We Should Welcome the UMC's Inevitable Fracture for Missional Reasons

by

Special to United Methodist Insight

Only a few weeks remain before delegates will gather in St. Louis for the General Conference. While much of our church’s future remains uncertain two things are clear. First, the UMC is going to fracture into two or more movements. And second, in time, we will all emerge in better shape.

Of the three options before delegates, the Connectional Conference Plan is basically a nonstarter. The Traditional Plan (TP) seems on the face of it to hold the denomination together, but in reality, if it passes, some progressives will leave immediately, and more will do so in the coming years. The One Church Plan (OCP) has the support of almost all progressives and some traditionalists but it too will lead to fracture. A large group of traditionalists will leave almost immediately, as well as a few progressives upset that the OCP doesn’t truly allow full inclusion of the LGBTQIA+ community. Some traditionalists from the global south may cling to the UMC for a while, but in time they too will leave, since the OCP will be the first step in turning the denomination in a truly progressive direction.

Others think that rejecting all the plans will keep us together, but many traditionalists have already said that they will leave if nothing passes, because that would essentially leave us in the same bind we’ve been in for fifty years. There simply is no plan that would keep us all together. It is time that we admit that; in fact we should welcome a fracture. As Protestants and Methodists we know the advantages of separation and the disadvantages of false unity. Furthermore, we know that faithfulness to our sense of mission, which for many now includes issues of human sexuality, must triumph over unity.

Prioritizing mission over unity is not new to Protestants or Methodists. In fact, Protestantism was born out of the deep conviction of Martin Luther and the other reformers that schism, or as I prefer to say “multiplication,” is sometimes more desirable than a false unity. The Reformers did not set out to fracture the church, but as it became apparent that the Roman Catholic Church did not adequately value the bedrock theological convictions regarding the priesthood of all believers and that justification is by faith alone, Luther and the other reformers chose mission over unity. Only because they had this commitment do we have the incredible diversity of Protestantism today, including the over 100 Wesleyan/Methodist denominations around the globe.

John Wesley and future Methodists certainly emphasized mission over unity. By the 1780s it was clear that Methodism in colonial North America no longer had a missional imperative, once the Church of England abandoned the colonies during the Revolutionary War. Wesley could have either abandoned the Methodists in North America or branched them off as a new work of the Spirit. His response was to release the colonial Methodists to form a new missional movement, the group that came to be known in 1784 as the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). Neither of the Wesley brothers wanted to separate from the Church of England, but they recognized the missional necessity of multiplication. In turn, after the Wesley brothers died, the British Methodists decided that faithfulness to their sense of God’s mission was more important than staying unified with the Church of England, which frequently berated, minimized, and hindered their work. So once again they cut their ties and became a distinct Christian movement.

Mission, not unity, drove Methodism in North America for the next 100 years. The history of African Americans in the American Methodist movement demonstrate this point well. Within a few decades of Methodism’s launch in the United States, Methodism fractured numerous times over the missional issue of equality for African Americans. Cutting ties with the MEC, they formed new movements such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the African American Episcopal Church Zion (AMEZ), the Wesleyan Church, (WC), the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America (now the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church or CME). African Americans gave up hope that the MEC would be truly inclusive and formed their own denominations. Each of these are still distinct Methodist denominations with vibrant ministries in the US and around the world today.

Another quick example of committed Methodists in the MEC who left their denomination behind over missional convictions are the groups we now know as the Nazarene Church and parts of the Pentecostal movement. They left the Methodist Protestant Church by the end of the 19th Century, because they prioritized their convictions regarding the work of the Holy Spirit over unity.

American Methodists know the disastrous results when we prioritize unity over mission. For example, in the 1930s three branches of Methodism (MEC, the Methodist Episcopal Church South-MECS, and the Methodist Protestant Church-MPC) sought unity after having separated 100 years earlier, in large part over the issue of slavery, but also the issue of the role of bishops. They came together in 1939 with the formation of the Methodist Church (MC), but unity came at a tremendous price for African Americans.

In short, white southern Methodists would only agree to the merger if they were guaranteed that no black person would serve their congregations as pastor of their annual conference as bishop. Northern whites, on the other hand, didn’t want southern racists serving them as bishops. The compromise was to establish regional jurisdictions for whites and a “Central” jurisdiction for African Americans that covered the whole of the United States. The result was a fundamentally racist “separate but equal” ecclesial structure. The compromise was so egregious that Mary McLeod Bethune derided it and the majority of black Methodists rejected it. Unsurprisingly, no predominantly black denomination ever seriously considered joining the new Methodist Church.

A similarly painful story from our history of unity triumphing over mission can be told in relation to women. As talks leading up to the 1939 merger progressed, it became clear that women’s ordination and their full inclusion as clergy was a major obstacle to unity. The MPC, for example, had ordained women and allowed them full rights as clergy since 1866. The MEC however, ordained women, but didn’t give them full rights as clergy. The MECS gave women neither. In the spirit of “unity” the churches agreed to revoke the full clergy rights of MPC women. Women would only regain their rights in the MC in 1956.

In like manner, the 1946 merger of the EA and the UBC to form the Evangelical United Brethren Church (EUBC) was only possible by sacrificing female leadership. The UBC had been licensing women to preach since 1849 and ordained them since 1894. The EA, on the other hand, did not ordain women, allow them into their seminaries, or fully welcome them into their conferences. The result was disastrous. In order to have “unity,” the UBC relinquished their commitment to women in leadership and revoked their rights as clergy. The EUBC did not fully embrace women in leadership until they merged with the MC in 1968 to form the UMC.

The UMC is at an impasse and there is no solution that truly unifies. Nevertheless, we can thrive as distinct Protestant and Wesleyan communities if we value our different understandings of mission as it relates to human sexuality instead of trying to cling to a false unity. If we can release each other to live out our missional visions separately, we can then devote all our efforts to being the missional communities the Spirit wants us to be, without all the vitriol of the last 50 years. We can refocus our time, energy, and finances so that we aren’t fighting each other, but are actually serving the world. Both new expressions of the Methodist spirit might decide, to see each other as fellow Protestants, blessing each other as fellow Methodists and Protestants, and perhaps working in partnership with each other as we currently do with hundreds of Protestant communities. Methodists have done this before–it is in our Wesleyan and Protestant DNA.

It is time for the UMC to decide which way the majority will go on human sexuality. Approving the Traditional plan will set the denomination’s course towards a traditional vision of human sexuality. Rejecting the TP, or approving the OCP, will turn the denomination in a progressive direction. Whichever vision prevails, those who disagree should be given their property, without penalty, to serve the Spirit as they best see fit. In this way our Methodist spirit will continue to thrive as we have for hundreds of years. We will not be the same, but the Methodist spirit just may thrive again in North America.

The Rev. Dr. Jack Jackson, Ph.D., serves as E. Stanley Jones Associate Professor of Evangelism, Mission, and Global Methodism and Director of the Center for Global Methodism at UMC-related Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, Calif.