In local United Methodist news, a group of clergy colleagues from the North Georgia Conference have drafted a “Unity Covenant,” which asks North Georgia United Methodists to affirm their opposition to schism in the United Methodist Church. Its drafters are inviting both clergy and laypeople to sign it. One colleague reached out to me personally today: would I please consider signing it?
I did consider it, but I won’t sign it.
The statement includes the following:
Though there are some issues about which we profoundly disagree, we are united in our opposition to schism in the United Methodist Church.
I’m not opposed to schism if the alternative is anything like the status quo: clergy breaking their ordination vows and bishops refusing to discipline them. For me to affirm, as this statement does, that the status quo isn’t “entirely sufficient” would be tragic understatement.
We have, at times, failed to keep true to our covenant as United Methodists, preferring the easy work of disruption and covenant-breaking to the difficult work of discipline.
Well, yes…
Any statement I would sign, however, would also need to say something like this: “While clergy may work within the system to change our church’s doctrine on human sexuality, we deplore any effort to subvert our Book of Discipline or break the promises we made to God and one another at ordination.”
Likewise, we have, at times, failed to recognize the sacred worth of each of God’s children.
Really? How so? If nearly two millennia of biblical interpretation and Christian reflection on the subject of human sexuality is correct that homosexual practice is spiritually harmful—indeed, a grave sin—then surely it would be unloving not to say so. Love can’t be mere acceptance. It’s because we recognize the sacred worth of each of God’s children, and God’s desire to save them from sin, that we urgently warn all sinners to “flee from the wrath to come.”
Sentences such as this one imply a false choice between love, on the one hand, and calling sinners to repentance, on the other. They are, in fact, one and the same.
Regardless, any statement I would endorse would have to acknowledge that people of good will on my side of argument also love LGBT people when they warn that homosexual practice per se is sinful. You may argue that we’re mistaken all you want; but that doesn’t make us homophobes.
Here’s one example of this problem. A recent Facebook thread about schism included a fellow United Methodist pastor posting the following:
[T]his endless denigration of LGBT people must end. It simply MUST end. How do we hold ourselves in one body when some of us INSIST on demeaning and excluding others of us. Should they not be told to end their destructive behavior toward other “family members.” It’s an abusive family. Shouldn’t the abusers be held to account?
So to be clear, just by virtue of holding to our church’s traditional view of sexuality, people like me are “denigrating,” “demeaning,” “excluding,” and “abusing.” We are engaging in “destructive behavior.”
In my fellow pastor’s defense, at least she believes, along with me, that the question of homosexual practice cannot be a matter of theological indifference—that the stakes are too high. So neither of us will sign the covenant. At least we have that in common!
But I’m not so different from my fellow pastor. My heart grows hard from arguing sometimes, and I easily forget that fellow clergy who disagree with me on this issue are also beloved brothers and sisters in Christ.