The slowly evolving trainwreck that’s the disunited United Methodist Church is an unbelievably sophisticated story and I’ve plenty of sympathy for journalists who’re being requested to cowl it — week after week — in normal-length information experiences.
I’ve some proper to say this, since I’ve been overlaying this story since 1984 or earlier.
For starters, there isn’t any one United Methodist Church and there hasn’t been one for many years. See this flashback column that I wrote a couple of years in the past: “Old fault lines can be seen in the ‘seven churches’ of divided Methodism,” which was adopted by “Doctrinal debates that define the divided United Methodists.”
The underside line, as soon as once more: This conflict has all the time been about biblical authority and a bunch of different doctrinal clashes, with battles about homosexuality grabbing the headlines.
Anyway, I used to be studying one other replace from The Nashville Tennessean the opposite day — “United Methodists grapple with schism as 300-plus churches leave across U.S.” (excessive paywall) — and one thing hit me (aside from the truth that “schism” still isn’t an accurate word for what is happening here). The important thing was a number of key occasions on a timeline.
First, let’s plug in a key reality from a recent Religion News Service report in regards to the doctrinally conservative UMC congregations who’re attempting to hit the denominational exit doorways in Western North Carolina and Florida. The legal professionals attempting to sue the UMC institution are, you see, are engaged on a deadline
A lawyer for the Western North Carolina Annual Convention, which has greater than 1,000 congregations, responded … saying it will not comply for the reason that request doesn’t comply with the disaffiliation plan authorised by a particular session of the United Methodist Church’s Basic Convention in 2019.
That plan permits church buildings to depart the denomination via the tip of 2023. They’ll take their properties with them after paying two years of apportionments and pension liabilities.
Tick, tick, tick.
That 2019 Basic Convention was, in fact, the watershed occasion during which a coalition of rising World South church buildings and a few conservative People infuriated the shrinking UMC institution by passing the “Conventional Plan,” whereas additionally (#TriggerWarning) urging enforcement of “Guide of Self-discipline” doctrinal stands on marriage and sexuality.
See this piece of a Wall Avenue Journal op-ed — “A Messy Methodist Church Schism” (excessive paywall) — by conservative Methodist activist Mark Tooley:
What introduced United Methodism to this divide was its decision-making physique’s 2019 “Conventional Plan” — a doc that affirmed its ban on same-sex marriage and mandated that every one clergy be celibate if single and monogamous if married. That units the church aside from practically each different mainline Protestant denomination.
Nobody anticipated the coronavirus pandemic, in fact, which ate years of potential voting and negotiating time from this painful divorce course of.
Thus, a coalition of liberals and conservatives met and negotiated the 2020 “Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation,” an try to permit the warring armies to separate with out paying secular legal professionals on either side hundreds of thousands of {dollars} for courtroom fights over properties, pensions, belief funds, and many others.
So what occurred to the Protocol? That’s the place the 2019 guidelines are essential.
