Yesterday, together with many others around the Methodist connection, I watched the ballots and live feed of the South Central Jurisdiction. I actually tuned in 3 times.
The first time, the body was calling forward the wife of Bishop Earl Bledsoe to receive prayer together with her husband. Prayer is usually a good thing, but in this instance, Bishop Bledsoe had just been voted off the island.
You might wonder why he was voted off. According to the media, Bishop Bledsoe was asked to retire early by folks who wanted to graciously spare him the embarrassment and humiliation of a church trial. By stating that he was being spared these indignities, however, and explaining why the body should vote to retire him, they embarrassed and humiliated him without a trial.
The contradictions didn't stop there. According to the UM Reporter, the committee found that Bishop Bledsoe is a "treasure" and a "fine Christian man and dedicated spiritual leader," but that he "lacks integrity and trustworthiness." Which one is it?
When Bishop Bledsoe changed his mind about being coerced into retirement by threat of public humiliation, the chairperson then publicly shared disparaging aspects of the complaints against Bledsoe, while assuring the media and public that the committee had decided to keep such information strictly confidential.
Bishop Bledsoe certainly had been hurt by these precedings, and hurt people need prayer, along with their families. So who better to pray for him that the people responsible for humiliating him?
Healing from what, you ask? Bishop Bledsoe needed healing from his desire to defend his dignity as an episcopal leader and human being.
I have seen this modus operandi time and time again within the UMC. The methodology of antagonism in cases of bullying is simple:
- A person is subjected to defamation, abuse, or placed in an unmanageable situation that is doomed to failure.
- Self-interested powers that be passively stand by as the damage is done
- The person has a negative emotional response and may make mistakes while anxious
- The anxiety, reactions, and mistakes are used to discredit the person and justify the antagonism
- The disenfranchisement of the person is formalized with religious ritual, establishing the new power structure and reducing the victim to the status of client.
Watching this human being, regardless of his shortcomings of which I have no knowledge, be smothered in prayer-love by the same people who want him to disappear made me a little dizzy.
I decided to watch YouTube videos of gerbils eating their young to calm my nerves.
Returning to the "live feed," I watched the vote to unite the Rio Grande and Southwest Texas Conferences. The vote was unanimous, followed by rousing applause, then "Next item?"
Hold on a minute. A number of us spent months on the Unification Steering Team and one thing we all recognized was that this was both a new creation and a significant death. The official vote at Jurisdictional Conference extinguished the only Spanish-language conference in a denomination that has a mere 65,000 Hispanic members. A death without mourning is a death without meaning.
Finally, there was a stalemate in the episcopal elections between two men -- one Anglo and one Hispanic.
These two men appeared to be equally qualified, with similar CV's, years of leadership in numerous churches. They were even the same age. The obvious difference was cultural background, context of ministry, and ethnicity. The Hispanic candidate was the only person running with an extensive history of Hispanic congregational ministry, a product of the Rio Grande Conference that had just been voted out of existence.
Vote after vote, the stalemate continued, with the Anglo minister having a small lead.
To break the stalemate, concerns were raised about the remaining candidates being from Texas. "We need diversity on the college of bishops!" To solve this, other Anglo male pastors from outside Texas entered the race, with the result being a significant drop in votes for the Hispanic candidate.
The Hispanic candidate then withdrew. His emotional speech lamenting a lack of inclusiveness was met with supportive applause from those who did not support him. The Anglo pastor from Texas was then elected by delegates who didn't want another bishop from Texas.
They had deployed the logic of inclusiveness to justify the selection of an Anglo candidate over an Hispanic candidate with equal or surpassing credentials. Sounds almost like humiliating someone to prevent him from being humiliated, or praying for someone's healing so that he will accept a diagnosis of his own ineptitude.
After singing the doxology and welcoming the new bishop, the body then adjourned to distribute 50,000 meals to the poor in the area surrounding the conference.
I wonder how many of those receiving meals would identify with an African American bishop who was humiliated in order to spare him from humiliation or the last Hispanic candidate endorsed by an extinct conference who was excluded in order to secure more inclusiveness. How many of those receiving meals would feel welcome in a United Methodist Church? How many would prefer food above friendship, distribution rather than dignity, paternalism rather than partnership?
So many contradictions!