here before and are great houseguests–and told me later. Multiple houseguests are a part of our life and he had good reason to be confident that I would be delighted.

My inner reaction shocked me. I thought, “But I’ll come home to extra sheets I need to wash and the deep cleaning won’t get done and I won’t have the perfectly ordered, very pure house!”

In other words, my penchant for purity had pushed out my habit of hospitality.

Purity Excludes

Now, should there be limits to hospitality? Limits to whom I invite to stay in this home? Of course. That’s not the point. The point is this: the more we aim for purity, the less open we are to anything . . . and that also, unfortunately, means less openness to the Spirit of God.

Purity makes us exclusionary.

Anytime we see vibrant renewal movements, both written about in Scripture and in history, we see something far more akin to chaos than order and purity. Different people finding God in new and powerful ways make it necessary for the organizations they enter to expand and adapt. The organizations either make room for them OR the incomers will simply break off and create their own church structures.

That’s what happened with the earliest Jesus-followers. They were Jews, seeing no need to leave their Judaism behind in their belief of Jesus. The splits happened because some within the existing structure could not or would not make the necessary adaptions to honor the renewal movement God had brought. Actually, they denied God had done anything or could possibly want to break such careful boundaries.

UMC renewal movement seeks to build high, impenetrable walls

But the renewal movements in the UMC are very different. They don’t seek to break down current walls but to build higher and tighter ones.

On the right or conservative (or “orthodox” as they tend to term themselves), we have Good News and now the quickly organized WCA (Wesleyan Covenant Association). Both are purity movements: pure doctrine (strict evangelical, inerrant Scripture with minimal room for alternative hermeneutical approaches); both exclude anyone who does not agree that God created humans with a rigid sexual binary. Both insist anyone who will not live out of that binary is living in opposition to God’s will.

But they are not the only inhospitable ones in their fight for doctrinal purity. It is just as exclusive on the left or the liberal (or the more-like-Jesus group, as they tend to term themselves), with the Reconciling Ministries Network: a demand that all agree fully that God blesses all sorts of alternative human sexualities. This, again, is a drive for purity that pushes out hospitality. It’s just framed differently.

Both extremes have compelling biblical and theological arguments that support their cases. Both are irreconcilably divisive because those compelling arguments led to radically different stances and neither side will agree that the other viewpoints have legitimacy.

At our last General Conference (May, 2016 where I served as part of the reporting team for the United Methodist Reporter), the two factions operated pretty much like the Republicans and the Democrats in our state and national houses of congress: If one side proposed a piece of legislation, the other side would automatically and unthinkingly oppose it.

We reached stalemate, very nearly shutting the entire UMC down at that point. I believe this is called “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” That’s what happens with the insistence on purity.

We need dirt to live and thrive

A giant problem with the purity push: we need dirt. Yes, it is true. We need to be dirty. The more “pure” we try to make our environments, the sicker those very environments become. Consider how the extreme conservatives managed to shut down the US government in 2013. They’d rather massive numbers of people get badly hurt than compromise one of their “pure” conservative principles.

The UMC plays the same game, just on a smaller playground.

The drive for purity wreaks havoc with our physical health just as it wreaks havoc on our spiritual health. We need both bio-diversity and spiritual diversity. We need it to stretch our souls and keep us consistently and carefully testing our stances to see how healthy they are.

If everyone around us agrees with everything we believe, we, as a church, become the religious versions of Fox or MSNBC News. We know that each news source will either ignore or downplay the good coming from the “other” world and exaggerate any possible negative statements or events that would make the “other” look bad or foolish or uninformed or even evil.

We, as a United Methodist Church, have drawn the same lines. Healing dialogue has disappeared. Tolerance for differing opinions, honestly and prayerfully reached, no longer exists in our denomination. Brothers and sisters in Christ are accusing one another of being evil and, in many cases, of not even being Christian.

We may as well prepare for the break-up. But if we think God is directing this split or is going to give special blessing to one splinter self-righteous group over another splinter self-righteous group, we’re all deceived. That is not what Christianity or Methodism is about.

It is about our baptismal and membership vows.

Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sin?

Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?

Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior, put your whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as your Lord, in union with the Church which Christ has opened to people of all ages, nations, and races?

According to the grace given you, will you remain faithful members of Christ’s holy Church and serve as Christ’s representatives in the world?

As members of Christ’s universal Church, will you be loyal to Christ through The United Methodist Church, and do all in your power to strengthen its ministries?

Will you participate in the ministries of this church with your prayers, your presence, your gifts, your service, and your witness? 

These give us the boundaries we need, just as my house needs some boundaries as to who stays there. Sure, houseguests are messy–and they enrich our lives immeasurably.

The church works the same way. The cleaner we try to make it, the closer we get to destroying it. The purity movements now at play will do just that.

The Rev. Christy Thomas of Frisco, Texas, is a retired clergy member of the North Texas Annual Conference. She blogs at Ask the Thoughtful Pastor on Patheos.com, from which this post is republished with the author's permission.