I read Bishop Mike Lowry’s letter of resignation from the Council of Bishops and the United Methodist Church “with a heavy heart and deep grief..." This is a major issue for the church, but for me it is also deeply personal.
The Methodist Church that welcomed me as an infant was a central part of the liberal mainstream of American Protestantism. We embraced science and biblical scholarship and the moral evolution of our society. In those years the mainstream offered a very big tent. Pretty much anyone could belong. And folks often concluded a discussion of religious differences with the closing remark that they were glad “we are all going to the same place.”
Half a century earlier, in the years when evangelicals were also progressives, Walter Rauschenbusch had declared that progress was not just inevitable, it was also divine. By which he did not mean that everything that happened was good, but rather that God expected us to make progress, morally and politically as well as scientifically.
I was eight years old when the great Methodist theologian Georgia Harkness wrote, “Understanding the Christian Faith.” Her chapter on “Understanding the Bible” lays out the perspective I grew up with, that the Bible is a sacred book, written over a period of about a thousand years. It is “heavenly treasure in earthen vessels.” It was not written for scientific or historical accuracy, but to convey the timeless message of God’s love and care. Some of it is timebound by the culture in which it was written, but at its heart it holds timeless truths about God and humanity. It is up to us, as we read the Bible, to separate the heavenly treasure from the earthen vessels.
Writing about “Jesus Christ Our Lord,” she states, “The question as to whether Jesus was born of a virgin is one on which the opinion of Christians differ, and the biblical accounts do not throw clear light upon it.” And on the resurrection, she declares, “We cannot be sure of the details of what happened that first Easter morning, but the central fact is certain. To the disciples . . . their Leader was not dead but present with them.” If she were alive today, we might call her a Progressive Christian. But in her own time, for a Methodist, her theology was predictably orthodox.
“Religion is perhaps its own worst enemy,” she wrote. “For religion, masquerading under the guise of archaic creeds, and impossible literalisms, and ecclesiasticism indifferent to human needs, has brought about an inevitable and in many respects wholesome revulsion.”
I was ordained when the church embraced “theological pluralism.” We understood faith, not in the reciting of creeds or the enforcement of doctrines, but in a journey that was both individual and communal. We were growing and changing and learning new things. In the words of the great abolitionist James Russell Lowell:
“New occasions teach new duties,
Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still and onward,
Who would keep abreast of truth.”
When Bishop Eddie Carroll put his hands on my head on a hot summer day in the chapel at Mount Holyoke College in 1973 he said, “take thou authority” to preach and teach and lead the church into the future. Bishop Carroll came out of the old Central Conference so he was well aware of the legacy of a past that was far from perfect. He knew that change was necessary and expected, as I did, that the church we served would continue to grow and learn. We would continue to pray and work for the coming of God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven.”
But all of that began to change almost immediately with the birth of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. The IRD's stated goal was to "renew" the mainline churches, by which they meant to move the churches away from social justice. Soon in addition to the conservative caucus Good News there was the Confessing Movement and then the Wesleyan Covenant Association and, finally the May 1 launch of the Global Methodist Church. Each iteration seemingly more rigid and dogmatic than the previous ones leading us back to the religion that Georgia Harkness so eloquently dismissed.
I still believe in the big tent. It pains me that the GMC folks are so opposed to the inclusion of gay folks that they can't bear the thought that somewhere in a Methodist Church a same-sex couple is committing to love one another forever. But even with that I don’t want them to leave because I believe that most of them will change. And the truth is that one of the reasons they are leaving is because they are afraid that if they don’t leave, they will change. Some won’t, but most will. They will have a gay child or a gay grandchild or a gay neighbor, and they will choose love over doctrine.
I am grieved by their leaving, but I am even more grieved by the damage they have caused. First and foremost they have done grave harm to LGBTQ folks. Their “beliefs” have encouraged and enabled bullying, ostracism, discrimination, and physical harm. The pain they have inflicted is immense. And, sadly, they will continue to inflict that pain with a new label.
And beyond the harm to LGBTQ folks, they have done immense and probably irreparable harm to the whole Christian Church. We will forever have to explain as Brian McLaren said that we are not “that kind of Christian.”
Bill Trench
The Rev. Dr. William C. Trench
The Rev. Dr. William C. Trench is a retired clergy member of the New England Annual Conference. This post is republished with permission from the author's Facebook page. To republish this content elsewhere, please contact the author.