
Salinger novel
Cover of J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye."
I am committed to remaining in the United Methodist Church. However, we all have good and bad days. Sometimes, I wonder if the stress I am experiencing is worth whatever the church will look like as a denomination after 2024. Most of my questions have nothing to do with the Book of Discipline, paragraph 2553, human sexuality, or the disaffiliation crisis. I want the church to be as open and welcoming as possible. Do we realize what an inflammatory statement that sentence has become? The words take on a life of their own. Everyone hears them differently.
Will we be the same organization, with all its flaws, blind-spots, scriptural and spiritual baggage, and dated traditions, except that we are now open to affirming our LGBTQ sisters and brothers? If this is all that occurs, we will have squandered an opportunity to say there is a different way to be a Christian. On the other hand, we can make a new theological statement. Christian nationalism, evangelical fundamentalism, Biblical literalism, and end-times theology, even the soft, watered-down kind that has long found a home in our denomination, are dangerous and wrong.
This is the week of the annual conference. I’ll pack up and head east on Wednesday to attend our annual conference. Here’s another moment of radical honesty: Just between you and me, I would rather be anywhere else than at annual conference.
Why? I’ve considered my reluctance to spend time with members of my own tribe, sing Wesley’s hymns, do the business of the church, and encourage each other to go on. Here’s what I’ve come up with. Not one moment of it seems real. The entire event seems disconnected from the realities of our broader world (the ongoing threat to turn America into a fascist autocracy, climate change, a massive land war in Europe, the multi-headed hydras of gun violence, racism, and poverty). Our world is on the edge of massive systemic change. Being aware of such change, announcing we care about change, and then returning to the hypoxia of Charles Wesley’s choruses isn’t enough for us to claim we are committed and involved to the crises surrounding us. By the time we determine who we think we are (as a denomination) the world will be fundamentally different place and we’ll be playing cultural catchup.
It is the Salinger-esque phoniness of it all. In other words, we seem incredibly out of touch, like we’re having a conversation with ourselves, we’re enjoying what we’re hearing, pretending nothing is wrong, giving each other awards for being Methodists, and enough fake smiles and stories of successful appointments you know that at least half of the people you talk to are being less than honest. Sometimes we talk about one thing, have a generic quadrennial focus, or collect a one-time special offering, all to show that we care about an issue. We’re a year past the height of the pandemic, in the middle of disaffiliation, and have lost over four hundred churches in North Carolina; it can’t be going that well. We can be hopeful for the future; I’m asking for some grounded humility and honesty in the present. That won’t happen. There’s no looking back — no time to process. We’ve got to keep on trucking. Where are we going?
It feels like we’re headed right back where we started from, cliches and all, and the world will pass us by. The newspapers will write a few stories about our meeting. They won’t care about anything else we say or do unless it deals with paragraph 2553 or human sexuality. To the public, we will appear as a group of religious schizophrenics who can’t decide who they want to be – another church on the frontlines of the culture war. In quotes we’ll be painted as woke snowflakes or religious bigots. As with most headlines these days, little context will be given. The world will move on. And we wonder why it’s hard for people to decide whether to visit our churches.
If the annual conference didn’t feel like an exercise in forced superficiality and superficial spirituality, an imposed family reunion, and reading from a religious script so that all the right things are said at the right time and imagining that Israel’s God who loves justice, humility, and mercy is pleased with Methodists conducting a worship extravaganza in eastern North Carolina, I might be more excited about going. As of now, I’m not.