The Gracious Gift of Grief

Photo by Pedro Lima on Unsplash

Since the recent announcement of the postponement of United Methodism’s General Conference (GC) until 2024, the Methodist world has been a swirling maelstrom of responses. The blogosphere and Twitter have lit up with enough reactive energy to power a visible-from-space light show. For some, emotions were already high and the loss of even a fragile hope for a “gracious exit plan” simply added tinder to a blaze that had been smoldering for a long time. For others, this regrettable turn of events was like a bomb dropped into the middle of a relatively calm and cautiously optimistic waiting room, prompting a mad scramble to find a safe periphery from which to assess the damage. Hearts are pounding, blood pressures are elevated, stomachs (and maybe fists) are clenched, heads are aching, and sleepless nights are the new and unwelcome norm.

I doubt if there is any way around this cyclone of reactions; for traditionalist Methodists, our path to a “next Methodism” lies through this experience. The key is how we choose to travel on this road of disappointment, disillusion, and uncertainty. I am more and more convinced that embracing genuine grief as the generous and gracious gift of God during this journey between “what could have been” and “what will be” is an essential element for a successful and healthy trajectory toward a new form of Methodism. Although the postponement of GC feels like a “last straw” to many fed-up, had-enough Methodists, even the most intrepid among us are forced to contemplate that the road ahead is almost certainly going to be longer than we would choose. So our “in-between” season is just that—a season, not a moment. And in that season, I believe God is offering us the gracious gift of space to grieve. And here my interest is not so much in personal grief, which each of us will have to navigate, but in the corporate, collective, and intentional grieving of local communities of believers. There is work to be done together.

Local congregations have experienced and will experience many losses in this season and beyond; those need to be grieved fully, collectively, and purposefully. Some griefs will lead us through lament straight into the healing embrace of the Father and the comforting presence of the Spirit of Jesus. Other griefs must carry us first through the valley of repentance, as the contemplation of some losses awakens us to Spirit-fueled conviction about our failures and faithlessness to the mission of Jesus and to our Wesleyan heritage.

There is certainly much to grieve. Each local body of believers in its particular context will have losses that are peculiar to that place and people. But there are also common losses among the people called Methodists, which have been and will be felt most keenly at the local level and must be grieved and lamented and healed by the gathered people of God in each local context. 

First, we must face and grieve together the loss of the “departed”—not the saints who have gone on to glory, but the brothers and sisters who have left, are leaving, or will leave our congregations. The inescapably sad reality is that very few, if any, congregations will enter a new expression of Methodism without having experienced significant losses of membership, and those losses hurt. They hurt deeply. During the past two years, with the inflammatory trio of arguments over COVID responses, political polarization, and denominational stress, many congregations already have experienced an unhappy exodus. This trend is not likely to reverse during our transition period. People have left already because they thought the move toward disaffiliation was excruciatingly slow; others will leave because this new season doesn’t accelerate at the desired pace. Some are contemplating leaving because they simply don’t think they can bear the emotional stress of a protracted and bitter disaffiliation process. Others will leave when we get “to the other side” and they realize that a mere change in denominational affiliation has not resolved problems that are inherently rooted in deeper issues of congregational spiritual health. All of these losses of people who are dear to us, with whom we have worshiped and served, perhaps for decades, are painful, for congregations and pastors alike. We need to name these losses and grieve them openly, giving each other space and freedom to do so.

Inextricably linked to the first grief is the second—the loss of an unrecoverable past. For many Methodist congregations, their “golden age” or “glory days” are still within the living memory of many members. Not only have they lost people, they have lost the excitement of being a “happening” place and the thrilling vibe of having a voice of influence in the community. Their new leaner, smaller existence doesn’t feel like opportunity for a fresh expression of church, vibrant with potential; it feels like a dark and discouraging fog that hides the sunlight of “better days.” This is a real loss and must be grieved together. The drastic changes in the larger culture, which have contributed to this perceived diminishing of the church, must also be recognized and grieved, with the acknowledgement that these cultural forces are not going to disappear miraculously with the formation of a new denomination or disengagement from the old one. Whatever vista God opens up for the local church on the other side of disaffiliation, it almost certainly will not look like the past, however much we wish it might. We must grieve the loss of that past with arms open in gratitude for all that it meant to us; as we release it into God’s keeping, those same open arms can then receive a fresh vision of what the church is to be and do in our local context.

Third, the amount of emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and ministerial energy that has been spent on either propping up the United Methodist institution or looking for ways to reform or escape it over the past several decades has inevitably resulted in the tragic loss of opportunities for gospel-shaped mission. There are only so many resources and so much time available! Each local church needs to examine, honestly and prayerfully, the ways in which its spiritual, economic, and human resources have been tied up in institutional processes. Where these have distracted from our mission to “spread scriptural holiness” in our neighborhoods, towns, and cities and to introduce people to the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ, those lost opportunities must be named and grieved with repentance. As the Holy Spirit reveals our missed opportunities, may we weep with sorrow and contrition, and may God gather up those tears, restore us with his forgiveness, and open our eyes to the places in our local context where he is at work. May we dedicate our resources to joining him in that work!

This season in which we are making the slow and perhaps torturous journey towards a new expression of Methodism is also a time for grieving a fourth loss, one which has taken place so slowly and subtly that many congregations are not even aware they’ve experienced it. This is the loss of our distinctive Wesleyan identity, replaced in many cases by a generic evangelicalism. I had a very revealing and irony-laced conversation with an Uber driver in January as I was leaving the Next Methodism Summit in Alexandria, Virginia. This delightful young man, who was raised Catholic and has dipped his toes in a variety of spiritual waters, wanted to know what made Methodists special or unique in the collection of Protestant traditions. We had a vigorous and wide-ranging chat about scriptural holiness, entire sanctification (the “grand depositum of Methodism”), spiritual disciplines and the means of grace, and passionate care for “the least, the last, and the lost.” When he dropped me off at the airport, he said wistfully, “I wish there was a church like that where I live.” Sadly, there are several UM congregations in his town. The question presses on each Methodist community in this season—how many people in our local contexts would echo that young man’s wish, “If only there were a church like that in my town”? Where we have failed to be true to our Wesleyan heritage and distinctives, we need to grieve that loss—a deep loss to our cities, towns, and neighborhoods as well as to our own spiritual lives. Let us grieve with repentant hearts, seeking the Holy Spirit’s renewal so that our new season results in more than just a label change.

Finally, we need to grieve—honestly and boldly—the loss of security that this season of uncertainty will bring. For more than five decades, both pastors and churches have had the comfort of being part of the UMC’s “system.” However dubious that comfort has been or however poorly the system seemed to function at times, still security existed both for a local church in knowing that it would have a pastor and for pastors in knowing that a church would be available for them to serve. No one really knows what the future holds in terms of “matching” churches with pastors and vice versa, but there will almost certainly be new terrain to navigate. The loss of familiar structures and procedures is unsettling, and we’ll need to grieve together over that loss. This is one area where we’ll probably need to give each other lots of grace and space in the grieving process, as some are ready to celebrate while others are still mourning. This is also another space where our road to healing may lie through repentance, if our grief reveals that our trust has been more in “the system” than in Jesus himself or that our “matching” of pastors and churches has been fueled by pragmatism rather than saturated in prayer for discernment.

How might we do this corporate grieving of our losses in this “in between season”? One way is through the prayer and lament of the gathered people of God. Liturgy, “the work of the people,” can help us here. I hope that we will be generous with each other—as the gifted writers and worship leaders and musicians among us craft prayers and songs of lament and confession for use in their local congregations, they can share these resources through their platforms and networks so that these liturgies can be used and adapted by Methodists in other local contexts. God has graciously given us this season for grieving—may we give ourselves fully and unreservedly to that hard and beautiful work, so that we are truly ready for what is next.

Dr. Rachel Coleman lives in Elida, Ohio. She is an adjunct instructor and course writer (Biblical Studies) for Indiana Wesleyan University, Bethel University, Asbury Theological Seminary, and United Theological Seminary, and serves as a regional theological education consultant (Latin America) for One Mission Society. Rachel blogs at writepraylove660813036.wordpress.com.