Where Do We Go from Here?

by

“The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

– Princess Leia to Gov. Tarkin, “Star Wars”

The momentous General Conference of 2019 is over, and both United Methodist individuals and the institution of United Methodism are mortally wounded. Now we wait to see if there’s a phoenix in the ashes that can rise in resurrection.

The hurt caused to LGBTQIA people by General Conference 2019 remains immeasurable. Even the staunchest allies among us can’t know their pain because we haven’t lived it, and we can’t live it unless we too are LGBTQIA. What we can do, what we must do, is to walk with LGBTQIA friends and family, listen to them, embrace them in our congregations and remind them at every opportunity that they are beloved of God. We must provide safe spaces for youths and young adults to discern their sexual identities, providing support and protection as needed. To the greatest extent we can, we must elevate our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people to leadership positions in our congregations and annual conferences, both in support of their gifts and to the benefit of our churches.

We also must keep up hope and courage as faithful followers of Jesus Christ. We may have been stymied in this encounter, but more encounters are coming. That’s because while traditionalist forces rejoice triumphantly that they rammed through their punitive plan, they’re more harmed than they realize by what went on in St. Louis.

Like their concretized theology, traditionalists have hitched their future to a vision of stasis, the idea that nothing will ever change for them and the church. Apparently none of them passed basic biology, because one of life’s elemental characteristics is the ability to adapt. Life without change is death, and traditionalist United Methodists, misled by church politicians whose motives are lower than a serpent’s belly, have just committed the equivalent of ecclesiastical suicide. They are driving away a generation of leaders and members, straight and gay, who will give up on the church because it won’t accept them and their LGBTQIA friends.

Even in Africa, that vaunted bastion of biblical fidelity, attitudes regarding sexual minorities are not going to stay the same. There have been LGBTQIA people in Africa since the first hominid emerged from the Great Rift Valley. Africans of sexual minorities who are now closeted will one day be set free, because things will change. Many American United Methodists have had their understanding of sexual minorities changed through relationship with the LGBTQIA people already in our churches. The same will happen everywhere United Methodists are now found. Such enlightenment won’t come easily, but it will come; it is inevitable, and therein we anchor our hope.

Furthermore, seen through an even longer lens, what happened in St. Louis marks another step in Christianity’s evolution, a tectonic shift as significant as the Great Schism between the church's Eastern and Western branches in the 11th century, as world-shaking as the split between Catholicism and Protestantism in the 16th century. We’re seeing a theological revolution that stands Christian tradition on its ear, because science, technology and globalization have contributed to new ways of seeing God. Today's denominations are coalescing around gospel interpretations that move the faith forward from tribal, pre-scientific constructs. Across denominations, people in pews and pulpits are demanding to know why they should believe in God when so much is wrong in the church and nothing seems to be done about it. God isn’t to blame for these wrongs; God doesn’t compel priests, pastors and preachers to abuse women and children sexually. But since the church belongs to God, even though it’s hijacked by humans, God gets the blame.

The late James Rowe Adams, an Episcopal priest considered founder of progressive Christianity, espoused a view of God that disrupts even as it intrigues. He saw God as that force which occurs in the interaction between people; in other words, relationships between equals constitutes holiness. This image may be uncomfortable for those who see God as the white-bearded eternal judge in the sky, but Adams’ vision runs closer to the wisdom of Jesus than many forms of Christianity. (The fact that there ARE other forms of Christianity, from Baptists to Coptics to Anglicans and beyond, puts the lie to traditionalists’ narrow view of orthodoxy).

The wider implications of St. Louis portend that like United Methodism, Christianity is fracturing along a theological fault line based on two different moral matrices, with LGBTQIA people suffering at the conflict’s heart. Traditionalists demand order, obedience, and purity, which in their view of scriptural authority leaves LGBTQIA people outside the church. Progressives moralize using love and justice, a different scriptural arc that places LGBTQIA people well within the faith community, loving and beloved.

Jesus’ greatest commandment, Mathew 22:36-40, turns on relationship, for it is impossible to love God and neighbor without it. Paul’s treatise on believers being ambassadors of God’s reconciliation centers on mending and fostering relationships. Sadly, traditionalists shattered the last tenuous United Methodist relationships in St. Louis by enacting a set of regulations intended to punish those who see God in diversity, whose revelations from God run counter to the form promulgated by a narrow margin in GC2019 votes. As retired Bishop Will Willimon was quoted in a Religion News Service article, progressives and centrists came to St. Louis bearing love and unity; traditionalists came with votes. Traditionalists know how to game the system; progressives are trying to change the system.

So where do we go from here?

Immediately, United Methodists wait for an official ruling from the Judicial Council in April as to the constitutionality of what was adopted in St. Louis. The church’s high court advised General Conference 2019 that 10 of the 15 petitions enacting the Traditional Plan violated the United Methodist constitution. Supposedly one amendment fixed all that was constitutionally wrong with the Traditionalist Plan, but its language and process were so convoluted that even we professional observers in the press box lost track. Many of us still ponder how General Conference could adopt legislation that is constitutionally flawed, but that’s what delegates did. (We’re always sardonically amused that traditionalists demand adherence to rules, but seem to skirt the rules themselves when it suits their purpose).

Meanwhile, the Council of Bishops cautions annual conferences and local congregations not to rush for the exit (“disaffiliation” petitions also were judged unconstitutional). Legislation enacted by GC2019 won’t go into effect until Jan. 1, 2020, and between now and then comes the Judicial Council session likely to invalidate much of it. So the next General Conference probably will take up the matter again when it meets May 5-15, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minn. The potential outcome of that meeting may be determined this year when annual conferences elect delegates – who may or may not be LGBTQIA allies – to the 2020 assembly.

In the end, the uncertain aftermath of GC2019 was well expressed in a pastoral letter to the North Texas Annual Conference by Bishop Mike McKee (Dallas Area), a supporter of the One Church Plan:

“It is important to say that the full implications of the Traditional Plan and other petitions passed at General Conference this week remain to be seen. It will take some time for the dust to settle. What it all will mean for the North Texas Conference is a story still to be written. My deepest hope is that this is a story that we – progressives, evangelicals and centrists – will write together.”

General Conference 2019 in St. Louis, Mo., was the ninth such legislative assembly on which United Methodist Insight Editor Cynthia B. Astle has reported.