Disaffiliation or Disruption?

by

A United Methodist Insight Exclusive

When the next editions of United Methodist history are written, they will have a lot of turmoil and trouble to explain. They will have to deal with shifts in authority from connectional to congregational power. They will have to describe the ways that the episcopacy re-engineered bishops to be parochial executives, not prophetic evangelicals. They might have to create a new date scheme for eras of the church, perhaps with BC and AD for life “Before Covid” and “After Disaffiliation.” And they should also give attention to external forces and figures that disrupted and altered The United Methodist Church, including individuals and institutions that impacted church doctrines and disciplines while living outside its systems of accountability.

Among those forces and figures are the “Institute on Religion and Democracy” (IRD) and its current president, Mark Tooley. The IRD, which began in 1981, is a political organization and not a religious one. Yet it devotes a lot of attention to religion-related topics and the practices of church bodies. Its leader certainly has committed many resources to altering United Methodism.

For decades, the IRD has intruded into the decision-making process of denominations, including Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, as well as The United Methodist Church. Though its current president, Mark Tooley, may or may not be a member or an active participant in any local United Methodist congregation, he has devoted a great deal of his energy to criticizing and commenting on the denomination.

Link appeals for donations

For fifteen years before he became the IRD president in 2009, Mr. Tooley led the IRD unit known as “UM Action.” A click on the UM Action website today takes a web surfer to this appeal: “Donate to help churches escape from the ultra-leftist United Methodist denomination before it’s too late!” The same site promotes “our new book, The Next Methodism, IRD’s guide for conservative churches.”

Such uses of “ultra-leftist” and “conservative” jargon make one thing clear. The IRD critique of the UMC is ideological, not theological. And its president is its principal voice.

Mr. Tooley’s career includes other centers of attention besides his gaze on The United Methodist Church. He has worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. He edits a journal on foreign policy and national security. He has written about a “Peace Conference” in 1861, after Lincoln’s election but a month before his inauguration, which sought to stop states’ secessions through a political compromise that would have allowed current and future states to decide for themselves whether slavery was permissible. Mr. Tooley seems to think such a compromise could have prevented the Civil War. If so, it would have left slavery legally intact in America.

He has been an intrusive presence in The United Methodist Church for a long time. At some in-person meetings of the Council of Bishops or the General Secretaries of denominational agencies, he could be found in the arenas of their discussions. He and IRD colleagues promote their views in a “Juicy Ecumenism” blog that is widely read.

Influential and well-funded, he and his organization function beyond the reach of any United Methodist systems of accountability. The IRD is a private organization. Although it intrudes into the activities of United Methodism, The United Methodist Church cannot audit the revenues, expenditures, or adventures of the IRD. The complaint procedures that can be used to discipline United Methodist clergy and laity might not be able to touch the IRD president.

More than two decades ago, when a United Methodist named George W. Bush was elected to the presidency, Mr. Tooley publicly recommended that only “conservative” United Methodist congregations in the Washington DC region should be considered by Mr. and Mrs. Bush as places of worship during their years in the White House. Indeed, Mr. Tooley listed the “conservative” ones that he thought would be suitable for the new President and his wife. 

Other presidents made clear that their choices about religious affiliations were personal and spiritual matters, not issues to be construed in political terms. Harry Truman was so deeply offended by Billy Graham’s willingness to reveal details about their praying together in the Oval Office that he banished Graham from any future visits. Dwight Eisenhower was outraged that the pastor of a Presbyterian congregation he had chosen to join publicly discussed the Eisenhowers’ decision. The President informed the pastor to be quiet or he would worship elsewhere.

But Mr. Tooley politicized a decision by President and Mrs. Bush about a church before they made one. He intruded into a very personal and spiritual matter that belonged to George and Laura Bush in their faith as dedicated and devout United Methodists. He disturbed ecclesiastical and pastoral considerations then occurring in the local churches, districts, and conferences of The United Methodist Church. He displaced the theological identity of the church with his politically extraneous definitions and ideological characterizations. He disrupted matters of faith.

Twenty years later ...

More than twenty years later, Mr. Tooley and his IRD continue to do the same thing.

After the 2019 General Conference narrowly approved a “Traditional Plan” that retained existing church laws and imposed new ones to prohibit sexually identified persons from licensed or ordained ministry and from being married in same-sex weddings by United Methodist clergy, Mr. Tooley served as an advisor to some United Methodists who felt such laws were not enough. When sixteen self-appointed United Methodists drafted a plan for breaking the church to pieces while getting tens of millions of United Methodist dollars to finance the fracturing, many of them relied on his advice as they prepared, published, promoted, and pled for their “Protocol” (formally titled "A Protocol for Reconciliation and Grace through Separation").

He and his organization also abetted a misinterpretation of another provision of church law that the 2019 General Conference enacted. Besides the “Traditional Plan,” delegates adopted legislation giving annual conferences limited authority for the “disaffiliation” of local churches.

Paragraph 2553 in the Discipline plainly says that a local church can seek to disaffiliate from the denomination if “reasons of conscience” compel them to be free from the church’s laws on homosexuality. But “the IRD’s guide for conservative churches” disrupted things in a strategy that prodded “conservative” United Methodists to pursue disaffiliation based on fearing future changes in church doctrine and order, not on their “reasons of conscience” for opposing current church law. These tactics of disinformation led some laity and clergy, including a few bishops, to interpret “disaffiliation” as broad permission to demand independence from the denomination.

This disruptive effort has had varied success in different regions of United Methodism. A final outcome will not be known until after the disaffiliation law reaches its sunset at the end of calendar year 2023. By the end of the first quarter of 2023, less than 10% of local churches had been disaffiliated by United Methodist annual conferences. However, in the Houston Area nearly half of the congregations of the Texas Annual Conference had been granted disaffiliation. And in the Northwest Texas Annual Conference fewer than five dozen local churches remained.

Disruptive strategies

Meanwhile, the IRD and its president continue to pursue their disruptive strategies.

In a post on social media on February 27, 2023, James Shepherd of the "Stay UMC" group referenced a tweet by Mr. Tooley, in which he quoted what he said was from a 1969 publication issued by a United Methodist agency that appeared to doubt the resurrection of Jesus. Mr. Tooley has not produced the original source that corroborates his citation. So, until it is found, nobody knows if those words were in fact published a half-century ago, whether they appeared as an authoritative United Methodist position, if they were cited as a challenge that Christians must address, or if they were a question that United Methodists must answer evangelically.

But the IRD and its president do not focus on searches for clarity. Instead, they use words as ammunition to disrupt the church not to defend the faith. They drag things into The United Methodist Church from outside the community of faith and explosively plant them.

Several years ago, my wife and I were victims of a burglary. The intruder(s) did not take anything from our home but left something behind. And what they left inside our house was a disturbing problem for some time.

We were out of town, attending an academic conference, and the organizers of one panel insisted that all participants power down our phones—not silence them, but turn them off—to be certain no inadvertent recordings were made. It was an international conference. Some attendees came from countries whose governments could make life miserable for any individual who used or heard certain words. To enter the conference room where the session was scheduled, my wife and I complied with the rules. We did not reactivate our phones until after the session ended.

That was when hers and mine began beeping, buzzing, and blinking. There were voice mails from a neighbor, to whom we had entrusted our house key and our home security code. She was worried that we might happen to see breaking news on a television screen, showing our house with several police cars on the street and two helicopters hovering overhead. Our security company left word that a home alarm had alerted them to call the first responders.

When we were able to get a flight home by informing the airline of an emergency at our house, we heard even more disturbing details. The police who responded to the alarm initially thought they might have trapped a burglar inside the house. With help from the neighbor who had a key, they entered the house without ramming doors or breaking windows. They searched the house thoroughly and found no person inside, but they did find something disturbing on our kitchen counter. It was a pile of weapons—guns of various sizes. Then they began to interrogate our neighbor, asking her if we owned guns, suggesting to her that maybe she did not know us as well as she thought, intimating that we might store arms unsafely across the street from her. She disputed all their suggestions, but they made her begin to doubt whether we could be trusted.

Eventually, the police concluded that a burglar had intruded into multiple houses in our subdivision and had entered our home through an unlocked kitchen window carrying weapons that had been stolen from another house whose homeowner was a gun owner. It took a while for the police to decide that the burglar had dropped those looted weapons on our kitchen counter and started to move in the house when our motion detector tripped the alarm, causing the burglar to crawl back through the open window and leave the cache of stolen weapons behind. It took a while for our neighbor to decide we were still trustworthy. It took a long while for us to get over the sense that our lives had been disrupted by someone who stole nothing but troubled everything.

Several days after the burglary, I was in the kitchen and happened to bump a small straw basket where we put notes, papers, and pens. I heard a strange noise, like a sound of something rolling on the counter. Then I watched as a small caliber bullet moved across the stone surface. It was a reminder of the disruption, which left behind a disturbance, that would be hard to settle.

The IRD and its president have been forces of disruption in The United Methodist Church for a long time. When the authors of the church’s history write in the future about disaffiliations in the denomination, they need to include careful analyses of the disruptions that intruders have left behind. Until then, United Methodists need to acknowledge that there are figures and forces whose purposes are rooted in something other than faith when they pick a fight with us.

The Rev. William B. Lawrence, PhD., is a United Methodist clergyman and Professor Emeritus of American Church History and former dean of Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. Currently he serves as a Research Fellow, Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition, The Divinity School, Duke University, an official United Methodist-related seminary.