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.

The UMC "Split"???

If you come to me for scholarly attention related to the recent actions of the special-called 2019 General Conference, I will disappoint you.  I have read a number of articles in the main stream media, the church media, and on Facebook on the several sides of the controversy but have not followed all the possible wisdom imparted.  

There is a lot of fear, a lot of worry, that I think needs to be put into perspective.  

I have three points to share in hopes to take the anxiety over a potential split down a notch or three.

One, I think the “traditionalists” overplayed their hand, much like the Republicans have with their mindless support of President Trump.  Two, a split of consequence is not likely to happen in any case.  Nearly every congregation and annual conference is too split (or soon will be) to go one way or the other.   Three, legal wheels grind very slowly.  

One, many Americans and some people around the world who watch us closely are aware that under President Trump’s administration, the right has flexed its muscle because their advocacy of control and judgmentalism are not being discouraged.  As a result, Republicans in Congress have sat on their hands when it comes to realistic responses to the various wild and criminal actions of the President.  The most clear sign of where Republicans are in their radical approach to governance is in the realm of abortion rights, notably the passage of laws in their state legislatures that are anti-women,  Their presumption based on their sense of power has shown them to be so far from the middle that the losses the Republicans had in 2018 appear to be even more likely in 2020.  I see that the same drive by the right wing of our Church for control based on a wedge issue.  That drive motivates much of the legislation that the Judicial Council sorted through recently but the General Conference passed anyway.  

I’ve contended that the “traditionalists” in the UMC face a rapidly changing social milieu so that this year may have been their last real chance to make a permanent change (they believe) in the United Methodist Church.  America had swung from anti-gay to marriage equality in less than a decade.  And because of social media and international travel, the prospect of changes in Africa and Asia are likely to be even more rapid.  As I write, the Philippines has a significant pro-gay movement going.  And my contacts with Africans encourages me to believe the more they know, the more they are unlikely to support anti-gay legislation as soon as 2020.  Notice that the votes at General Conference 2019 were close.  

I am sure both sides pressing the homosexuality issue will do all they can to get their delegates elected for 2020’a General Conference.  The dynamic of change on the view of homosexuality is going on world wide now, mostly the younger generation against the older generation.  Most of the legislation supporting the “traditionalists’” position does not go into effect until Jan. 1, 2020, with one exception, and within months after that, the 2020 General Conference will go over much of the same ground with possibly different results.   I think the conservatives have overplayed their hand.

That doesn’t mean we will avoid a great deal of pain and disruption in our church life, not dissimilar to what we face in our political life in the U. S..  As long as “controllers” (those with the psychiatric issue of having to bring everyone to their point of view and have to be the only ones who are right) have any power, only dissension and other harms will result from it.  The struggle for reasonableness is not over but it may prevail much sooner than the “traditionalists” wish.

Two, many older experienced people just shake their heads as they watch the sound and fury of those most outspoken on both sides.  For one thing, there are few geographic signs in the United States that the Church can be split regionally as it was split before the Civil War.  At that time, the southern states were a geographic focus for slavery.  While certain counties in the deep south remained loyal to the Union and did not join in the war of the rebellion with the rest in their state, the denomination had a strong basis for splitting.  No such thing is true now, at least  in Europe and the U. S.  There are some churches that have strongly taken sides for and against homosexuality.  Some have actually chosen to leave the denomination already.  But by and large, possibly with the exception of certain ethnic congregations still under the influence of the older generation, most congregations are very mixed.  They would have a terrible time making up their mind to even take a vote to align with one faction let alone split away from the denomination.  The same is true of annual conferences.  The chances of there being a wholesale leaving of the denomination by one side or the other is highly unlikely.  Oh, the feelings can be very high and individuals within nearly all churches can get very upset over the disagreement, but most United Methodists will be pretty slow to even hold meetings to discuss the issues to say nothing of the option of leaving the Church.

I am aware that certain pastors have cultivated their churches to understand the issues from their point of view to the point of becoming identifiable to one side or the other.  I know from long experience that even in those churches, there are people who are not all in with that one side and do not like being forced on this issue to take sides.  As in the parts of the world that tended to support the 

“traditionalists’” legislation, the growth against anti-gay beliefs is very strong among the younger generation even in local churches.  

I also think that science and experience are taken seriously by more and more people as gays have come out of the closet.  Those who feel there is no real problem would prefer not to get into a fight about what for them is settled.  

I really do not see a massive shift of whole congregations or annual conferences into a new denomination nor into other denominations.  

Three, it has been pointed out in many places that a split on any scale within the denomination will tend to have long dragged-out legal hassles.  Who gets the Publishing House?  Who gets Wespath (the Board of Pensions)?  Who gets the properties, especially the really valuable sites in New York and Washington?  Who gets the seminaries?  

But the area not really thought through in the new legislation is that each allegation against a pastor or bishop will still end up having to be handled by fair process and appeals.  Each will likely be looked at in terms of the viewpoints of the annual conference and officers handling the respective cases.  And what may appear to be “egregious” to one side may appear to be reasonable and fair to the other when tested in our denominations’ court and appeal systems.  A bishop built a huge case unrelated to homosexuality against a pastor only to see it stretch out to nearly three years.  Making the laws more rigid, as the traditionalists have done, is likely to trigger stronger legal responses.  In this era when change occurs rapidly because of modern technology, three years is a very long time and the milieu can change dramatically while a case is winding slowly through the judicial system.  I cannot see the judicial system speeding up despite the efforts of the “traditionalists.”

Prior to the 2019 General Conference, I argued that millions of dollars and hours were being used to deal with an issue that pales in the face of the most recent projections by climate sciences that we have only a decade to change our carbon-based world economy or the climate will be so damaged it will lead to our extinction.   The next three years of that decade are going to be critical for humanity’s survival, to say nothing of the shift in thinking on homosexuality. 

In conclusion, I think the “traditionalists” won’t be able to handle their own overreach, the distribution for the various parties is too wide for any kind fo coherent split, and the very legalities the traditionalists have applied to their agenda against homosexuality (no longer just the practice of homosexuality) will take years.  

Of all I have read about the fears of the denomination splitting, in light of my observations, I like the following statement by the Rev. Dr. Chomingwen Pond, retired pastor, for missionary, and former professor of theology at Africa University:

“What we need now is the Gamaliel Solution (Acts 5:34-39). When Peter and the Apostles were arrested and the religious leadership wanted them killed, Gamaliel, a highly respected teacher of Israel, reminded them that they had faced similar situations at least twice before, and that when the leader was killed, their followers melted away. So in this case be careful. If it is of human origin, it will disappear of its own accord; if it is of God, it will endure--and you may find you are fighting God!”

The Mueller Report

A careful reading of the Mueller Report makes it clear that a Justice Department rule that the President may not be indicted for crime while in office was the major factor in why Mueller could not indict President Trump.

As a solid "rule of law" guy, that left Mueller with the problem of listing all the things he has found so far against the President so that Congress and the American people could look at the list and decide whether or not the President was a criminal.

Ordinarily, Special Counsels take several years to do an investigation.  The Watergate case was not finished until two years after President Nixon resigned. In this case, it appears that when Attorney General Barr took over, the investigation was halted before Mueller could finish.  There are many unanswered questions because so many of the witnesses lied or had destroyed evidence.  

Proving someone has lied takes a long time.  With the Mueller probe shut down, it is likely that there are some things we will never know.

All that aside, there are some things we do know.  So many details in the Mueller report should leave everyone, not just the Democrats, unsettled. The Mueller Report opens with the stark statement that Russia interfered with and influenced the 2016 election.  And so far, while every American (and major international) agency related to intelligence gathering has said the same thing, the President has done nothing about it it.  He believes Russian President Vladimir Putin who has denied Russian interference.  And there is no serious effort by the Trump administration to do anything about it.  What is worse, every major intelligence officer with expertise in the Russian interference in the FBI has been fired or taken off the case.

Russia used their computers to "invade" America and Europe, stirring up old prejudices, stealing information, manipulating voter registrations, and spreading misinformation.  Who benefitted?  The Republicans did.  President Trump did.  It is no wonder they do not want to have Mueller continue his probe into the Russian influence.  

Without firing shot, Russia has gotten NATO to be weaker, the international climate accord disrupted, American allies facing tariff wars that weaken both American and their economies, and have threatened the dissolving of partnerships and alliances that have kept peace in the western world for seventy five years.  

And they have left America so divided that we may never recover, at least not in our life time.  And the Republicans will blame, not the Russians, but the Democrats.  And the Democrats cannot straighten things out on their own.  Even if the 2020 election is overwhelmingly won by the Democrats, there will still be Republicans who will never believe the Russians did it.  Never.  

So sad.  So very sad. 

Neil DeGrasse Tyson Interviews Stephen Colbert

FOR GC 2019 RE: THE WAY FORWARD

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.

Merry Christmas. To celebrate so far, when I got up, I turned on the Christmas tree lights, and ate the last of the fruit cake. I then opened the shades onto a sun-filled yard which will be 75 degrees warm by mid-afternoon. I saw three large birds, a Great Blue Heron, a Snowy Egret, and an Anhinga. Yes we have "snow flowers" (Large Flower Pusley, a new alien species of ground cover) but I've been able to restrict them to one small patch in the back yard.

No, Virginia, we definitely are not in Wisconsin! But we are doing well. looking forward to being with friends later today and then having family later this week when we will celebrate the holiday together.

How blessed we are to be able to enjoy life, both where we are and with whom we are friends and family. And fellow apostles.

May your holidays bring you the sense of God being with us.

Disgust Phenomenon and Homosexuality

DISGUSTING! The difference between liberals and conservatives is the degree of disgust they feel about many things.

That is simplifying the differences and does not cover the complexity of how people take their political stances. But research* is showing that the "disgust" reaction is a built-in self-defense mechanism. Those who are different, have a different appearance, or have some other physical traits that are unfamiliar and not proven to be safe tap that self-defense mechanism in our psyches.

"Disgust" is a close cousin of fear. And as people learn from experience that something is not worth being afraid of, experience with things that appear to us to be disgusting like leprosy or physical deformities on people, helps us discover that our first impression of "disgust" diminishes the more we are with them.

"Disgust" is as potent as fear is when we decide to feed it with excuses, rationalizations, false theories . . . and religious beliefs. I remember when I finally realized that my feeling of distaste about homosexuality was unfounded. I didn't have to be homosexual and deal with the behaviors I imagined they had. Then I discovered people who were homosexual found my heterosexual impulses were distasteful to them. That was a surprise!

I have always believed that the ""Yuck Factor" was an important part of why so many people believe homosexuality is wrong. What this science about disgust is saying is that it is not just a matter of taste but a full-fledged defense mechanism which keeps us separate from something strange that we are afraid could cause us harm. It is not something that is easily overcome with rational discussion, especially when those feelings are buttressed by Scripture and church leaders who speak out against homosexuality as if they were speaking on behalf of God.

There's an irony there in that God is described as both male and female in Genesis!

The way I was able to continue my journey toward overcoming the "disgust" my body provided as a shield was to have a couple years to know a political science professor, a janitor who had severe cerebral palsy, and a fantastic singer, all of whom were gay and I would not have known it if they had not told me. I attended a Metropolitan Church service attended by many people, some gay, mostly parents and siblings of gay people because they were made to feel unwelcome in mainline churches. The pain I felt there among those folks really hammered home just how much our "disgust" was both misplaced and unreasonable.

I know this bit of information that the natural "disgust" response to the unfamiliar is something like fear that can (and should) be overcome will not be enough to change anyone's mind about the seriousness of the split within our denomination over homosexuality. But maybe it will help us all move a little further along in our Christian journey.

*I discovered the research in a report on NPR today which I cannot further document. I've been around social sciences since college over 60 years ago and the report sounded valid. And it adds a new layer to the research noted when one Googles the phrase "disgust research."