The head bishop of the United Methodist Church in New York on Monday committed to ending church trials in his region for ministers who perform same sex-marriages, essentially freeing them to conduct a ceremony still prohibited under his denomination’s laws.
As the first sitting United Methodist bishop to publicly make such a pledge, Bishop Martin D. McLee instantly became a leading figure in a decades-old movement within the United Methodist Church, the country’s second-largest Protestant denomination, to extend equal recognition and rights to gay and lesbian members. Though Bishop McLee said that he hoped his approach would heal the church’s deep divisions over homosexuality, more conservative Methodists warned that his actions would push the denomination closer to an irrevocable split.
It’s disingenuous to claim it will heal anything. Or perhaps he meant heel.
Well, I agree that it’s absurd, BlueOnatario, and it it’s certainly misleading, but it may not be intentionally disingenuous. It’s at least possible that the NY UMC bishop is so deluded and self-deceived that he sincerely believes the propoganda. I’ve come across plenty of well-intentioned, do-gooder activist types among the clergy of many denominations who are so confused by the upside down values of absolute relativistm that they can no longer tell the difference between the truth and a lie in many realms.
Unfortunately, I’m not at all surprised at the miserable outcome, which was fairly predictable. Rather like the infamous acquittal of heretical TEC bishop Walter Righter back in the mid 1990’s, oldline churches that pride themselves on being “mainstream” (and certainly not “narrow” and “fundamentalist”) have enormous difficulty being truly counter-cultural, for that would mean going upstream against the powerful antinomian and permissive cultural currents of our time, and by definition, they arae committed to going with the flow, not against it, in order to stay in the cultural mainstream. Even if that means departing from the Christian mainstream.
David Handy+
[blockquote]Instead, Bishop McLee […] agreed to drop all charges against Dr. Ogletree; in exchange, he asked only that Dr. Ogletree participate in a dialogue about the church and its stance on matters of sexuality. [b]Promoting dialogue, the bishop said, could be a model for other United Methodist bishops to follow.[/b][/blockquote]
I’m thinking McLee is getting his talking points from somewhere.
And thanks for the reply, Fr. David. It may be delusion, but I would not underestimate McLee’s understanding. As we’ve seen before, his goal is not to have dialogue, but to shut down one side of the conversation. One hopes the reaction will be a renewed effort to stop this nonsense. But, to whom will anyone in the UMC now appeal? As in other places, bishops will probably take care of each other first, for “what is truth?,” and the fight will be fought with one side having one hand tied behind their backs because they will feel it’s the Christian thing to do.
The sharks smell blood in the UMC. If I were a conspiratorial type, I’d believe that people who have sharpened their skills manipulating other church’s bureaucracies have cracked open the playbook and are looking for some big plays to end this game and that this is one of them.