Two United Methodist women from Chicago exchanged vows Friday in a park near the Fort Worth Convention Center where this week delegates at an international conference affirmed the church’s stance that the practice of homosexuality is not biblical.
With a procession of about 200 supporters, Julie Bruno and Susan Laurie walked from the convention center to General Worth Square, singing This Little Light of Mine. Their ceremony was performed by a lay person from New York, although some clergy were in the crowd and applauded. Audience members also spoke a blessing of the union.
The event symbolized some of the deepest divisions that remain unresolved at the end of the 10-day General Conference of the United Methodist Church. Nearly 1,000 delegates representing more than 11 million people gathered to address denomination concerns and social issues.
Bishop Ben Chamness of the 28-county Central Texas Conference said there was “a great spirit of holy conferencing … by people with different views.”
Of all the so-called “mainline” denominations, the UMC may have the best chance of resisting the cultural currents favoring the “gay is OK” delusion. After all, if you’re an orthodox Lutheran and unhappy with the ELCA and its capitulation to allowing “local option” with regard to ordaining gay clergy, there is always the Missouri Synod. And if you’re in the PCUSA and unhappy, there is the PCA or the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. But there is no large evangelical alternative to the United Methodist Church.
Of course, conservative Methodists could opt for one of the Holiness Movement churches (Nazarene, Wesleyan etc.), or cross racial lines and affiliate with the AME or AME Zion, but my point is that so far the Methodists have been able to avoid the kind of large scale schism that has particularly depleted the ranks of evangelicals within the Presbyterian Church.
Then again, it may only be a matter of time. All the “mainline” traditions have a very, very hard time resisting what the cultural “mainstream” does, whether you look at the acceptance of divorce and remarriage almost on demand, abortion on demand, toleration of cohabitation, and so on. So even the UMC faces an uphill battle in re-inventing itself as a genuinely counter-cultural church that can act as the salt of the earth. Time will tell.
But even if the conservatives prevail, the UMC can’t continue as “a house divided against itself.” In the end, either the liberals or the conservatives will be forced out. It’s only a question of which one leaves. In the meantime, we can rejoice at all conservative victories such as this one, however long-lasting or short-lived the results may prove to be.
David Handy+
I think the Methodists are taking a lesson from the sad Episcopalians. They see the havoc wrought by the homosexualists in our sad denomination and they draw back from the precipice.
The General Convention cut loose its foreign missionary dioceses in the 1980’s and 1990’s by establishing independent Anglican provinces in the Philippines, Mexico, and Central America. One effect was to remove these sociallly conservative voices and votes from the convention. The liberals in the UMC seem bent on the same.
Unless there is separation from the homosexualists and their supporters, there will never be peace in the UMC. ‘Come apart from them and be thou separate.’ ‘Do not intermarry with them.’ ‘Be holy as I am holy’ Nowhere does the Lord advise His people or His church to be yoked with unrepentant sinners, nor to allow them influence or leadership among or over His people. As long as there is a ‘democratic’ rather than a ‘theocratic’ governance, there will be problems and continual compromise with the opponents of the Word of God.
The UMC ‘victory’ still contains a compromise of Scripture as does Lambeth res. 1.10
Anyone who can say with a straight face, “A great spirit of holy conferencing,” needs his head whacked. This is appalling English! The left butchers the language, I suspect, because their ears have never been trained to hear with precision, and this because they want a language that is slippery, vague, bathetic because the quaint, antique approach would make clear language in scripture clear language in scripture. And they cannot abide that risk. Larry
Well, when we hit the next General Conference in 2012, the last stall will be over, and the Africans will be fully represented in UMC deliberations. This was the last flurry of agitation by the liberal lobby, and they know it. The Africans are not down with the whole LGTBQXYZ agenda, and making it a civil rights struggle doesn’t even cause them to bat an eyelash.
There will be flailings, but the battle for the United Methodist Church is largely over. Homo-normative standards aren’t on the books, and they’re not gonna be. We’ll spend the next four years feebly disputing exactly what hetero-normative means as a bad thing, and then — hey, i may want to go in 2012, just to watch . . . and pray.
I’m very thankful to see ya’ll using the term “homosexualist”, since it’s important to focus on the ideology and not the person who experiences same-sex attractions. In fact, we see some heterosexually inclined persons embracing the homosexualist orthodoxy, and some homosexually inclined persons reject it.
“…the deepest divisions that remain unresolved ..”
Yes, praise God, they have been resolved! Not every inclination of Man is subject to study and discussion. The five generations preceding my own prove that the family is fixed and has infinite value. The three generations after my parents prove that now divisions DO exist. A damnable situation.
Don
No doubt those clergy onlookers applauding have heard the gozpel of the NEW THANG (c) as ‘preached’ by Presiding Bishop Kate Schori at
St Thomas, Dallas, TX Garden Party:
” Another gay audience member who said he met his partner of 10 years at St. Thomas asked when the couple will be able to walk down the aisle together and have their relationship blessed by the church.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen this year,†Jefferts Schori said, adding that the national church’s General Convention undoubtedly will revisit the issue when it meets again in 2009. “I think it certainly will happen in our lifetimes.â€
“I certainly hope that we can expand our awareness enough to see that God is blessing [same-sex unions], and that the church needs to recognize that,†Jefferts Schori added. “…our job as Christians is to look around and see the glory of God wherever it is.â€
So watch UMC, there’s always tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow…….
An interesting take on this over at GetReligion. A review showed that a third (more or less) of the Star-Telegram’s articles on the conference concerned same-sex issues. I would like to see how this compares to the Startlegram’s coverage of the Jehovah Witness and Unitarian-Universalist meetings held here in the past few years.