United Methodists Are My People

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The Destruction of my denomination of the church. I am a United Methodist Pastor, and have been for over 50 years. I have been proud to be a part of a Christian Church group which brings people to the exciting experience of Jesus Christ, and also reaches out in love to help the least, the last, and the lost who are suffering and dying. And I also take strength in the many United Methodist pastors and people I have known, in worship services, weddings, baptisms, funerals, and countless joy-filled celebrations across the years. These people are my family.

Yet now within my church there is a divisive group that is attempting to tear my church apart. They are a cabal of fear-based fundamentalist preachers and their followers who are engineering a split in a church, which otherwise has been serving Christ for over 200 years. And what are the two main points of their argument?

First, they don't think that gay persons have full rights to be members of Christ's church as United Methodists. They think they are better than others, especially gay persons, which is the fatal flaw of the Pharisees of long ago. They base their homophobia on a handful of anti-homosexual passages in the Bible which no longer apply in the Christian world of today. Why do these passages no longer apply? Because God's Spirit told us, toward the END of the New Testament, in Galatians 3:28 " There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are ALL one in Jesus Christ. " This message to the early church tells us that the "prohibition" against being gay and being a Christian is now obsolete. This is the new rule: ALL (including the gay person) are included in the one-ness of Jesus Christ. God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.

Second, these modern-day Pharisees take it upon themselves to say that Christian ministers and teachers like me are "invalid." Why? They say we don't believe in the divinity of Christ Jesus. They say we don't believe in the Bible. They say we are not following in the tradition established by John Wesley. All of this is based purely on their fundamentalist/political OPINION. It has no truth in it. It is just a smear campaign to further their fundamentalist political aims. And I say it is all a load of baloney. I've known thousands of fine United Methodist ministers, teachers, and laity, men, women, and youth, some of whom were gay as well as straight, across my 50 years of work, and the vast majority are all as faithful to our historic tenets of faith as any of the hell-fire and brimstone fundamentalist critics who set themselves above us in judgement, like a gang of Pharisees.

Where will this all go? The fundamentalists are trying to tear the church apart through a process called "disaffiliation." They are trying to convince United Methodist churches to split off from the old Mother Church, to participate in a divorce, and to go with a different denomination. And a lot of them are going.

I hate to see it. My United Methodist Church is not perfect, just as no church is perfect. But we are not fear-based. We are faith-based. We are not Pharisees, not usually anyway. But this is making tough times for us. And why? Underneath it all is a group of extremist fundamentalist politicians in clergy-garb who are trying to make things as purified as they imagine they are.

If it gets serious, I'm not going to join the Pharisee Methodist Church. I'll always remain a United Methodist minister, even if there are only a remnant of us left. After all, the Bible says, "a remnant shall return."

May the Lord bless you and keep you.

The Rev. Ed Williamson is a retired clergy member of the New Mexico Annual Conference. This post is republished with permission from his Facebook page.