Protest Outside General Conference
The United Methodist Church has its own painful history of Bible-based racism. Demonstrators at the 1968 United Conference demanded the end of the racially segregated Central Jurisdiction – a condition required by southern Methodists in the 1939 merger – as part of the merger of the Methodist Church with the Evangelical United Brethren Church to create The United Methodist Church.
I begin by quoting a response that reflects an assumption and attitude that harms rather than heals our wounded United Methodist Church.
“The (Progressives) usual and customary protocol is deceit since they are actually Secularists. You cannot trust virtually anything they say or do. You must constantly try reading between the lines or searching for their hidden agendas. They cannot be trusted. On the other hand, traditionalists say what they mean and mean what they say because they use the Bible to stand on and can be trusted.
“So, who are our delegates going to TRUST at the February General Conference - the Bible or Secularists? That will determine how this thing goes.”
– Comment by William Says to an article on Juicy Ecumenism, “Uniting Methodist Panelists: ‘The Bible is Wrong’” by Dan Moran, August 4 2018
“Traditionalists ... use the Bible to stand on and can be trusted.”
As I read the above comment, memory took me back to that moment when I was in a store in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, holding the hand of my preacher father. My father, the Rev. G. Haven Caldwell was pastor of St. Paul Methodist Church in Winston-Salem. I must have been 10 years old at the time (I am now 84). As my father was about to pay for the item he was a purchasing a white woman rushed up to the counter and loudly said: “What do you mean serving niggers before you serve white people?” The salesperson behind the counter motioned to my father to step back; he did and the white woman made her purchase and left. Then my father stepped forward and made his purchase.
When I got older, I came to understand that my father was “somebody.” He had earned degrees from Bennett College, Gammon Seminary, Syracuse University and had an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Gammon. He and my mother Julia Brown Caldwell were leaders in the racially segregated Central Jurisdiction and in the cities where they lived. Thus the incident of my childhood became more of a wound, that a man of my father’s stature had been so demeaned.
I have read history and “remember when” those who today call themselves Bible-based traditionalists used the Bible to justify race-based colonialism and the enslavement of my African ancestors. And then as a sequel, we were segregated by those who engaged in the destruction of Reconstruction and lynched black people.
This was done by people who claimed they were “standing on the Bible.”
The special General Conference session next year in St. Louis, Mo. is about more than rescinding language and legislation about “the practice of homosexuality.”
It is about The United Methodist Church ending its weaponizing of the Bible to hurt, harm, and hate people because of who and how they love. But it is also about boldly expressing a biblical faith that in word and deed never uses “Christian teaching” to define some people because of who they are and what they do as being “incompatible.”
Some people “back in the day” and even now believe that because I am a black man I am “incompatible.” And some people today view me as a “nigger”without using the word because I do not conform to their assumptions about what I should and should not do and be.
“Incompatible” is a softer word than the N-word; but it means the same. May the UMC in 2019 end its diminishing of Jesus by extolling “Christian teaching” that is discriminatory. As I write and share this I can hear again the late Bishop Leontine Kelly saying to someone who said to her “Paul said women should not preach:” “Paul did not call me to preach – Jesus did!”
When I was the second national Chairperson of Black Methodists for Church Renewal and Cain Felder was the Executive Director and Thelma Barnes was Associate Executive Director these words in our BMCR Constitution made clear our purpose: “To encourage and involve black Methodists and others in the struggle for economic and social justice.”
The Black United Methodist Church nor any United Methodist Church can be “church” if we continue to use the Bible as a weapon rather than as a guide to the liberating power of God as expressed in Jesus. May the General Conference of 2019 see Jesus and allow him to lead us out of the wilderness we United Methodists created for ourselves in 1972 by adopting language that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” May the General Conferences of 2019 and 2020 dare to “Be Church” in ways that equip us for the 21st century rather retreat to the 19th and 20th centuries.
Gilbert Caldwell
The Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell. Photo by Mike DuBose, United Methodist Communications.
Longtime civil rights activist, the Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell of Asbury Park, N. J., is a retired clergy member of the former Rocky Mountain Conference (now merged with Yellowstone conference to create the Mountain Sky Annual Conference). This article is adapted with permission from an email Rev. Caldwell sent to colleagues.