The One Church Plan, The Traditionalist Church Plan, Or The Gay Church Plan... This February, We Will Know!

“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
   -1 Cor 13 4-13


Friends,

In February you may see national headlines where some United Methodists say some terrible things about LGBTQ folks. And you may think to yourself… wait…I  am going to a Methodist Church, and we march in PRIDE Parade and we have a campus ministry called QueerFaith on Campus, and we have a National Coming Out Day worship service… and we include everyone. And you would be correct.

We are part of a larger denomination that is a global church in conflict. Since the 1970’s…every four years at General Conference (Methodist Olympics) our church has been in public debate about the tension of where we are and where we long to be. I have chosen to be a part of the United Methodist church to push for change. Every year we grow closer and at the same time every year, there are more delegates from countries in the world where LGBTQ people can be punished, violently by the state for simply being who they are. We are a global church, and including global voices is often complicated. In fact, if this was simply an American vote it would have passed more than 12 years ago. It is not our vote, it is a global vote, and that pushes progressives, like me, on inclusion as well.

The good news is we are not alone in conflict and division. The truth is the church has been in conflict from the beginning. When Paul writes this poetry about love… he wasn’t thinking about a cute couple getting married in Corinth. He was writing to a church in conflict. The church was struggling to be the church, the wealthy feasting communion before the folks with less control over their schedules could arrive. The church was struggling to live into the way Jesus taught and not just in Corinth but everywhere. Almost immediately after Jesus’s death, the challenge of embodiment begins. The Gospel story ends with the imperative to go to the ends of the earth, baptize, include, transform, and it turns out when you go to the ends of the earth… well not everyone is circumcised. It turns out, circumcision is a big deal… and adult men who may feel inspired to live like Jesus may not like such an intense entry ritual into the fledgling Christians community. This was one of the first great tensions, and the debate shapes who we are today. The early church dove into scripture and when I say scripture, I don’t mean Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John… I mean the scripture that Jesus studied like the prophets and the Pentateuch and the tradition in which he was rooted. Circumcision was the was the sign of the covenant with God, the symbol of connection in relationship with God’s presence and promise. And the early church discerned, do we live into the letter of the law or the spirit of the law? Do we find other ways to symbolize this covenant or is this ritual essential for new people, is it essential to their faithfulness? Ultimately the early church choose inclusion, they choose and adaptive interpretation of ancient scriptures, a testament to a living faith and the practice of faith that is expected of each of us.

Our church is working through a modern tension but we have roots that can point the way forward. Two years ago the church almost split, and in an effort to keep the most people in community so we can do the most ministry together, the Bishops appointed a “Commission on the Way Forward.” This team of diverse voices went to work and developed two plans. One plan creates three church bodies, a progressive, a moderate or contextual, and a traditional church, all linked to each other for some shared ministry but each with the freedom to make choices regarding LGBTQ clergy and weddings. The other plan developed is the One Church Plan; it in a sense allows what exists now to exist in the future… without worry. It is contextual in the sense that local churches can make choices about weddings and an annual conference can make choices about queer clergy. Currently, the coasts have moved forward, ordaining LGBTQ clergy and presiding over weddings for same sex couples. In fact, the Western Jurisdiction (all the conferences from the Pacific ocean to the Rocky Mountains) has elected the first openly gay Bishop (http://www.umc.org/bishops/bishop-karen-oliveto). She is amazing, and it seems there is nothing the folks the South East and South Central can do about it... and believe me, they have tried. We are not in one of the jurisdictions that have moved forward, we are not of one mind in the Great Plains, and so we still reside in tension and I am ever mindful of this in our ministry.

To make matters, in my opinion, worse, three bishops who won’t own their work but are pretty easy to identify, have made a third plan, called the Traditionalist Plan. These bishops are fulled by an organization called the the Wesley Covenant Association, which may as well be wearing red hats that say Make Methodism Great Again. This Traditionalist Plan doubles down on the language that I long to change in our book of discipline, language that excludes LGBTQ folks while at the same time suggesting this does not make them heterosexist. This plan makes punishments and trials for folks like Bishop Karen Oliveto mandatory.

In response I would like to propose a fourth plan, I call it "The Gay Church Model” with only queer clergy… the rest of us will renounce our credentials, and only gay weddings… no matter how cute the straight couple might be. As they object, I believe it will at the very least invite them to understand how I feel about their plan. The WCA and their Traditionalist Plan may be leaning into a time when the church was at its largest and powerful in a conventional way. And there might be important learnings for us from the 1950s, but I suspect that has more to do with the post-war programs like The GI Bill and VA Home loans, as well as corporate structures that provided better middle class wages for a greater shared prosperity than it has to do with women staying home and queer people staying in the closet. The truth is the world has already moved forward, and the Traditionalist Plan may allow for a denomination to exist two or three more decades but there is no future in the Traditionalist Plan. Tradition can be valued without rooting us to our past sins and mistakes. Tradition can be valued for the launch pad it gives us into the future and the spirit of those radical reformers who went before us to make our traditions worthy of the people we invite into the church.

I ask you to join me in praying for the delegates whom have been elected by our Great Plains Conference (Nebraska and Kansas) and the delegates from around the world who will journey to St. Louis in February. I do not know what will happen. I do know that I am grieved for the future brokenness that we will witness, the potential exit of many conservatives or perhaps many progressives, the potential brokenness in local congregations where people will unintentionally, and perhaps intentionally, hurt one another with words and votes and debates. Church people typically do this over much less… you know, over things like tables, carpet colors, or if mustard should be in potato salad... and now we will have a decision point that will potentially cut even more deeply into people's hearts when a church lady hears her friend name her granddaughter a sinner. I am grieved at the idea of the church I grew up in splitting apart.

But I am not worried. I am not worried because I believe, even as it is painful, we will find a way forward and we will not be alone. I believe in our denomination, denominations connect us to something larger then ourselves, they root us in community, they hold us accountable, and life as an independent religious guru or independent community seems to be one of the fastest ways to what Lila would call… “bad choices,” most of which relate to power and the abuse of money or sex. I am not afraid, because we will have a community. I am not worried, because I believe in our conference. Even through we are pretty far from the coasts, as a place with a fair number of ‘traditionalists” votes and voices, we were planted as an inclusive faith community, and they have invested more than half a million dollars in our work. We push the boundaries and dance on the edge, and even our once conservative Bishop, Scott J. Jones,  has stood by me when I needed him too. That is support and the kind of financial support other mainline denominations simply could not have mustered. Connectionalism is powerful, and we, I believe, are one of the best examples of what churches can do together. We have received everything I have ever asked for. That doesn’t mean it has always been easy, but if that isn’t a blessing then I don’t know what is.

I am not worried; I believe our past points to our future. We are the church of Wesley. Our Book of Discipline makes theology our task and faith a practice. Wesley believed in holiness that was social, “there is no holiness without social holiness.” His practice of faith took him into the world, transformation of self was for the transformation of the world. He believed in Bible study, small groups, prayer, and communion as a means of grace, but that grace took you into the world. Wesley launched schools for children who wouldn’t have had a chance otherwise, it is obvious that if he believes faith requires everyone to participate in the theological task… then everyone needs to know how to read, everyone needs the critical thinking skills… not just a few leaders or a pastor. They built schools and health clinics, they asked everyone to give, and out of the shared resources they made micro loans to help people out of poverty. He took the powerful to task ,seeking reforms on taxes that kept so many people poor. Methodists addressed poor labor conditions, fielded the labor movement, and worked to abolish slavery.

Wesley spent time with vulnerable people, and I believe his legacy calls us to do the same. I am not worried because we have disagreed before. In the 1950s the debate was around women’s ordination, and there are plenty of Bible verses that you could use to tell me to sit down and shut up… but the church ordained me, so I’m not going to. We have disagreed from the very start, and while we may have settled the circumcision tension carried by the early church, it taught us about interpretation of scripture and listening to the Holy Spirit's guidance. Wesley gave us the tools in our theological task and in our practice of faith, he gave us a shared method placing scripture alongside tradition and the questions of is this reasonable and what’s my experience.

I am not afraid. We will settle the tension around LGBTQ inclusion in the larger church and no matter what happens in February, we will be a place of love and inclusion for all people.

All will be well… even if it's not always pretty getting there. When you see the news in February, do not be afraid, we will be the church of inclusion.

From your friendly local Abbot,

Rev. Debra McKnight