Toy soldiers
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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
– “The Second Coming” – William Butler Yeats
I have never been to Bakhmut. I’ve visited villages like Bakhmut in Ukraine, Russia, and Armenia. I know these isolated agricultural communities that were once part of collective farms and appear out of nowhere when you think you’ve run out of all traces of civilization. They do not seem to be landmarks that will be forever etched in human consciousness as monuments to brutality or bravery. Their 19th-century plainness, the homes, and barns frozen in time make them more Czarist than Soviet and cause me to ask, “Why is there so much death in this place now? Why has this violence been unleashed, through time and space, to bring 21st-century war on a 19th-century reality?”
It is difficult to imagine the brutality of the fighting for Bakhmut. Hundreds of men, women, and children, both soldiers and civilians, Russians, and Ukrainians, have died for the smallest pieces of land in recent months. Victory is measured in inches and rubble.
United Methodists are not physically fighting and dying for our churches. However, in some ways, a congregation struggling through disaffiliation is a months-long battle for inches, meters, and controlling tiny parcels of land in a fratricidal quest to survive one more Sunday. I want to ask these same questions, “Why now? Why did these churches deserve to be subjected to torment, anger, and division? Why did we use the Bible to divide the people of God?”
The buildings we inhabit are reduced to spiritual and psychological rubble. Our souls are littered with emotional shrapnel. Some of the wounded can be triaged to Lighthouse Congregations. Others will not survive. They are too far gone. Many of those caught in the middle will never return to any congregation. Our witness has been tarnished to such a degree that no matter what we say, it will sound vapid and hollow to people who only want to be loved. We were too religious to love people whose holy book proclaimed God is love. You can’t blame people for walking away from a church that took two millennia to get its act together on its most fundamental principle.
The hardest part is the unknown, watching and waiting for the next barrage of distractions. Official processes and timelines are determined and published by the ecclesiastical authorities, but that is no guarantee that the rules of war will be followed. Dezinformatsiya, a word of Russian origin, is as much a part of the disaffiliation debate as it is part of Vladimir Putin’s lies to justify the war in Ukraine. So, we wait, watch, and the disaffiliation paralysis takes hold. Ministry stops. Instead of the mission of the living seeking the lost, we begin errands for lawyers, clerks, banks, and institutions that are all too willing to profit from our failure to be the church.
In these slow summer months of disaffiliation paralysis, the front line is frozen. We wait for the Fall. That is when the real spiritual carnage will begin. We prepare, pray, and remember that we may be the only reinforcements we ever see. This struggle is not about us, our buildings, our land, the idolatry of the Book of Discipline, or a denomination called the United Methodist Church. It’s about love. God is about love. That’s the only message to stop the bleeding and save our lives. That message is non-negotiable. If you’re caught in the depths of disaffiliation paralysis, remember that God is love.