A Future of Grace and Truth: Thoughts on Separation in the UMC

Photo by mk. s on Unsplash

The following is an abbreviated form of an address given to Wesley Memorial Church, a United Methodist congregation, on Sunday November 13th, 2022. My prayer is that it will help your local congregation discern its future. 

It was the Annual Conference 2016 at Lake Junaluska (NC). I was set to be ordained that weekend as a full-connection deacon and it was the opening business session in Stuart Auditorium. On one side of the auditorium sat the clergy, and on the other sat the laity delegates. A petition was put forth to overturn the language of the Book of Discipline regarding human sexuality. If passed, it would be sent to the General Conference as the official position of our Western NC Annual Conference.

There were so many people present that we had to stand in order to vote. 85% of the clergy stood in favor of overturning the language. I looked across the auditorium, and only 15% of the laity were standing. The results of retaining the language were the converse: 15% of clergy, 85% of laity.

Then and there I realized, this isn’t going to end well. The divide of pew and pulpit, theologically, ideologically, was vast. This was six years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any better. 

On that day I realized that the UMC as a body has irreconcilable differences. Clergy and laity largely have been unequally yoked, and the ties that have bound us are fraying as we pull in different directions. 

Considering this ongoing tension, vast numbers of lay people have been “disaffiliating” for quite some time. 

Divorce builds slowly over a long time, eventually until a relationship breaks. To those just coming into the conversation it can feel like drinking from a firehose and that it seemed to happen overnight. But to those of us in the know, we have seen this divorce coming for quite some time.

The UMC laity I have known over my entire life and especially during the past twenty years of ministry are good, Southern, Christian, don’t-rock-the-boat kind of people, certainly not the type of people who would come against their pastor. Most sit quietly by and trust, or if they don’t like things, they vote with their feet. But over the past few years I have noticed a change. Many lay people are doing more than voting with their feet. They are reading, praying, and asking important questions. Many, many lay people I speak with do not want to leave the UMC but feel that the UMC has left them.  

Is this divide of pew and pulpit sustainable? If one group, composed mostly of laity and a few pastors, is simply upholding what we have always believed about marriage and sexuality, and the remaining portion seeks to change it or deviates from it, then who has really done the leaving?

Broken Covenants

On a large scale, the UMC has not had a worldwide General Conference since 2016. General Conference is the official voice of the UMC, composed of delegates from around the world. The 2016 General Conference was so contentious that they tabled discussion over human sexuality until 2019. It was supposed to have led to a season of “listening” for three years, to be followed by a specially called 2019 General Conference to decide once and for all regarding human sexuality. It was during this season that the now defunct “Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation” emerged.

The two prevailing options in 2019 were the One Church Plan, a compromise that would allow ministry and theology to be contextual to a geographic area, and the Traditional Plan, emphasizing what the UMC has always taught, but more punitive, with more stipulations to hold bishops accountable, more church trials, etc. Quite honestly, it was a plan that left many conservatives uncomfortable in that it seemed a bit too heavy-handed.

Regardless, at the 2019 General Conference, the Traditional Plan passed 53%-47%. The official voice of the UMC spoke. Did that solve this divide of pew and pulpit?

The decisions of that 2019 General Conference were resisted by large segments of our ecclesial leadership. My Western NC conference, clergy and lay delegates, actually rejected the decision of the 2019 General Conference with the approval of a petition by a significant margin that included this statement: “We reject the Traditional Plan approved at General Conference 2019 as inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ and will resist its implementation.”

Our Western North Carolina Conference rejected the decision of the official voice of the UMC (General Conference) and has stated that it will resist its implementation. This is now its official stance.

When both “sides” are saying that the other is sinning, then who can say who’s right? By what standard of authority do we define what sin is? The covenants that have bound the UMC are broken. Many are doing what is right in their own eyes. This is not sustainable.The UMC has lost its ability to abide by covenantal decisions. We cannot move forward as a people if we can’t even agree on the destination. 

Deconstructed to Death

Something I hear frequently is, “There is nothing to worry about. The overall doctrines of the UMC will not change and are almost impossible to change.” True, on paper the doctrine in the UMC is extremely difficult to change. It requires a supermajority at General Conference and ratification by the annual conferences. 

In practice, however, it is easy to ignore, resist, and reject our doctrinal standards, and this happens with some frequency. The issues surrounding human sexuality are but the tip of the iceberg. For example: I could quote bishops and other elders who deny the divinity of Christ, the exclusivity of Christ for salvation, and the virgin birth, who write off whole sections of the Bible as culturally irrelevant, and who desire to make truth subjective and contextual. This is well-trodden ground, however, and we need not rehearse the incidents. When we ignore, reject, or resist core Christian doctrines—and I would include Christian marriage in that category—we supplant those doctrines with opinion, and we deconstruct the faith. When one domino falls, so do many others over time. This is readily evident in the recent history of other Protestant denominations. 

The unity of the United Methodist Church that you have long enjoyed was built upon a foundation of doctrine that is biblical, traditional, scriptural, evangelical, and orthodox, all full of grace and truth. 

Yet the rampant deconstructionism of that foundation has led us to the situation we are in now. It has started at the level of theological education and has spread to pulpits around the country. 

You cannot chip away at your foundation and have a sturdy house. You cannot cut out your legs and expect to stand. Like G.K. Chesterton said, “Before you tear down a fence, you must ask why the fence was put up to begin with.” 

On Christian Marriage

Let’s just take one of the many dysfunctional issues we are facing, and perhaps the most significant regarding theological deconstruction: redefining Christian marriage. If it isn’t redefined at General Conference 2024 it will definitely happen by 2028. If your church stays United Methodist, you will have to navigate those waters for the remainder of your existence as a local church.

Standards are for our good, for our blessing. There is safety within their guardrails. 

This discussion of Christian marriage needs qualifiers, particularly to make the distinction between secular and Christian marriage. 

With regard to Christian marriage, this is an in-house issue, a conversation that sounds ludicrous to the outside world. Pursuing holiness, abstaining from sin, holding every thought captive to Christ—all of this and more sounds laughable to the nonbeliever, just as it did to me before I became a disciple of Christ.

Many today see marriage as a homogenous entitlement, available to all at any time, to which I would say yes, in a secular sense. It is the official law of the land in the United States. You can marry someone of the opposite sex or the same sex. People have free will and legal authority to do as they choose. 

When you follow Jesus, under His lordship and leadership, the expectations change—regardless of who you are—not as some hateful rule, but for our good. We obey Him because we want to and because He is worth it. 

Christian marriage as prescribed in Genesis and affirmed and quoted by Jesus in Matthew 19—the definition of Christian marriage as one man and one woman—is God’s idea. I don’t get to change that.

Some may say, “We have divorced persons who remarry. How is that any different?” This is called an argument from a negative. That statement acknowledges that divorce is a sin. Divorce is incredibly painful. We lament divorce. I lament how divorced persons are treated and we need to do better, but we do not write liturgies blessing and celebrating divorce. We mourn with those who go through it. We do not hold up divorce as a positive good, but as a sometimes-necessary evil. 

For many, a desire to stay United Methodist is understandably a fear of the future, a fear of the unknown, a fear that if you take a historic Christian stance on something, people somehow won’t feel welcome. Holding to a traditional view of Christian marriage, for example, a stance the UMC has literally alway held, does not and should not mean that we don’t welcome people. 

Some seem to think that compromising holiness ensures church growth. That’s false. Embracing and raising up those who are sexually faithful and obedient, as witnesses to our culture, will attract the world. Without holiness, Jesus Christ can’t be seen in us by the world; and without love, the world will resist the truth of this holiness. Fear of offense is not a tenable ministry footing. The Church should speak lovingly and prophetically to culture, not capitulate to it. If salt loses its flavor, what good is it? 

Before people have joined the church lately, many of them ask me, “What does your church believe about marriage?” and I always answer, “We believe what the UMC has always believed.”

This church has always held a traditional UMC position. Is this a place of hate? Walk around my church on a Sunday morning and show me. And the notion that a disaffiliation vote will cause us to take some sort of “hard right” turn is simply untrue. There is no bogeyman around the corner. 

The act of disaffiliation will ensure that you will continue to walk in the theology and doctrine you have always had. This will not be the case in the post-separation UMC. 

Temper with Reality

I think one thing that is helpful is to make sure we are tempering our opinions with reality. If we do not do this, our opinions can become insular and detached from reality. I’ve done this before, too: we can get stuck in our own echo chambers. We build strawmen in our minds and only see and hear the opinion that props up our position. The people with whom you disagree are not bad people. They are people many of us have known for decades.

But we do need to temper our opinions with reality. I recently had a conversation with someone in the church who was angry, scared, and anxious about what is occurring in the UMC. I appreciated the candor and openness. Here’s what I genuinely asked her and I will also ask you: What is your expectation for this church? What is it that you want to see?

She replied, “This church should be a place where people are loved, included, people from neighborhoods coming in.” Great! I’m on board with that. We all are. That’s actually happening right now, so how is that different than right now? How is that different from your entire life in this church?

Our future can be one of grace and truth.

John 1:14 says, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” John is writing from his own experience of knowing Jesus personally. Jesus is not half grace and half truth to John, but full of both—equally both, all the time, forever. 

One of the beautiful strengths of our UMC connection, something I have long admired and respected, has been that the UMC has tried and attempted to hold grace and truth in tension. Now it seems people just want to paint the other as either all grace or all truth, either a lover or a hater. We have descended into a place of false stereotypes, largely built on our political affiliations. It is easy to hold a position based on your political beliefs, but that doesn’t take faith. 

The Church at its best represents this third way, choosing neither grace nor truth separately but simultaneously. This way of faith is closer to the heart and nature of God and exactly how we see Jesus ministering to sinners. 

Holding grace and truth together, staying deeply rooted yet flexible, is not easy. It is easier to choose one or the other, but to do so is to miss the heart of Jesus. If we will have any shared future together, it will be in that way, His way. Separation can be healing, even redemptive, as we bless the other to go in the way of their own conscience.

Clark Chilton is Associate Pastor at Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church in High Point, NC.