On Bringing Church Complaints Against Jeff Sessions

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Dear United Methodist Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

I share your outrage at the U.S. Attorney General interpreting a well-intentioned law to give our government license to be cruel with adults who come to this country seeking asylum, only to have children ripped out of their arms. He is using these children as pawns as a misguided “deterrent” to stop other families from likewise coming to seek asylum from violence in their countries. The ethics (or lack thereof!) in this action is abominable and worthy of our strongest condemnation!

I am also equally embarrassed that this man is a lay member of The United Methodist Church.

But before we hasten to the battlements signing written “complaints” against a lay member of the church, I would humbly encourage you to pause and ask yourself a few questions, so we all know what we are doing and why.

First, what is our goal in filing these complaints? Do we want biblical “Justice” that will help this individual realize the error of his ways, repent, to ask for forgiveness, and change what he is doing for the sake of his faith in Jesus Christ? Or do we want to seek humiliation of him and to heap vengeance upon him? One is consistent with our faith, the other is not.

The next question is more personal: what is in this action for our benefit?

The only serious "penalty" that can be applied against a Lay Respondent who has had formal complaints filed against him/her is to terminate his/her lay membership in The United Methodist Church. If we seek to “remove” him from the membership of the church, just so we won’t feel embarrassment that he is a member of our denomination, that’s not seeking to apply our Judicial Process for the purpose of “bringing him back to the fold.” Rather, it is seeking to remove our embarrassment by punishing and humiliating him in the most imaginable ways possible. This is not justice; it is vengeance.

Our judicial process is designed to give a “Respondent” (i.e., the accused person) an opportunity to change his/her ways to restore wholeness to the Body of Christ. That’s what biblical justice and righteousness (i.e., “right treatment of people”) is all about.

I write this because circumstances and appointments in my ministry forced me to have to learn a lot about our judicial process. I’ve been defense counsel in two trials of clergy, counsel for the church (i.e., prosecutor) on the first round of charges against a third clergy, mediator of a sentence against a fourth clergy who chose to admit his guilt, and have served as defense advocate in 15 cases of administrative complaints against clergy, all from my own annual conference. I’ve seen more of church trials in the past 33 years than any sane clergy would want to see.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is that resolving a complaint short of trial is far superior to having a trial. The other big thing I’ve learned is that no one “wins” in a trial. Everyone involved in a trial, and the Church, all lose. The phrase I’ve heard most clergy who serve as members of a trial court (our phrase for “jury”) say is, “I feel soiled.”

I’ve been a United Methodistt clergy for 47 years. To my knowledge, in that time there have been two trials of lay members in the United States. The last one was in the last quadrennium in the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference. From what I heard from the legal folks there, it was an unmitigated disaster and cost the Conference tens of thousands of dollars.

So what will filing these complaints get us? Likely, Attorney General Sessions would turn in his church membership and keep on doing what he’s doing now, giving the ultraconservative Wesleyan Covenant Association fodder to damn the rest of us for years to come. There’s no incentive for the Attorney General to go through a church trial. He’d simply join another church and complain about how "liberals" are trying to run “good Christian folks” out of the UMC.

If nothing else, the bishop and superintendent of the local church where his professing membership is held would find a way to stop any action before a Committee on Investigation ever got appointed!

As far as I can see, this effort to get people to file complaints against Jeff Sessions really is just a PR effort by some, (making such an action no different than those filed by the Trump Administration), and it has been used as a way for many who signed this complaint to feel a sense of nobility within themselves. That’s all it is.

If you really feel moved to sign, go ahead. Just know that the odds are very high that nothing will come of it. And if something did come of it, very likely it would be something you would regret seeing.

The Rev. Thomas H. (Tom} Griffith is a retired clergy member of the California-Pacific Annual Conference.