The parallels in last week’s United Methodist Church General Conference and the 2016 United States presidential election are too many to ignore.
Both had only one preconceived outcome, an outcome ordained by the media, the scholarly and the powerful, and an outcome that was expected to push the world into a shiny, secular, progressive future.
But a funny thing happened on the way to that future. It’s not the future the people who are governed by the outcome, who are schooled in history and tradition, believed they were ordained to have. And they made their voices known with their votes.
In 2016, it was to express displeasure in the previous eight years of a president who ruled by executive fiat and to show a lack of confidence in a potential leader they didn’t trust, couldn’t believe and didn’t like. Yet Hillary Clinton, the world was told, couldn’t lose, but did.
On Tuesday, it was in a specially called conference to discuss the issue of same-sex marriage and LGBT clergy in the country’s largest mainline Protestant denomination. The proffered solution, which would have kept congregations with divergent sexual beliefs under the same Methodist banner, was said to be the salve that soothed all hurts and was claimed to be favored by more than 60 percent of conference delegates. Yet, the One Church Plan not only didn’t survive but was replaced by a Traditional plan that is said to keep the denomination’s stance on same-sex marriage and LGBT clergy the same as it is today – forbidding them – and strengthen penalties on those who violate it.
The United Methodist Church learned last week, as did the entire U.S. electorate in 2016, that the country leans center-right in it politics and its religion. Both also learned that an outcome members and voters are told they should want, and what the media pushes, may not be what the members and voters want or believe is the right solution for them.
Sadly, the immediate future for the denomination is likely to be the same as it has been for the presidency of Donald Trump.
Trump, who despite his upset win brought plenty of foibles to the office, has been successful in many areas as a chief executive. He has cut taxes for the majority of taxpayers, sliced business-crippling regulations, unleashed the military to sweep away Islamic State terrorist forces in the Middle East and appointed conservative Supreme Court justices.
Yet, because of his upset win over the pick of the media and the elites, he has been dogged from before his inauguration with unfair attacks, biased reporting and scurrilous innuendo.
The church, because its delegates did not choose the favored way forward, already has been called intolerant, discriminatory, a tool of the devil and many things not printable in a family newspaper. Its critics, because it chose to adhere to behavior acceptable for millennia, because it chose to cling to Scripture as its guide, and because it chose not to honor what it believes is secular behavior, are not about to let up, either.
Talk is already rife about reversing the decision at next year’s quadrennial General Conference, about striking down the voted-in plan through church “courts” and about generally making the denomination miserable through protests, media pressure and lack of participation in churches or in paying pledged tithes.
That is one way for members to handle what occurred at the special General Conference.
Another way is to continue to be the church, to continue to be widely available to those who seek a deeper spiritual relationship (Methodist congregations once were in every county in the country), to continue to do mission work in countries that other denominations may not reach (some 43 percent of delegates to the special conference were from abroad, where the church is quickly growing), and to continue to live out both an evangelical gospel of repentance and personal relationship with God and a social gospel that encompasses numerous social justice issues.
No matter what outcome resulted from last week’s gathering in St. Louis, the church was going to lose members – either those who couldn’t stomach eschewing Scripture for secular beliefs if the church adopted the One Church Plan or those who favor same-sex marriages and LGBT clergy and can’t live with the Traditional Plan.
Those who remain now have an opportunity to live out the gospel with their lives. We hope they choose wisely.