A United Methodist Insight Exclusive
I am "looking down the barrel" of becoming 80 in a couple weeks. I was in my 30s when I first heard that someone threatened General Conference with splitting over homosexuality. There was no article of faith involved that I ever heard of.
Even then, homosexuality was hardly ever discussed in any way. The "Ewww" factor was all that I knew about it: that it was an icky thing no one talked about. There was no sense of tradition in the church when I grew up or even in the seminary that there was a doctrinal issue over homosexuality, as the Rev. Tom Lambrecht of Good News claims in his article. It was a non-issue.
What was still alive in the 1970s was the doctrinal issue of war. It was still being challenged by conscientious objectors who did not talk of splitting the church over it, but spoke of their willingness to go to jail rather than go to war. In the 1970s, there were a number of old folks still around who remembered the rejoining of the southern and northern branches of Methodism in 1939.
There was no homosexuality issue until a gay pastor went to court against the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference to get his job back. At that time, the early 1970s, civil courts could act on church matters like employment practices and the pastor not only got the court to make the conference reinstate him to return to the congregation he had (they wanted him back!), the court made the conference pay the pastor $125,000 for punitive damages.
At the following General Conference, there were no demonstrations. What struck me most was that there was no talk of conscientious objection which I thought was the way United Methodists handled their disagreements. The Book of Discipline at the time did not contain anything about homosexuality. It was not referred to in the General Rules. It was not a part of either the Methodist or the Evangelical United Brethren statements of social principles. There was one passing reference to being against exploitation of sex between men and women but otherwise, the Disciplines up through the 1968 edition said nothing about it.
At that time, the guiding principles could be summed up in two passages.
- From the Social Principles: "...all persons have supreme value in the sight of God, and ought to be so regarded by us."
- From the Articles of Religion: "It is the duty of all Christians . . .to observe and obey the laws and commands of the governing . . . country of which they are citizens . . . ."
Hence, the attitude at the time was that conscientious objection on moral and ethical issues was the proper route to show disagreement. That had been the strategy not only against war but against Jim Crow laws in the 1960s. So it was a real shock to the United Methodist system to have someone threaten splitting the church over homosexuality at the 1972 General Conference and keep up that drum beat through every General Conference since. Splitting was not the Methodist way. It was a Baptist tactic. The Methodist way to respond was and still is conscientious objection. Sound familiar?
The Rev. Jerry Eckert of Port Charlotte, Fla., is a retired clergy member of the Wisconsin Annual Conference.