UMNS Photo by Heather Hahn
CT Small Group
Connectional Table members spoke in small groups about different legislative approaches to the denomination's sexuality debate during their meeting in Maputo, Mozambique. Pictured from far left are Monalisa Tuitahi, the Rev. Kennetha Bigham-Tsai (standing), Bishop Minerva Carcaño, the Rev. Tamara Brown, the Rev. Ole Birch, the Rev. Harald Rückert and Josephine Deere.
12 November 2017
The United Methodist Council of Bishops gave us a second option for a way forward out of our impasse on human sexuality, and that one I’ll call COB Option 2, A Third Way.
Here’s how the COB describes this choice:
2) Another sketch of a model removes restrictive language and places a high value on contextualization. This sketch also specifically protects the rights of those whose conscience will not allow them to perform same gender weddings or ordain LGBTQ persons.
There seems to me to be no room for doubt that this option is in essence the same as the proposal presented to General Conference 2016 by the Connectional Table as the set of petitions called A Third Way. My analysis of this one ought to arouse your suspicion concerning a possible conflict of interest, because I have claimed to be the author of A Third Way. In full disclosure I should have been saying that I was the principal author, because there were many minds involved in the creation of A Third Way.
The core of the idea first surfaced as A Way Forward, and it was conceived and promoted in conceptual form by, among others, Adam Hamilton, Mike Slaughter, Don Underwood, and Jan Davis. You’ll still find that conceptual proposal on the web at this address: http://awayforward.net/
I signed onto that proposal, though I had, and still have, some significant reservations about the piece of it that calls for local churches to be empowered to decide whether or not they would receive a pastor to whom they object and to decide whether or not they would host same sex union ceremonies. In response to it, I wrote up the legislation that I thought would be required to put the concept into UM language for the Book of Discipline. I sent that to the A Way Forward leadership, but I received no response. As far as I know, the group never developed a legislative proposal.
However, the Connectional Table had formed a Task Force on Human Sexuality, and Amy Valdez Barker, then the chief executive officer of the CT, asked me to serve as legislative consultant for the Task Force. I agreed, and at the first meeting I offered my A Way Forward legislation as a first draft of the Task Force recommendation. The Task Force consisted of chair Kennetha Bigham Tsai, Ricky Harrison, Amy Valdez Barker, and Ashley Boggan Dreff. For a time, since we were meeting in her office, Susan Henry Crowe joined us and contributed to our conversation. My draft was subjected to markup and the usual perfection involved in group process, so, in truth, all of us were the authors of the proposal. It was Bigham Tsai who proposed the name “A Third Way,” and that name stuck through the CT’s approval process. The proposal was not modified by the CT, and it was submitted as drafted by the Task Force.
The highlights of A Third Way are the following:
1) Relegates incompatibility language to historical status.
2) Permits bishops to decide whom to appoint to what ministry settings.
3) Permits pastors to decide whom to marry to whom.
4) Permits annual conferences to decide who is eligible for ordination.
5) Decriminalizes both being gay and officiating at same sex union ceremonies.
6) Retains language that supports civil definitions of marriage as between one man and one woman.
7) Retains language that prohibits the expenditure of UM funds for the promotion of the acceptance of homosexuality.
It would be nice to hope that to enact COB Option 2 all that would be required would be to update A Third Way to account for changes in the appropriate parts of the Discipline made at GC16, but that is not the case. It is not the case because of the election of Karen Oliveto by the Western Jurisdiction to be a bishop of the whole Church. That changed everything.
For A Third Way to be viable at all at GC19 as the way forward, the episcopacy has to be regionalized. In fact, whereas COB Option 1 calls for the Church to be increasingly centralized, COB Option 2 calls for exactly the opposite—the Church must be significantly regionalized, which is precisely what A Third Way did, except for the episcopacy. And Oliveto’s election makes that untenable without a new provision that regionalizes the episcopacy.
Our episcopacy has historically been conciliar, rather than diocesan. Examples of a diocesan model of episcopacy are the Catholic and the Anglican. In those churches, roughly speaking, a bishop has authority in his or her own diocese, but nowhere else. In our polity, bishops serve the whole Church. To make A Third Way work, we’ll have to switch to a diocesan model of episcopacy.
Mind you, A Third Way already faced debate and disposal at General Conference in 2016, and it didn’t make it to the floor for plenary consideration. It failed in legislative committee, so developing a strategy to get it approved at GC19 is a daunting challenge.
Lonnie D. Brooks is a longtime United Methodist layman and leader in the Alaska Missionary Conference. This post is republished with permission from his Facebook page.