Looking Backwards
One of the things I strongly disliked about The United Methodist Church was the wrangling about taking the right position on every single social and political issue. I guess Methodists tried to corner the market on this phenomenon by coining a “Social Creed” in 1908, ostensibly to take a strong stand in solidarity with organized labor against deplorable working conditions. As was seen with so many well-intentioned phenomena in the UMC, what began in earnest was quickly coopted to suit the agenda of leftist activism. Every quadrennium, the Book of Resolutions was packed with new resolutions, largely matching extreme leftist political positions, often adopted at times when few were present to advocate for more grace. My Methodist Polity professor in seminary politely referred to the Book of Resolutions as “bound toilet paper.” He meant this in the sense that it was nonbinding (so its purpose was only to virtue signal) and not worth the paper it was printed on.
Even if one allows for the Book of Resolutions to be seen as somewhat of a vanity project among the cultural elite of United Methodism, the problem of the Social Principles (¶160-166) cannot be avoided. Indeed, for many within United Methodism, this, rather than the preceding section on doctrine, was the heart of the faith. The task of faith for many in that tribe was not to discern correct biblical doctrine and then to let righteous works proceed out of such belief. Rather, it was to begin with the right social stance/agenda and then wrangle the scriptures and the structure of the denomination to conform to it. Conservatives/Traditionalists were mollified by having great doctrine; they didn’t realize the doctrine was just words to the Social Gospel types. Even when conservatives managed to bend the General Conference to take right stances against abortion and for international advocacy for the persecuted church, the structure of the denomination refused to submit. Only a couple of years later, the bishops of the UMC issued an ugly statement against the victory of the right to life movement. The General Board on Church & Society still seems to have nothing to show for its explicit mandate to advocate for the persecuted church.
So there’s an AGENDA or MESSAGE undergirding the UMC. This was also evidenced in a conversation I had with Rev. Robert Barnes, who filed charges against Karen Oliveto (a lesbian recognized as a bishop in the UMC despite a Judicial Council ruling saying she was not a viable candidate for the role) for preaching against the unique divinity of Christ. When a small cabal of bishops answered his complaint against Oliveto, the content of their message was explicitly that there were “other doctrinal sources,” outside of the official canon of the UMC, which confirmed the legitimacy of her message.
This was why I and many others had to get out. It didn’t matter what was on paper; there was another worldview, hostile to traditional Christianity, that was operating covertly and powerfully under the surface, which would not be assuaged by any clear messaging of the general church. They don’t listen. They don’t learn. They beat the drum of progress without consideration of the many failures their movement has had over the last century.
The issue of prohibition mobilized the Methodist Episcopal Church (the predecessor to the UMC) to take a strong social stand against alcohol. Activists throughout the denomination deplored the ill effects of alcohol, seeking its complete eradication from society. They were successful at getting federal legislation passed in the form of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. Due to the alcohol brewers and distillers no longer paying taxes, the American people nobly agreed to pay a federal income tax for the first time in history to maintain the government. However, alcohol consumption actually increased across the US. Moreover, it seemed to create crime and incarcerate minorities who refused to be cowed by the heavy-handed moralism of an increasingly invasive government. Eventually the 18th Amendment was repealed, but the taxes it instituted were maintained and increased over time, even as our nation went further into debt as it created a huge bureaucracy that continues to grow to this day (mirrored by the UMC). Essentially, the good intentions of people concerned with alcohol consumption were used to 1) hurt the poor, 2) increase the government, and 3) institute and justify higher taxation. This is how institutions co-opt the noble intentions of others. People think they are taking the right stance on something, pat themselves on the back as they adopt the right language, then go home to think about other things while the full-time employees get to decide how it is they will use these new words for their own benefit.
Roughly 40 pages of the 819-page 2016 Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church is dedicated to the Social Principles. That represents almost 5% of the book. Not too bad if this way of things mattered. The reality is that some sections in the BOD are much more influential than others. For many, the Social Principles represents closer to 90% of where their passion and emphasis is. Yet for some, the Social Principles don’t go far enough to advance peace and justice in the world. A new revision, the “Social Principles 2020,” fully conforms the stances of the church to the language and worldview of political progressivism. At this point, I’m not sure how high a priority will be placed on the promotion of these new Social Principles at next year’s UMC General Conference. It would seem that regionalization will be taking center stage.
A final word about the irritation and concern I have felt about this tendency towards public moralizing in the form of policymaking is summed up in the relatively new term: virtue signaling. The notion is that actually consistently holding principles that inform us as we go about our lives is too high a burden to bear, and that instead we need to simply put out the right signals that we are on the right side of history. An example would be people posting black squares on their profile pictures to signal solidarity with BLM a couple of years ago. To many, taking a moral stand isn’t so much about living a transformed life, but more about loudly proclaiming something. As the Methodist Episcopal Church, and The United Methodist Church continued to generate more and more social and moral statements, they submitted these to newspapers around the country for publication, with the implicit assumption that the general populace would be interested in the Methodists because of their right social stands, or that the country’s legislature would feel pressure to conform to Methodist moral edicts. The whole notion is just icky to me. It fundamentally misunderstands how Christian social witness works, confusing it instead for worldly forms of power politics and currency.
Defending Morality, Questioning Policy
A disingenuous reader might be inclined to infer from my words here that I do not feel that Christians should live differently in the world, more principled and moral lives than the licentious world around us. To the contrary, I believe that Christians should be held to strict moral standards that directly correspond, not to any Social Principles, but to the Word of God. The first generations of believers had no Social Principles, yet they were known for living more morally upright lives than even the most honorable philosophers of that day. Believers were known for going into the woods around their towns to find and adopt the discarded babies that were often left to die. They refused to attend the circuses and gladiatorial games, the plays and pornographic events of the cultures in which they were located. They showed honor to slaves, women, children, elders. The fact that they did these things much more uniformly is incomprehensible to those who think that we need to invent new policy to manufacture behavior, which is a foundational belief of progressivism. It flows from a fundamentally flawed understanding of both holy scripture and the role of institutions and the state.
What is the nature of the GMC?
The Global Methodist Church is a new covenant body for those who have been able to escape the dysfunction and progressive-dominated United Methodist Church. While it is cast by the spurned as a “far right” denomination, it is pretty hard to see it as such. To many (including me, sometimes), it seems like simply a less-progressive group, but still liberal in leanings. Many within its ranks openly promote biblical hermeneutics that sound very much like what was found in the UMC. The tent is quite broad, focusing more (so far) on mission, evangelism, and passion than on doctrine. Very few are interested in any smacking of legalism or rigor, preferring instead to focus on things more easily cast as positive. And, yes, there are social stances at the entry point of the denomination. In fact, when individuals vote within a local church to join the ranks of the GMC, they have to state explicitly that they personally approve, not just of the GMC’s doctrinal standards, but also of its “social witness.”
In the Transitional Book of Doctrines and Discipline, the guiding document of the GMC, the “Social Witness” of the GMC is found in Section 2, right after Section 1, which is Doctrine. You can find this section on Page 20 of the Transitional Book of Doctrines and Discipline, or if you would like a PDF I put together that also has all of its scriptural citations printed alongside the stances, you can view it HERE. To its credit, the Social Witness section is only two pages, representing about 2% of a document that currently stands at roughly 100 pages. It is also worth noting that every single stance (there are 14 of them) is undergirded by several scriptural references (though some of them have significant typos). Even so, I cannot help but worry that the presence of such a section presages a future push in the GMC for something resembling a Social Justice or Social Gospel sentiment. There is a very human tendency to forget the mistakes of the past, or to imagine we can play with the same fire without getting burned.
Again, I am not saying that Christians should not live counterculturally upright lives. I’m saying that true believers do not need enumerated social principles, spelled out and formalized, in order to uphold Christian virtue. Rather, these things flow naturally out of a living and active faith. While I agree certain litmus tests can be helpful for measuring an individual’s beliefs or practice against the plain gospel (indeed, this is largely what I understand the creeds to be), I guess I would rather defer to the General Rules (link is to a video series I recorded on them) and/or John Wesley’s 22 Questions for such a measuring rod. One might notice that these documents point much more explicitly toward individual behavior than social policy. We might do well to let that disparity speak loudly to us, rather that infer something lacking in the former ways.
Progressivism is built on several presuppositions that fly in the face of the gospel and of history. Notions like the belief that human society can be perfected, or that top-down coercive power can and should be used to compel righteousness, that individuals should jettison personal critical thinking out of deference to experts, that systems and groups are more powerful or important than individuals and grassroots movements, that federal centralization of power and resource is superior to localized distribution of resources. It is hard to predict at this point how roundly progressivism will be rebuked within the Global Methodist Church. It is quite possible that the nascent group will not adequately extricate the ideology from its ranks, and that the long-term nature of this ideology will corrode even a body that separated in order to stem the tide.
Yet it is also possible that a prolonged period of reflection about where we came from and what went wrong could yield a present wisdom in which we abandon many of the trends of the last 150 years that created such anomie and distraction. It is possible that the global majority of believers who come into the GMC will not be so enthralled with these cultural trappings, preferring instead a simpler, plainer understanding of the gospel way of life. If the western centers of thought and power can stand to let others lead, I am hopeful that we in the West can receive the medicine we need to be liberated from the shackles of progressivism.
As I have said recently, I am choosing to be hopeful and optimistic about the Global Methodist Church. I have chosen to join their ranks as clergy, after all. And they have chosen to receive me despite many years of stymying in the UMC. This new body cannot work if constituent members choose to be cynical or if the institution chooses to withhold power. We have to be faithful and gracious with one another if this is to work, just like in the local church. So my warnings and reticence around the ‘Social Witness’ of the GMC is intended as friendly caution, bearing in mind that I might have drawn the boundaries in the wrong places and could easily be wrong about the threat such a document carries. I hope my words are received as a proposal for a friendly amendment, and not an indictment of an already fatally-flawed body. I don’t think it is fatally flawed. I think it is already something worth fighting (righteously) to defend against the forces of darkness that are surely seeking to tear it asunder.
It is also worth saying that my faith leads me to largely agree with the 14 social stances enumerated in the GMC’s ‘Social Witness,’ though I would quibble with some of the language used. I found it helpful to read and talk though with my brother in the segment below. I hope many others find our reflections useful as they consider the GMC, whether they have already joined or are considering joining.
I have provided a number of resources in this article for reflection. Consider spending time with the various links I have put throughout the article. Also consider watching the video below, in which my brother and I go through the Social Witness section of the TBD&D. I hope these things are a blessing to you as you consider your own way of practicing your faith collaboratively with others (the church) in the world.
The discussion was somewhat lengthy, so I edited two versions of the conversation: one that has very little discussion and analysis, and another that has almost everything we said. Both are below:
I had never heard the book of resolutions referred to as bound toilet paper. When I read your comments I wonder if we are trying to add to the scriptures as Jesus rebuked the scribes and Pharisees saying, "Woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door to the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor do you allow those to enter who are trying to enter." Matthew 23:13-14 Just as schooling is less and less about reading, writing and 'rithmatic and more about teaching social and political world views, religion has become less about denying ourselves, taking up our cross and following Christ and more about indoctrination to beliefs that have little to do with Christ. Teaching biblical "Truth" as Jesus taught it, should be the primary purpose of the church.
Good comments as always Pastor. My recommendation for the GMC with regard to the inclusion of 'Social Witness' would be to stand solely on witness as given in Scripture, thus eliminating it in its entirety in the Transitional Book of Discipline (TBoD). I believe such issues; specifically those as may be tied with points 3, 4, 5, 6, and 11; should be left to the discretion of the individual congregant as each may interpret both scripture and the issues. The GMC, with the inclusion of the Social Witness in the TBoD, is placing the denomination into a political arena and asking for a pledge to the same that will not serve well to the denomination and thus, jeopardize the growth of the denomination.
I think there will be staunch, constitutional conservatives who will avoid a denomination with such proclamations, some ambiguous, that could be used maliciously to support an issue indifferent to a large number of GMC congregants. Take, for example, in item number 3 the phrase, "the well-being of the mother and the child." What does well-being mean in this statement? Does it mean a physical health issue or one of a mental issue, or am I wrong on both thoughts? The ambiguity leaves open the possibility of interpretations that are not going to satisfy the entire population of a denomination, so why include it when it is not necessary to do so? See my point?
Again, thank you for all you do to share very important information that I believe is critical to the GMC as the denomination charts a path best designed to navigate them to a future that will, prayerfully, best serve to God's desires.
May the Lord Bless You, Your Family, and Your Ministry,
Kerry