Every time Rob Renfroe misleads, a rebuttal will be issued.
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Rob Renfroe
The Rev. Rob Renfroe (Photo courtesy of Good News Magazine)
I always read Rob Renfroe. You should, too. Then you should read someone else so that you have a counterbalanced view. So read this first, then come back here.
Rob is right. There are deeper things that divide the UM Church. To Rob's point:
I remember hearing a speech on the floor of General Conference in 2008 when a delegate said out loud, "Why are we talking about homosexuality when they are going to hell anyway?"
I remember the Conference Lay Leader in 2016 who unashamedly told me that 90% of churches in his conference would not take a woman as a pastor.
I remember our own Annual Conference a year earlier when, debating a resolution related to allowing guns in churches, a laywoman said we must allow guns because they will be needed for Armageddon.
I remember checking out the calendar of events for a church with a pastor who had just surrendered his credentials and seeing a guest speaker on the evils of evolution.
These are hard things to believe if you have been in 90% of our local churches, but they are true.
I do not doubt that Rob has personal examples of people includes bishops and seminary presidents who are much more theologically liberal than I am. I also do not doubt that there are a roughly equal number of stories of misogynists and fundamentalists. There is an equal chance for either extreme to control their respective denomination.
Rob goes on to share that General Conference was cancelled because of politics. It's possible. It's also possible that the members from Africa who he says argued for it to go forward were swayed by false reports that 90% of Africans would be able to attend (see the shifting story here). He also notes that the Commission has formed a task force examine a hybrid General Conference in 2024 as evidence that it was possible to do so in 2021 or 2022...ignoring that the same group also had a task force examining precisely that question.
Then he, once again, maligns "progressives" as people who want to force their will upon everyone else. "The progressives have told us who they are," he says, while making generalized claims with absolutely no shred of evidence. So let me remind you both of who progressives are and who traditionalist leaders are:
Progressives endorsed the "One Church Plan" that explicitly allowed and encouraged theological diversity. It was derailed because traditionalists were clear that they could not live with diversity.
Progressives at a national and global level have consistently operated within ethical bounds. Traditionalist leaders have, among other things, vowed to continue fighting in a denomination that they no longer believe in example #1 will be Renfroe himself if he does not surrender his credentials on May 1 instead of staying one day longer in a denomination that he implores you to leave).
Progressive leaders, at least those staying in the UMC, have never had conversations about how to destroy or damage traditionalists or the GMC. Good News has had that exact conversation, as I've shared before.
Renfroe uses the secular political language of "woke liberals" even as his allies have threatened secular lawsuits and dehumanizing vast swaths of our denomination with the one word "progressives."
To the average traditionalist sitting in the pews: It's time to believe hard things. You've been misled. You are better than your leaders. You don't need to follow them to a place you don't want to go.
The Rev. David Livingston serves as senior pastor of Old Mission Church in Fairway, Kansas. This post is republished with permission from his blog. To reproduce this content elsewhere, please contact the author via his blog.