In the late 1960s, a gay pastor in the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference was removed from his appointment based on his being gay. He sued in civil court and the conference was ordered by the court to not only reinstate him but pay him a six figure settlement.
That triggered two responses.
The conservatives moved swiftly and effectively at the 1972 General Conference to introduce new legislation regarding homosexuality, even to the point of making it a matter of such importance that they would leave the denomination if they did not get their legislation through.
That hit liberals and moderates who were still in the mindset that mergers were better than splitting or staying separate (we had just merged with the EUBs in 1968) and were very much caught up in the Council of Churches movements nationally and internationally as well as locally. So the conservatives got their way. Over the following years the conservatives used the same tactic to increase the amount of church law against gays and added their own missions board, women’s association, and other groups that became a denomination within the denomination.
The liberals who tended at the time to follow the “Yuck Factor” without realizing it even a decade later were moved to express their antigay feelings more openly. Even Bishop Tuell at the time (the early 1980s) sought a way to remove gay pastors without having to resort to church trials to do it and found a willing Judicial Council (liberals and all) to support such a removal (see JCD 524, where there was no mention of homosexuality but where it was common knowledge that the pastor facing that involuntary leave was openly gay).
Remember that over these same decades, the Southern Baptist Convention was taken over by conservative leaders who saw to the firing of certain moderate to liberal professors at their seminaries and that the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church split when conservatives took over that denomination’s leadership, and nearly half of the denomination merged into the more moderate Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Those splits both represented major power shifts within the two denominations.
The Presbyterians also split as did the Episcopal Church. One could say that the capitulation to the conservatives’ anti-gay legislation prevented a split in our denomination for almost a half century.
From an historical perspective, when one group says that if everyone does not do something a certain way that they will leave, that is a power play even if tolerated for the sake of unity. The ploy can be covered over with theology, Bible references, and impassioned pleas to tradition but it is still an example of “party spirit” (Galatians 5:20) the Apostle Paul decried. And when that group provides a plan to allow their opponents to leave “amicably,” that shows they have wanted to take over all along and then purge the denomination of those who disagree with them. That was the playbook of the conservatives in the four denominations that were split.
There are other dynamics at play. I will note only three more.
The first is the development of the internet. As homosexuality came out of the closet and more people, especially high school and college students, had experience knowing gay people, and various sciences studied homosexuality, its biology, and its human history, that information spread rapidly over the internet. The United States changed in its attitude within a decade from most living by their personal distaste for homosexual practice to accepting gay marriage. The same is likely to happen in Africa and other bastians of anti-gay culture. In my estimation, the conservatives have only a decade to try to take over the United Methodist Church before their main reason dissipates as the older generation dies and the younger generation comes in. The internet and information sharing will be the death of the “yuck” factor for most people in the world in our lifetime.
The second dynamic is the usurpation of power by the Council of Bishops. In the 1960s when the gay pastor won his law suit against the Church, the Council of Bishops was a support group. By the turn of the century, they were a union, politically active to strengthen their roles in personnel, handling of finances, and programming for the denomination. In the past two decades, church life has become so complicated that it has been easy to let the bishops be the ones to solve our biggest problems. And this issue of standing up to the conservatives’ push to take over behind the cover issue of homosexual practice was handed off to the Council of Bishops in 2016. I thought that strange given the Council of Bishops’ attempt to reorganize the denomination after 2008 fell flat at the 2012 General Conference. It is my opinion that I think is based on good grounds that the Council of Bishops has manipulated the Way Forward process to the point where none of the options really helps our denomination and I hope the General Conference 2019 votes down all of the petitions for the various plans being offered at this time.
The third dynamic also dates back to the 1960s. Colleges and universities were already teaching about pollution of water, land, sea, and atmosphere. In 1968, a colleague in my annual conference, a campus minister, was saying that we were passing a point of no return for air pollution. In 1980, a state representative spoke of how serious pollution was that I found reading some of the apocalyptic prophets started to make sense. That was also when everyone switched away from energy-wasting electrical appliances and the electric companies all had to increase their rates to make up for that loss! And then during the Bush administration which was so pro-oil and coal, former Vice President Al Gore produced the Academy Award winning film, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, pointing out how global warming was increasing at an alarming rate. Frank Lutz persuaded everyone to call it “climate change” to defuse the warning. And now the most recent warnings have given us until 2030 to turn things around or IN OUR LIFE TIME we will see the end of civilization and massive extinctions, including among human beings.*
The internet is full of information about ways to diminish global warming and perhaps as we quit chasing squirrels (using power plays, taking advantage of life’s complexity, etc.) and change our priorities to deal with first things first, we can go to work on saving the planet. Maybe this 2019 General Conference will turn a corner and take steps to help the world realize that our global survival is at stake. Even just issuing a warning would be better than mucking around in organizational chatter surrounding homosexual practice..
*Type “2030 global warming" into any search engine like Google for confirmation.
