Calvin and Me

Introduction

I am an Arminian.  I am not a Calvinist.

I think I know what I am saying.  In the following essay, I hope to explain myself and why understanding the distinction is important.

I hate typologies and, unfortunately, this is one.  It has all the flaws of typologies: over-simplification, imprecise boundaries, potential for having no real-world examples, and being a distraction from other dynamics which may be more important.

But typologies also have some strengths, mainly to point at dynamics that may not be accurately identified in other typologies (!) or ways of identifying the dynamics of a particular problem.  In the case of the portends of schism in our denomination, many analyses have been offered to try to clarify the problems that have brought us to this point.  But so far, none have really stuck.  While they have been of help, the problems still hold sway..

Sometimes problems begin to dissipate when their dynamics are properly named.  For example, drugs have been around ever since humankind learned about the effects of burning certain plants, ingesting others, and fermenting others.  From peyote buds among Native Americans to opium dens in Victorian England to speak-easies in Chicago to recreational marijuana, good and bad ways have been found to deal with these mood/perception altering drugs.  In America, after we resolved the place of alcohol in our society in 1933 with the repeal of the 18^th Amendment, the place of marijuana went from being ignored to becoming the gateway drug in the War on Drugs started during the Nixon administration.  What was known as “grass” in the white community was largely ignored but what was known as “weed” in the black community put hundreds of thousands of young black men into prison and marked them as felons for life.  The medical arguments for marijuana made inroads into the illegality of “MJ” but the naming of the racial prejudice involved in the application of the law finally has broken its back.  

So by my naming Arminianism and Calvinism as the basis of our being on the verge of schism may help us put it into perspective and maybe take some of the steam out of the fearsomeness of the movement toward splitting the Church.

Since my experience and seminary training have led me more toward church law than theology, I warn you that I have spent little time studying the writings of either Jacob Arminius who influenced John Wesley the most or of John Calvin who influenced George Whitefield.  So I will open my monologue with a little personal history on my experience with these two approaches to Christianity.  Then I will apply insights gained to the present situation so that you can understand why I used this typology so extensively in my commentaries on the Judicial Council’s decisions of early 2019 (See http://aiateam.blogspot.com).

My Experience with Arminianism and Calvinism

My mom was Episcopalian by proximity to the little church across the street from her home.  My dad was Methodist like my grandmother but at some point was told he was going to Hell because he did something as a youth.  He tried the Episcopal Church but was turned off by the priest demanding money all the time so he had that excuse for not going to church,  But I think the Hell thing bothered him the most.  The finality of his theological doom weighed on him.  We never put a name on that phenomenon.

Between my mother and grandmother, and a move to Waukesha at the start of WW II, I grew up in First Methodist Church.  The overall impression I got of Christian faith from first grade through my early college years was that our faith was that God made us to be caring and inclusive, “patient, kind, not jealous, boastful, arrogant or rude,” and by following and being like Jesus our example and Lord, we would be working our way toward perfection in love in this life like our Heavenly Father.  It was our tradition.  There were some Lutherans and some Catholics who weren’t exactly on the same page, but every other denomination, including First Baptist Church, were very much the same.  We never put a name on that phenomenon.  

In my senior year in high school, one of my buddies started talking to me about being saved and how his new church had given him a wonderful new life.  I visited it with him once, even attended a Billy Graham rally with him where I talked with someone down front after joining the line of those who had found Christ.  In the Methodist way, I had but I had never had the sense of emotion about it that Graham was trying to instill.  There was no emotional release over grief about my sins in finding Christ.  Sunday School had taken away nearly all of my desire to swear.  I never took to cards or gambling.  They were mentioned, I’m sure, but I never signed a card promising to never do them as I did in seventh grade about smoking.  Sunday School bolstered me against drinking though I had the bad example of many of the fathers among my friends on that as well.  I did get a lot of satisfaction out of church choir when I joined it in high school.  

But what was left, thanks to my friend, was an uncomfortable feeling that maybe I didn’t have my faith right.  By the way, my friend was still the same kid I’d grown up with, nice, clean, no bad habits, excellent student, friendly.  But he was sure he was different.  Who was I to say?  “Live and let live” and “I drew the circle to take him in” were deep in my code of ethics.  If he chose to exclude me, that was his problem.

In college, at Wesley Foundation, I remember a meeting where a student felt his spiritual needs were not being met.  The Foundation directors and about forty of us students entered into an extended session of soul searching and defining of feelings with him.  He was not finding the emotional release he had experienced in his church at home.  He felt we were not talking about the right things, like calling people to Jesus, and were spending too much time worrying about the Korean War, racism, and having social events.  He decided we were the wrong place to be for him.  We tried to talk him out of leaving because we thought the fellowship we had was so valuable but he couldn’t see it.  He left.  

A seminary student visiting Wesley that night led a lot of the conversation and at the end, identified the young man as an evangelical.  Though the word was not unfamiliar, the concept was uncomfortable.  We all had heard from one or another of our pastors at home at one time or another but either as the good news that Jesus came to be our example or as a sect-like religious superiority that was not at all our tradition.  Same word, “evangelical,” but carrying very different connotations.  The seminarian didn’t bother naming us, though words like “Modernists” and “liberals” were in our vocabularies.  We never applied them to ourselves because within one’s own tradition, we presumed we were who we were, “bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things,” just being ourselves.  I’m sure I heard about Jacob Arminius during those college years but he was John Wesley’s favorite theologian, we were told.

At Perkins where I went to seminary, I’m sure Arminianism was discussed and since it was as comfortable as an old shoe, it was barely noticeable among the discussions of the various theologians and reformers we studied, most getting only a glance in the scheme of things to me.  I was already in a student appointment, learning the ropes, and practical things were really my focus.  I do remember Grady Hardin preaching in chapel one day.  His sermon was three sentences long and took about 15 seconds.  “Here is the Gospel:  Jesus Christ gave His only begotten Son to save us from our sins.”  He paused, and then asked, “Did you hear it?”

Grady was the best preacher on the Perkins staff at the time, which says a lot because they all were worth hearing and packed the chapel when they took a turn.  But that day, Grady left us so stunned that I don’t remember anyone talking about it.  In hindsight, I can go on for a half hour, I’m sure, but at the time, I think most of us on the liberal side, which was most of Perkins students and faculty, didn’t quite know what to do with it.  It sure sounded Calvinistic but we knew Grady was not a Calvinist.

In 1983, a colleague called me late one night saying he was being charged with beating his wife and could I come over and talk with him about what to do.  He knew I had been to the Judicial Council about being left without an appointment.(JCD 492).  In the course of the conversation, he spoke of how his wife’s mental illness had come up before and had been quietly handled by the previous bishops.  “But this time,” he said, “they’re coming after me because I was an Assembly of God preacher before I became a United Methodist.  They can’t believe I’m an Arminian.”  I knew roughly what he meant.  When the case went to trial, the church counsel did all he could to paint him as a Calvinist though the word was never used.  And as a barber’s child, since he was balding, he wore his hair funny.  But I digress.

I know Tom Lambrecht because his family grew up in a church I later served in Milwaukee.  He joined our conference via Asbury Seminary - Except for a handful; of us from Perkins and other seminaries, Garrett Evangelical was the major supplier of pastors for our conference. - He didn’t come at theology the way the rest of us did but we “drew the circle that took him in.”  And over the ensuing years we took in others not from the mainline seminaries.  And some of them formed a support group of like-minded pastors and it became a kind of caucus over the homosexuality issue, among other things.  I never felt like they were alienating people in their churches from what I experienced as my tradition.  We accepted the fact that there were some churches that were “conservative” and needed pastors like Tom to serve them.  I served in some of those smaller conservative churches and saw no signs of alienation.  And we accepted the differences of opinion the evangelicals expressed during reports from Church and Society at annual conference.  We usually outvoted them but continued serving side-by-side with them on other conference committees and as churches in mission together in Wisconsin.

After I retired, a colleague called me from Wisconsin and asked if I could help on a situation where a church was considering leaving the conference.  I looked into the matter and discovered the church had a new member who was agitating for change because the church had had a black pastor and they had a hard time accepting that.  The new pastor who came after him was anti-gay and riled up the congregation about that burgeoning issue.  What really bothered me was that I was otherwise completely comfortable with the people of the church.  They were exactly the kind of folks I grew up with and served in nearly all my churches.  But they were being led away from our denomination by a lay person and a pastor not fully vetted by the conference.  I didn’t put a name on it, foreshadowing of our current arguments over disaffiliation as it was.  I just felt in a vague way that the Southern Baptists had struck.  I had no reason to think then or now that there was any tie back to Tom’s group.

I’ve watched with dismay as my Church was caught between several dynamics that were slowly changing it to something I wasn’t sure was recognizable any more.  

My main focus in working as an advocate for pastors and lay people in trouble was on how the Council of Bishops was absorbing more and more of my respective bishops’ time.  Good persons became bishops and found themselves thinking the best model was an autocratic one (they said it was only a CEO model) and not a pastoral one.  I observed with sadness as superintendent have gotten further and further from their pastors and local churches.  And I have written about it over the years.

But bad as that has been for my church, I’ve felt what to me was an insidious erosion of fellowship which isolated pastors from each other caused by use of computers for social contact.  And before that, a whole generation of second career pastors wanting to be their own bosses.  And before that, driving in their own cars to do things, no longer needing to depend on anyone else to get around.  That individuation has put pastors on isolated islands and made them vulnerable to attack by antagonists in the church (“clergy killers”) with superintendents busy dong their stuff and falling back on a policy of “the customer is always right,” no longer trusting the pastors to be worthy members of the collegiality of the clergy. 

Since 1972, there has been one other thing that has entered this scenario.  A group of savvy politically oriented pastors began to pressure the Church to block gays from being pastors.  While they were ostensibly focusing on homosexuality, their movement coincided with movements in the Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Congregational churches for Calvinist elements to take over the leadership of those denominations.  One outspoken pastor, in defending the movement in our church said that it was our tradition.  I don’t know about you but it was NOT a part of my tradition to demand certain decisions from us or they would leave.  My tradition said you love one another. You look at the problem, you work it out, and you don’t threaten anybody.  That Calvinism is so presumptuous, in my eyes.  We’d made it through the issues of smoking, divorce, and abortion successfully.  What was up with homosexuality that it was too controversial to be our latest project?

Every General Conference I observed between the 1980s and 2012, every conversation started out, “Well, is this the year they’re going to split the Church?”

When the conservative plan came along through the Way Forward Commission and got called the “Traditionalists’ Plan” (TP), I spoke up (you can see my little pipsqueak essay on this in my personal blog at http://jerryeckert.blogspot.com.  That plan was not from MY tradition.  

Putting my 84 years into these few pages leaves out a whole lot of personal data like the impact of studying cultural anthropology as my college major, taking extra years of seminary, etc.  But it outlines some key background that led up to a particular moment when I started working on commentaries for the 2019 Judicial Council decisions (see http://aiateam.blogspot.com).  As I started on the docket items related to the TP challenges, for some reason I thought of the split between John Wesley and George Whitefield.  As I remembered seminary lectures on that moment in our history, Wesley who was a follower of Jacob Arminius had a hard time  reconciling his approach to faith with George Whitefield’s Calvinistic approach.  Wesley, who said something like “If your heart is as my heart, give me your hand” in his sermon “On the Catholic Spirit,”  showed he’d work with anyone.  But Whitefield was not in that same place in his preaching and approach.  

I don’t happen to know anything more specific than that about their split and despite doing his preaching  in the colonies of North America separately from the Methodists under Wesley, he still arranged before his death with Wesley to do a funeral sermon for him in London, which Wesley did.

I looked up Whitefield and happened upon a few words in a brief summary about his preaching.  “His approach disrupted settled churches.”  I remembered a research paper I did on the “burned over district” in western New York state where, after devastating wild fires went through there, the settled churches were under attack from the Calvinistic preachers who with the fire and brimstone sermons converted enough of each ;local congregation and each denomination that a whole bunch of new denominations sprang from their efforts (Church of the Nazarenes, Wesleyan Methodist Church, Primitive Methodist Church, Assemblies of God, and many more).  

As I turned back to my analysis, remembering that Wesley/Whitefield split, I wondered if something of that dynamic was still at play in our denomination.  It explained why I was offended by a brother pastor who felt his Calvinism was traditional and he had no idea that I thought my Arminianism was properly in the Wesley tradition. 

Implications of Being an Arminian

John Wesley’s approach of openness to cooperate with others despite having different theologies has inspired collaboration.  It inspired the World Council of Church, the cooperation in the mission fields (look up John R. Mott), and I would add that kind of Wesleyan influence at least indirectly inspired the formation of the United Nations and NATO alliance which brought relative peace in Europe and the possibility of the European Union.  Working toward union for the benefit of all through associations in which all partners had a say before decisions were made and policies formulated has been part of the genius of the post WW II world.  

That comes from the Arminian wisdom that we are followers of a God of Grace who has shown us in both the Old and New Testaments, lessons learned in tradition, from reason, and from both good and bad experiences what it is to live together.  We are saved by following the word and example of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  We ain’t fully there yet. - Wesley added going on to perfection in love as God loves to remind us of that by identifying how high the goal really is.  If that doesn’t keep us humble, nothing will!

The problem with Calvinists is that they do not have that problem.  Maybe their theology gives down-trodden people hope of finally being right in God’s eyes.  Maybe their preaching finally opens people’s eyes to their self-worth.  But once saved, they do not have to go on to sanctification.  They no longer have the problem of being imperfect.  God has given them the perfection of Christ!  What establishes that is that they have God’s Word on it, right there in God’s Bible with every word in it the word of God and no one can dispute them because they have the very words of God in their hands.

So who may criticize them if they follow the Bible?  They can’t criticize themselves because they are already perfect, so no one else may.  They are right provided they have the word of God supporting them.  And knowing that, they will find something in the Bible that they feel finalizes the deal.  And if they find six, no one can prove them wrong!  Victory in Christ, Halleluiah Amen!

You will never win an argument with a Calvinist even using the same Bible and the same translation.  Because God has saved them and and given insight into the meaning of it and no one else could be right because they have it right.  Is that a heady power!

Hey, as I was growing up, I was not accustomed to dealing with someone one who disagreed with me, mainly because people didn’t disagree.  We were largely settled on the most important things like being neighborly, parents’ word being final, being generous when someone needed our help, being humble when we could be wrong about something because we were trying to get it right and knew we were in an ongoing process.  Well, maybe some of us (ourselves included) got a little big headed until someone else set us straight.  I’ve even known of bishops who backed off when they discovered they were wrong.

That very humility, though, is what you have a hard time finding among Calvinists.  They do not self-evaluate because they are already one with Christ!  That is intimidating!  And so us non-Calvinists give them space, allow them their way, maybe even give them rope to hang themselves.  

But we mostly worry that maybe they are right and we have to give the benefit of the doubt.

Then I was reminded of what happened with Calvinists and the settled churches of the nineteenth century.  They were disrupters because they preached that the settled church people had Christianity all wrong.  

Let me say a word about what happens when Calvinists finally all gather in one place.  They can’t agree to disagree.  They can’t develop a concensus.  They develop factions that have to counter each other because someone in the other faction disagrees and only one side can be right and it certainly isn’t them because our side are right.  

The Southern Baptist Church spreads by splitting.  They have discovered that disagreeing leads to them spreading their understanding of the Gospel by not trying to understand each other and not trying to learn more in case they would learn enough to clear up the disagreement.  Save time and energy.  Separate, split, and don’t bother to even wish each other well.  Amicable separation?  Maybe with Arminians involved so the Calvinists can finally get their way. . . .

I’m old enough to know that Calvinist Churches work out agreements within their own groups and have done some amazing things such as move in a leaky old boat across an uncharted ocean to a new land seeking freedom for their kind.  They hear the message in their churches to love one another and they hear the same stories we do from the Scriptures.  So they can have neighborliness and generosity and all the good things talked about in the Scriptures.  But that mutuality has its limits and does not include others who are different.  It is intolerant of those who do not take the Calvinists’ privilege of rightness seriously, like those in the settled churches, or those of another race, or religion, or even nationality..

It took me my life time but suddenly, I would rather be an Arminian than a Calvinist.  I can work with Calvinists in a county jail.  I can work with Calvinists on missions through my annual conference.  I can usually work with Calvinists in my congregation if I can quote Jesus at least once in a sermon and then keep them out of key power positions in the church’s leadership.  

But do not let one become a bishop.  Even Arminians fall into the trap of mistaking that position as becoming God Him/Herself.  Power corrupts.  At least Arminians have the possibility of realizing that, whereas for Calvinists’ power is their privilege because God has made them right.

I suddenly took pride in being an Arminian.  After my whole life time, they have not proven my Arminianism is wrong.  I no longer wonder if maybe they are right.

As an Arminian, I have seen how our way to understand and make decisions is more effective if less efficient that Calvinists’ decision making.  I have seen how our way brings people together more effectively and I have seen how their way tears people apart.  

So just because I no longer am intimidated by Calvinists, I still have the rest of the world to listen to and learn from and relate to in a Christ-like manner.  And much to learn in order to make the best decisions with others not always open to listening and learning.  But then, we have more than just Scripture on our side.  We have tradition (I want that word back!), reason, and experience to draw upon to face the world for Christ’s sake..

Finally

Having named a major aspect of our situation, that underneath the exasperating discussion and demonstrations and fussing over administrative detail trying to resolve the tensions in a Christian manner, does acknowledging Arminanism and Calvinism as key elements of the struggle over schism tell us anything?  Does recognizing these elements take a little steam out of the altercation and put it into a more malleable problem?

Do any of our typologies do that?

One small point to consider:

Since 1972, the sticking point has been the authority of Scripture.  It gives finality to the Calvinists’ power and it intimidates the Arminians.  At least I thought it did.  But I suspect I am not the first to realize the Calvinists do not want that discussion because it is their lone source of power and they can’t take a chance that they will lose that argument.

Update:  I just read an article about bullying and being the victim.  I wonder if my feeling of release the other day was as much being freed from acting the victim as it was new found pride in my identity as a follower of John Wesley and his Arminian tradition.

Are we there yet?

In 1962, David Younk saw me going into the church.  He was home from college and wanted to talk.  He said his professor was lecturing about pollution.   "Water?" I asked.  "No, air."  He went on to talk about how Los Angeles always had smog.  We actually saw the nasty yellow haze over that city a couple years later when we drove out to see seminary friends in California.

Another David, a campus minister named Stephenson, just a few years later, warned our annual conference that we were approaching the point of no return for pollution and the survival of the planet.  He spent most of his ministry trying to help the campuses and churches he served to do something about it.

A decade later, I heard a local politician home during a break from his work in the legislature talk about how pollution was exacerbated by the way we wasted electrical energy.  I bought the newly invented light bulbs, turned off lights, and unplugged appliances.  So many people did that the power company had to raise rates in order to pay stock holder their promised dividends

Around then, I saw an odd thing.  The trees started to look weird.  Out east, trees were dying because of the exhaust fumes from cars and trucks.  In Wisconsin, where I was, the trees were actually growing faster.  Branches seemed to be reaching towards the road where I drove regularly.  The ends of the branch were always fresh growth, as if they couldn't help themselves.  While they took a break over the winter, the trees came back too enthusiastically, as I saw it.

Every car we bought over those years had much better mileage than the one we had owned before.  The smog in Los Angeles cleared as cars there burned less and less fuel.  The trees out east survived because of the change in formulas used in the fuels as well as with less being consumed by vehicles.  We now have a Prius that stops the engine by itself when we are waiting at stop signs.

Earlier this year, NASA scientists said we would reach the no return point with respect to global warming by 2030.  Al Gore's Oscar winning movie on global warming came to mind with its graphic of how that warming would shoot up extremely rapidly very soon.  And now, some scientists are saying we have 18 months.

Who is to blame for this pending disaster?  Putin with his dreams of world domination and the sale of Russia's oil and gas.  The Koch Brothers who also are into oil and gas and coal, besides.  Mitch McConnell who won't let government act unless it somehow means money in his pockets.  And Dick Cheney and both Bushes because of their ties to oil.  

And me.  I have been warned and made only minor changes.  In the right direction, but not really enough.  I've been mostly quiet despite the warnings.  Until it appears to be too late.  Now I'm speaking up . . . on a blog maybe twenty friends will look at over the next eighteen months.  And Facebook.  And letters to the editor.  And friends in the denomination saying we fuss over homosexuality and ignore global warming with its threat to the planet earth.

American optimism has blinded us to the fact that every major culture in history has had its dooms day.  But we've seen the future in Star Trek.  But then I recall how Capt. Pickard lived a lifetime in one episode where a planet faced its own end and had drawn him onto a fantasy so that he would be the bearer of their cultural memory once their planet died.

So our wonderful "tour ship" glides toward disaster with little chance to slow and change direction in time to prevent disaster.

In Biblical terms, God did not save Methuselah from the Flood in Noah's time.  In fact, God let humanity destroy its greatest achievement at the time, the Tower of Babel, by its self-absorption and loss of communication by adopting jargons that meant nothing to each other.  And the ruins of great civilizations scatter the jungles and deserts of the world and lie under its hills and plains seen only from satellites.

Do I have any suggestions on how to undo this human folly?  I'm not even sure which NGO is the most effective at working on environmental change.  All I know is that we have to elect people who really care and are willing to work on changing our policies to those which could save the planet.  And we have to somehow draw people away from their own major concerns about feeding their families and getting medical care and to look at what is coming if we don't find a way to change.  Rich and poor alike, we all have to do something different very soon.  

So maybe I can't offer a swift recommendation.  Maybe there is one possibility that might slow things down a bit.  That is to listen for and pass on the best ideas, large and small, in hopes that someone somewhere will do something with them along with us.

Are we there yet?

"The Authority of Scripture" v. "Do No Harm"

I just read the letter Dr. Tennant, president of Asbury Seminary, wrote in response to the letter of a large number of alumnae and alumna of Asbury.

It is disappointing that he does not acknowledge that there might be harm being done to people because of his stance that the authority of Scripture is at stake in this controversy within the Church.  "Do no harm" is John Wesley's FIRST General Rule.  Wesley does not prioritize authority of Scripture in his General Rules at all.

If Dr. Tennant could acknowledge that there is harm being done, that could start the discussion in a new direction: Is the word "homosexual" and the related passages taken to be "Scripture" properly translated and understood for their primary intent as indicated in the original languages which underlay our translation?

Dr. Tennant might find as I have that the original intent of some of the passages was to discourage sexual acts that did not lead to live births to help the people of Israel to survive in the desert, something Israelis do not subscribe to now (they practice birth control legally in Israel).  In addition, passages referring to same sex acts have words in the original language which were used primarily to identify people who preyed upon children, something nearly every culture has sanctions against, and about which there is no argument in the UMC.  No one is supportive of sexual exploitation of children by adults.

Dr. Tennant has felt that even such arguments, apparently not spelled out in the alumnae letter or his own, are insufficient for him to give up his view of what the Scriptures say and his persistence in then super-prioritizing the "authority of Scripture."  

That is indeed very disappointing.  And is leading to harm being done in the name of the Church.

Hey GOP, the FBI was on the Russian case since the Cold War.

I would love to have seen Mueller or the Democrats argue the Republican challenges to Mueller because those will be floating around in the ether without much of a challenge. But let me deal with one. 

The FBI has had an ongoing investigation into Russian spying in the US since before the Cold War. Over the past decade, the best FBI team on counter-intelligence against the Russians was led by Peter Strzok. Strzok knew every intricacy of the Russian efforts as did most of his team. So when Papadoplous was identified as having been approached by a Russian spy, that was merely adding to what Strzok and the FBI already knew. 

The British counterpart to Strzok was Michael Steele. They knew each other because they shared intel as needed. So when Mitt Romney wanted intel on Trump, he hired a research group that went to the newly retired Michael Steele who sent a numbers of reports to Romney and to his friend, Peter Strzok, at the FBI. 

Strzok added that material to his already expansive files on Russian espionage being monitored and countered by his team. 

When Romney dropped out, the Clinton Campaign took up the research firm's work to help them, knowing the FBI was already on the case. 

The Republicans have no case trying to say it was Steele who started everything and blame Hillary for it. Even if the Steele material never came along, the FBI was long ago on the case and had enough to allow Pres. Obama to throw out two Russian troll teams working in the US, impose new sanctions on the Russians, and confiscate their mansions before he left office.

BTW, when the Strzok and Paige emails came out, Mueller immediately removed them from his team. Under Jeff Sessions, the rest of Strzok's anti Russian spy team was fired or removed without any reason given. Maybe the Republicans need to investigate THAT!

What is Trump's relationship to Putin?

My brother had a theory. When a new inexperienced officer took up his assignment, he sought out the most experienced non-com willing to work with him. My brother called the second man "the little sergeant." The little sergeant, if he was smart, stayed in the background but made sure his own interests were accommodated as well as giving the new officer some workable advice that the officer felt was a real help.

I believe that when he became President, Trump immediately chose Putin to be his "little sergeant.

Nearly every major foreign policy position Trump has taken has benefitted Putin. Abandoning NATO, undercutting the EU, pushing for Brexit, stopping the US/South Korea/Japan military exercises, ending the Iran and Paris deals, and ending our relationship with Cuba all are what Putin wants.

Even on domestic issues, Putin's agenda is visible. In terms of who Trump put on his cabinet, as Putin has oligarchs on his, Trump put millionaires and billionaires o

n his. Both are anti-free press, both replaced judges where they could, Intimidated opposing politicians, ignoring laws they do not like or that put limits on their authority. And Putin is a master at telling lies, describing how everything is going in glowing terms, trying to set the national dialogue on his own terms and having nothing to do with reality. Sound familiar?

So far, there has been one area that Trump has not followed Putin. Putin has no problem killing people he does not like. Trump has not intentionally tried to assassinate anyone yet.

Even on climate change, Trump has followed Putin almost like a puppy. Putin's reason? Russia's primary resources are oil and gas.

Maybe Trump is following Hitler's playbook but it is Putin that he can't wait to go see for private conversations . . . and Putin's suggestions about what to do next. Putin is Trump's "little sergeant."

"Broken girls blossom into warriors"

A conservative woman Facebook friend posted the following:

I immediately thought of the women in the border camps who struggled up the long journey from Central America, 80% of whom were raped along the way (if not in the custody of the CBP and ICE).  In the camps, they only have the toilet for running water and hardly any room to lie down.

The mistake the President and his supporters in Congress and elsewhere that they do not even begin to realize that these women have a spirit that they will never match.

First, the women will not forget who caused them the horror at the border.  Second, they will eventually get out.  Third, if they were smart enough and took enough initiative to undertake the journey here in the first place, they will organize and become a huge major force in American politics no matter what the President and his co-workers devise against them.

It may take a generation, but probably not.  They will have their African-American, Korean-American, Chinese-American, Hmong-American sisters to walk with them and their Hispanic sisters who have been here for a generation and are already in Congress!

The President should be welcoming and helping these refugees.  Instead, he is making them into warriors that he and others will face one day soon.

Our Litigious Age

History may look upon our part of Church history as a “litigious age.”  

I get that a lot from bishops who resent pastors who raise questions of law to get help from the Judicial Council.  Funny, but I don’t hear them complain about litigiousness when bishops bring formal complaints against pastors.  

They seem to be glad there is a judicial process set up by the General Conference so there is a way to fire those they think are bad pastors, according to their own evaluations.  And pastors are getting a lot more savvy about fighting unfair personnel practices, which is what they feel about how they are being treated. Indeed, with the introduction of the concept of “Fair Process” in 1992, the number of church judicial actions seems to have increased compared with the first 200 years of our denomination.

As I looked back on GC2019, I had a middle of the night revelation.  Resorting to law comes from having lost trust in one another.

I can easily argue that the law has always been needed.  Jesus quoted law and counted on it even when challenging it.  Regarding the first two hundred years in America, we have wedded ourselves to the concept of ordering Church life around a constitution in order to have a fall back position of what to do in case of confusion or perceived harm.  If brothers and sisters cannot resolve a disagreement, they could take it to the “Church” with an orderly way of formal debate based on prior agreements about the judicial/appellate process, with an agreement as to who and when and where a final decision could be made to which the contesting parties had to adhere.  

But even that formal debate process was not used all the time, as it seems to be nowadays.  

And now, thanks to GC2019, I anticipate it is going to get worse.  I see two major dynamics at work in our day.  One is the impatience of church leaders to do church their own way.  The second is the desire of some to have complete control.  

Those who follow my writing know immediately the first category is characteristic of the Council of Bishops as well as some individual bishops and other leaders.  Law and constitution are important to them only when it serves their purposes.  If the Discipline says something different than they want, then they defy or ignore it.  I’m talking tendencies here and fortunately not all Council of Bishops’ actions and  not all bishops and leaders are like that.  But enough have decided they know best and do it their own way.  And that triggers the litigiousness about which they complain.  

I have watched that phenomenon since 1960 and it never ends.  When General Conference votes a hedge against bad personnel practice, certain bishops find a way to get around it.  And a new round of litigiousness begins.

But what I have seen in the war to gain control over the denomination, most recently carried on in the passage of the “traditionalist” plan at GC2019 will push the use of courts outside of the denomination and into civil courts.  The hard line against homosexuality held by the “traditionalists” will tempt pastors and congregations identifying with both extreme wings of our Church to consider leaving and the terms of their separation will not be “amicable”  because of the wide variety of property issues.  And the harshness of the new personnel laws guarantee that the litigiousness will veer into state and federal courts.  It now will become a matter of civil rights of LGBTQI folks.

While we spend tremendous amounts of energy on that, the global warming crisis goes on unaddressed, the immigration crisis gets worse, and we inadvertently let income inequality become normalized.

As I said above, resorting to law comes from having lost trust in one another.  

We Christians have never agreed on everything with one another, even when nascent Christianity was Jesus and his twelve Disciples.  The separation of Paul and Barnabas was heart-breaking as was that of Wesley and Whitefield.  That the Church even exists is a testament to the fact that Christians have found ways to trust each other anyway.  

For all the dynamics that press on us, we set them aside to do missionary work.  The strangest theological bedfellows end up working together to serve a county jail.  We rediscover that there are things beyond us that we care about despite our differences. There are crises that need all of our varied gifts and experiences in order to be met and that we have to guard each others’ backs.  We know that when we have to, we can take on the view that once the hungry are fed, the thirsty get water, the sick are cared for, the naked are clothed, the strangers welcomed, and the prisoners visited, then we can look at our differences and “talk religion.”  

We may even discover we can postpone litigation until after that.

Until we regain that level of trust, our litigious age will continue.