Down the Rabbit Hole with the United Methodists

The So-Called-but-Not-Very-Traditional Plan (Unconstitutional Parts)

by

Special to United Methodist Insight

I am not enjoying my time down this strange United Methodist rabbit hole into which so many of us have fallen. But somehow thinking of it as a rabbit hole and all of us as characters in Alice in Wonderland helps keep my spirits up; things are always a little bit better if you can make a 19th century pop culture reference that features an argumentative tea-drinking rabbit, a laconic hookah-smoking caterpillar, and a queen of hearts who habitually shouts, “Off with their heads.”

Every day, things get curiouser and curiouser. I hear large-church pastors, who are long-time moderates and backers of the institution, astonished to find themselves and their churches refusing to pay their apportionments for the first time in their ministries. Strong supporters of the One Church Plan, myself included, who were making passionate theological arguments for unity a few months ago are now warming to proposals that entail greater separation. I have had a couple of calls from retired centrist pastors who never struck me as firebrands but now want to make themselves available to officiate at same-sex weddings so younger clergy colleagues won’t be brought up on charges and lose their salaries for a year.

Even curiouser is the fact that we just passed a bundle of extremely radical legislation at General Conference and called it “the Traditional Plan.” And it is precisely because of its extreme nature that so many moderates are behaving so very strangely. I recently wrote about the parts of the So-Called-But-Not-Very-Traditional Plan that were passed at General Conference and affirmed by the Judicial Council. We passed legislation eviscerating the constitutional authority of the annual conference, ensuring more church trials, and mandating draconian minimum penalties for officiating at same-sex weddings, even though we have minimum penalties for no other infraction.

The Curious Unconstitutional Pieces of the Traditional Plan

Curiouser still is the legislation supported by General Conference but ruled unconstitutional. We voted to require Boards of Ordained Ministry to examine the social media accounts for every candidate for licensed, commissioned, or ordained ministry, looking for evidence that the person is a “practicing homosexual.” (Note the absence of the word “self-avowed.”) We passed legislation mandating that anyone serving on a Board of Ordained Ministry must certify that they will enforce the disciplinary mandates regarding homosexuality and, in case that wasn’t enough, that they will enforce the Book of Discipline “in its entirety.” And, in the event we didn’t have enough trials and hearings in our future, we passed a law allowing any seven of our 66 active Bishops to bring a complaint to a three Bishop “council relations committee,” aka the episcopal triumvirate, asking for the involuntary leave or retirement of any Bishop who will not enforce the Discipline “relative to self-avowed practicing homosexuals.” Anyone who claims that General Conference 2019 left us with the status quo has not been paying attention. We have entered a disturbing alternate universe.

Remember, you do not need to worry that the legislation I am describing here will be enacted in January. You only need to worry that something similar, this time probably constitutional, will be submitted in a few months in preparation for the next General Conference where it will likely pass and by a slightly larger margin than the 55 percent top 45 percent vote we saw at General Conference 2019. And worry too, because this bizarre legislation says a lot about the mindset of those who wrote it, and who, even now, are writing other legislation for the May 2020 General Conference. In other words, go ahead and worry.

Examining social media for evidence that a candidate is a “practicing homosexual”

As if things were not bad enough already, the So-Called-Traditional Plan would have required all Boards of Ordained Ministries to conduct investigations of all candidates, “including information on social media” looking for evidence that a candidate is a “practicing homosexual” (Petition 90038, Full Examination, Page 185, Advance Daily Christian Advocate for 2019 General Conference).

Note that the word “self-avowed” is dropped from our well-worn phrase “self-avowed practicing homosexual.” It isn’t enough if the person does not avow to the Bishop, the Board, or some other group that he or she is gay and in sexual relationship. It isn’t even enough if the candidate vows that he or she is not gay and/or not in sexual relationship. No matter what the circumstances, the members of the Board of Ordained Ministry would have been mandated to scour social media for evidence that any candidate is a “practicing homosexual,” self-avowed or not.

If you review General Conference records from the past several decades, you will find that the word “self-avowed” was crucial. Wisely, the delegates wanted to avoid witch hunts; they did not want self-appointed or even church-appointed investigators out looking for evidence. Why would we drop the word self-avowed? If you want to investigate candidates, you have to drop the word self-avowed; otherwise, you would just ask them.

(For the record, in late amendments to this legislation, proposed by conservative renewal leaders, the word “self-avowed” is still absent. Perhaps leaders of the renewal movements will respond saying that the omission was an error made by an author or editor, and the word “self-avowed” was inadvertently left out of the well-worn phrase “self-avowed practicing homosexual” in both the original petition and the amended version. And certainly it is easy to imagine how an error could be made in this legislation where the phrase and omission occur only once – as opposed to a petition where the same omission is repeated, say, three different times in three different sentences. Of course, if you are going to mandate a social media search for evidence that a person is a “practicing homosexual,” it would make no sense to include the word “self-avowed.”)

Note, too, that in this legislation, the Board is not just allowed to investigate social media; they are mandated to do so and for every candidate. Indeed, they must also certify both that they have done so and their findings.

There is more. Notice the word “including” in the phrase “including information on social media.” For each candidate the Board must conduct an examination to determine if someone is “a practicing homosexual,” and they must include social media; the implication is that many other things could legitimately be included. If that doesn’t raise the hair on the back of your neck, you haven’t been reading enough dystopian fiction … or enough 20th century history.

Why Mandated Social Media Investigations are a Bad Idea

But even just the social media investigation would be a disaster. Human Resources professionals spin out hundreds of blogposts on the many things that can and do go wrong with social media background checks. Anyone who has been on Facebook for more than two days will have received suspicious friend requests from what turn out to be imposter accounts set up usually by scoundrels but sometimes by jokesters, using a person’s name, pictures, and even key identifying information to produce a convincing imitation of the real account. In addition, legitimate accounts are often hacked, whether by teenage mischief makers or true antagonists. Human Resources professionals also warn of the TMI effect. The Board members would be exposed to “Too Much Information” about the candidate, their friends, their political and social views, and their strange fashion choices that, however intriguing, are not relevant to the ordination process and that will almost surely create bias. The Human Resources folks have an additional worry that social media background checks will create violations of the law where employers are making decisions based on protected information that is illegal to consider. Although Boards of Ordained Ministry and other religious bodies are free to ignore those laws, they are still just as subject to the dangers of unconscious bias. Think, for example, about the information you often come across on someone’s social media – who they voted for in the last election; what they believe about abortion or gun control; whether they take and post selfies in their pajamas while at the Kroger at midnight with a gaggle of pajama-clad friends. You can’t un-see that stuff. It is wildly unrealistic to expect ordinary humans to be exposed to all of this data, however irrelevant to the ordination and candidacy process, and not be influenced by it.

This would be a significant disadvantage for younger candidates, who usually have a much broader social media presence; Board members would find plenty of data from high school and college years when the candidates’ pre-frontal cortexes were not even fully developed and they could hardly conceive that they might in a few years be answering a call to ordained ministry. Developmentally, this is also a time of identity questioning and formation, and for many young people, social media is their safe space. Board members would also find it difficult to accurately interpret what they read. Have you spent much time looking at the social media of people in their teens to mid-20s? It’s bewildering, including the coded and extremely confusing references to gender and sexuality, as well as references to things that appear to be about sexuality, but actually are not. Honestly, it’s almost as if the coded language were designed to confuse any older person, i.e., anyone over 28!

A social media search for every candidate would also take a massive amount of time. Boards could appoint and train a designated person to do this which, of course, would still be time-consuming and would not avoid the problems reviewed above. No doubt many Boards would be plagued by other self-appointed investigators, some with an ax to grind; with this legislation the ax grinders would have a disciplinary mandate to grind away.

Because social media background checks are so dangerous, Human Resource officers often recommend setting up an “ethics wall” by hiring a professional company to do the social media background searches and then to report back only the relevant information. Most Boards of Ordained Ministry could not afford this service, and even if they could, the companies that perform these services are strictly limited by the law and their own professional ethics on the kind of information they can search for and report. They can legitimately look for violent and criminal behavior, but not for evidence that someone is a “practicing homosexual.”

Examining “Information Publicly Available”

Leaders of the conservative renewal movements will tell you that after the Judicial Council ruled in October that this petition was unconstitutional, because it focused on “practicing homosexuals” but did not include other parts of the disciplinary standards, they prepared an amendment. Both version 1 (reviewed above) and version 2 (as amended) are illuminating and reveal something about the mindset of those who wrote them. (By the way, General Conference approved version 1, which had the distinction of being ruled unconstitutional twice).

Version 2, the amended legislation, is also troubling. There we find that the Board of Ordained Ministry must “conduct a full examination (including information publicly available) to ascertain whether an individual meets the requirements of all applicable disciplinary standards, including but not limited to ¶ 304.1-3 . . . If it is determined as a matter of fact that an individual fails to meet any of the requirements, including but not limited to being a practicing homosexual, the board shall not recommend the individual to the clergy session of the annual conference for commissioning or ordination.”

Note that the examination would include not just social media, as we saw above, but “information publicly available.” Information publicly available? How bizarre that we would be using for our examination of candidates the language that is common to the CIA and other intelligence agencies!

Note, too, that in the amended version, the Board is still charged with examining this publicly available information to learn if a candidate is a “practicing homosexual.” (The word self-avowed is still missing.) In addition, the amended version broadens the scope of the examination to determine that all candidates meet “the requirements of all applicable disciplinary standards,” and Boards would not be allowed to recommend anyone who, after a review of information publicly available, “fails to meet any of the requirements, including but not limited to being a practicing homosexual.”

It would take another long essay to list the many things that might be intended by meeting the expectations of “all applicable disciplinary standards,” but it would certainly include, as stated in the text itself, everything in ¶304.1-3. Thus, Boards would have been required to “conduct a full examination (including information publicly available) to ascertain,” among many other things, whether a candidate meets requirements such as exhibiting “personal habits conducive to bodily health, mental and emotional maturity, integrity in all personal relationships” (¶ 304.2). These are all wonderful things that we rightly ask of our candidates for ministry. But if a Board is expected to look through “information publicly available,” which includes social media, to ascertain whether every candidate meets all requirements, and the Board is not allowed to recommend those who sometimes (in many cases, often) fail in these areas, such as “personal habits conducive to bodily heath,” as evidenced in “information publicly available,” then we are going to have a serious shortage of clergy. Of course, the bizarre dystopian plot into which we have fallen is driving away our members (right, left, and center), so maybe the time is just right for a clergy shortage!

What else might be meant by the expectation that candidates would meet “the requirements of all applicable disciplinary standards” as ascertained in a review of “information publicly available.” Three unconstitutional Traditional Plan petitions dealing with the “Composition of Boards of Ordained Ministry” further illuminate the things that a Board might be looking for in its “full examination” of all “information publicly available.”

Limiting Membership on Boards of Ordained Ministry

Three unconstitutional Traditional Plan petitions (90037, 90039, and 90040) deal with the “Composition of Boards of Ordained Ministry” and were written to try to exert greater control over Boards. The petitions would have required three levels of certification. Potential Board members would have had to certify that they would “uphold, enforce, and maintain the Book of Discipline related to commissioning, ordination, and marriage of self-avowed practicing homosexuals.” In case that might not take care of the problem, bishops would have had to certify that all the nominees had themselves so certified. And then annual conferences would certify that the bishops had indeed certified that the potential Board members had indeed so certified. (I am not making this up; the authors already did that for us.) And if annual conferences failed to so certify, they would lose GCFA funding along with any right to use the cross and flame logo!

According to this legislation, potential nominees would not have had to certify that they would uphold the Discipline on any other issues whether theological (Christology, for example) or social (capital punishment, for example). Potential members would not have even had to certify that they would enforce the Discipline on other similar qualifications for ordination such as fidelity in marriage. The three-decker certification was only about enforcement relating to the “commissioning, ordination, and marriage of self-avowed practicing homosexuals.” And for that reason, the legislation was ruled unconstitutional last October.

So, the conservative renewal leaders drafted amendments to make the legislation constitutional. If they could not pull out one issue to determine eligibility for membership on the Board, then they would make full compliance with the whole of the Discipline necessary for eligibility. According to the revised legislation, then, any nominee to the Board must agree to “uphold, enforce, and maintain the Book of Discipline in its entirety.”

Now this amendment only passed in one of the three petitions, but that was enough for the revised version to be reviewed last month by the Judicial Council, which, not surprisingly, ruled that the legislation was unconstitutional.

What might it mean to mandate that all members of Boards of Ordained Ministry certify their willingness to enforce the Discipline “in its entirety” you ask? As the Judicial Council put it, “Basically, candidates could be asked to certify, in addition to the qualifications of ordination, that they, for example, attend weekly worship services, pay their pledges to the local church or abstain from smoking, drinking, and gambling.” The requirements would also include the General Rules where we are enjoined not to do any work on the Sabbath; not to wear “gold or costly apparel;” and not to read books that don’t increase our “knowledge and love of God.” Surely the Book of Discipline itself is questionable on that count! Even “fighting and quarrelling” could be disqualifying which would likely mean that no delegate from the 2019 General Conference would be eligible for Board membership! But these are just a few examples. If you want more, just review the Discipline, in its entirety (but please don’t expect that exercise to increase your “knowledge and love of God.”)

Grounds for Worry and for Hope

Again, you don’t need to worry that the legislation reviewed here will be enacted as law in January. But you should be worried that the same folks who brought us the So-Called Traditional Plan, in its constitutional and unconstitutional parts, will be back with new and improved versions of this and other legislation, and they will almost surely have the votes to pass them! Moreover, progressives and now many moderates, myself among them, will be back with new forms of disruption and disobedience.

It’s tempting to keep quoting Alice in Wonderland: “Things are curiouser and curiouser.” “We are all mad here.” “Off with their heads!” Would that this were a children’s novel, or even dystopian science fiction, and we could put it away after the last page. This is not an alternate universe; this is the actual mess in which we find ourselves, the mess we created and even “upheld, enforced, and maintained.” And there is no easy fix. Indeed, many United Methodist leaders across a wide spectrum now believe that there is no fix at all, easy or not, that will keep us together in our current form.

Conservative groups will keep pushing for legislative accountability, even if they have to go to more astonishing extremes to do so. Progressives will keep pushing the limits of that accountability through increasing ecclesial disobedience, even if they have to go to more astonishing extremes to do so. And many moderates, horrified by the draconian extremes of the So-Called-Traditional Plan, are finally ready to join them. Nobody will back down. And as far as I can tell, all of us believe we are acting according to conscience and in loyalty to the people with whom we are in ministry. That’s why we are willing to go to such extremes; United Methodists can be shockingly stubborn when it comes to loyalty to our people, our ministries, and our consciences. Let’s hope and pray we can use that common ferocity and stubbornness, combined with trust in the God who brought us this far by faith, to find a way either to amicable separation or a profoundly new form of unity.*

*I make a more sustained case for separation or significant restructure in my article, “When Brothers and Sister Fight to the Death: Ecclesiology, Mission, and the United Methodist Church,” in Where do We Go From Here? Honest Responses from 24 United Methodist Leaders, Kevin Slimp, ed. (Market Square Publishing, 2019).

The Rev. Dr. Rebekah Miles is an ordained elder and five-time General Conference delegate from the Arkansas Conference and Professor Ethics and Practical Theology at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University.