Liberal United Methodists Demand “Autonomy” – But With Conservatives Paying their Bills

United Methodist Church leaders in the denomination’s radicalized Pacific-Northwest Annual Conference have once again made a show of flaunting their disregard for biblical teaching on sexual self-control as well as the connectional covenant that supposedly “unites” them with other Methodists.

The Pacific-Northwest Conference is rather small, and under its theologically liberal leadership has been among the fastest-dying in the denomination. In the last reported year, it lost a whopping 5.3 percent of its membership. It includes some faithful, evangelical congregations and clergy, but they are a marginalized minority.

Revs. Cheryl Fear and Gordon Hutchins were let off with no more than a token slap on the wrist after each officiated at same-sex unions, in open violation of the UMC Book of Discipline’s explicit prohibitions on such sin-encouragement by our clergy.

After formal complaints were filed, Bishop Grant Hagiya appointed as “counsel for the church” (essentially the prosecuting attorney within the UMC legal system) the Rev. David Orendorff.  Orendorff is a lefty clergyman among those declaring “I stand with Bishop Talbert,” in support of the cantankerously radical retired bishop’s urging UMC clergy to join him in defying and undermining our denomination’s biblical policies on homosexuality.

Could the rest of the church trust such an openly biased bishop and church counsel to have the integrity to meaningfully uphold the biblical covenant that holds the UMC together, and to resist the temptation to abuse their positions to undermine the effectiveness of this covenant?

The answer came last week when Orendorff announced that he had negotiated with Fear and Hutchins for them each to receive “a 24-hour suspension without pay” in order to avoid a church trial (with potential for greater penalties) and Bishop Hagiya publicly applauded this settlement.

Unsurprisingly, the two faithful pastors in the conference who filed the charges were not happy with this decision, from which they were cut out. Rev. David Parker noted that the settlement had “no meat to deter others from following the same course of action,” adding, “One can only believe, that is exactly the point of the decision.” Rev. Colleen Sheahan noted that in filing the complaints, the main request of herself and Rev. Parker was that Fear and Hutchins would pledge to not do any more such same-sex rites in the future, a pledge they have refused to make.

It is worth noting that such undermining of the Discipline on sexual morality is not terribly new for this region. In 1993, the Board of Ordained Ministry of the Oregon-Idaho Conference (an annual conference now grouped with the Pacific-Northwest Conference as part of Bishop Hagiya’s Greater Northwest Episcopal Area) declared that Jeanne Knepper was indeed “a self-avowed, practicing homosexual” whose ordination was indeed prohibited by the Discipline, but that they nevertheless defiantly affirmed her continuing in ministry. A 2012 newspaper article noted that she was retiring that year as a UMC minister in good standing who was open about partnered lesbianism and enjoyed the support of her bishop at the time, Bob Hoshibata (who has since been reassigned to the Desert-Southwest Conference). At the 2001 Pacific-Northwest Annual Conference session, the Rev. Mark Williams publicly declared that he was “a practicing gay man.” But when an investigative committee the next year asked him a question to confirm that he was indeed homosexually active, Williams rather unbravely refused to answer, which the committee used as an excuse to claim that it did not have enough evidence to charge him. In 2001, the Rev. Karen Dammann disclosed her active lesbianism to the Pacific-Northwest bishop at the time, but did not face a church trial until 2004, when the activist jurors refused to convict her. The bishop-appointed counsel for the church in that case similarly made clear his biases by declaring after the acquittal, “I’m glad I lost.”

What does this penalty actually mean for Fear and Hutchins?

I called the Pacific-Northwest Conference office and learned that this penalty is expected to mean that the congregations will each withhold one work day’s worth of salary from their respective pastors. But the details of how each congregation will actually implement this are not clear. According to the latest Pacific-Northwest Annual Conference Journal readily publicly available, in 2011, Fear’s congregation paid $36,194 in base pastoral compensation (before housing and other benefits) while Hutchins’s paid 24,981 in pastoral base compensation. With 250 work days per year, and if there has been a salary freeze at both congregations since 2011, that would mean a net salary reduction – effectively a fine – of $144.78 for Fear and $99.92 for Hutchins. And that is ONLY if Bishop Hagiya and the congregations Fear and Hutchins lead can all be trusted to be serious about carrying out this slap-on-the-wrist penalty.

Which is a pretty big “if.”

So once again, church officials in the UMC’s increasingly radicalized Western Jurisdiction did what they have long done: made a show of paying lip service to the letter of church law, while avoiding any effective upholding of it. The renegade clergy convicted of willfully breaking our denomination’s biblical marriage policies got off with paying no significant cost (if any), being given no expectation for repentance, and having little to no incentive to not go and do the same thing again tomorrow.

Perhaps the most revealing comment of this episode came from the Rev. Monica Corsaro, a former Planned Parenthood chaplain who served as advocate for Fear and Hutchins. In an interview with the United Methodist News Service, she celebrated how this case raised the question of “What kind of autonomy do annual conferences have?”

Something that is extremely difficult for those outside of the denomination to understand is: when radicalized bishops and their followers in the Western Jurisdiction openly reject much of the UMC’s core doctrine, refuse to honor their covenantal commitments they chose to make to other United Methodists, and demand governing “autonomy” from the rest of the denomination, why do they insist on staying within the very same UMC from which they wish to be “autonomous”?

I certainly am in no position to speak for others. But it would be rather naïve to ignore some very important financial realities.

As approved, without plenary debate, by the 2012 General Conference, the Western Jurisdiction bishops enjoy lavish six-figure salaries which put them in the top one-tenth of one percent of the richest people in the world – before even factoring in their generous housing and other benefits.

And yet, as I have documented earlier, not only does the current structure of the Council of Bishops gives the radicalized Western Jurisdiction far more bishops, and consequent clout in denomination-wide affairs, than the region’s meager numbers warrant, but the Western Jurisdiction bishop’s salaries are subsidized by apportioned offering-plate dollars from the rest of the United States. This problem is made worse by the Western Jurisdiction’s pattern of not even paying its generously lowered assigned fair share of apportionments for the bishop-supporting Episcopal Fund. Thus, whatever their motives, the facts are that by staying within the UMC the Western Jurisdiction bishops are protecting the pipeline for their own lavish salaries.

But the more the Western Jurisdiction bishops and the leaders they appoint continue to betray the trust of the rest of the denomination, the more we can expect the rest of the church to ask why they should have to keep paying them to do so.

Of course, defenders of such antics are quick to point out that the Book of Discipline has no mandatory-minimum penalties for clergy convicted of willfully violating church policies.

Some relevant recent history is worth reviewing. At the last General Conference, UMAction and other UMC renewal groups strongly supported a petition that would have written into the Discipline clear mandatory-minimum penalties for blessing same sex unions. Specifically, this reform would have required clergy who bless same-sex unions to face a minimum penalty of a one-year suspension plus only being reinstated after committing to not repeat their offense, and with all repeat offenders being defrocked.

There was supposed to have been a debate on this motion. But when unauthorized LGBT activists occupied the floor and refused to let business resume until the global church submitted to their dictates, our bishops in their collective wisdom decided that the best leadership they had to offer was to meekly submit to these bullying demands by, among other things, preventing delegates from even considering this proposal, which very well may have passed. Thus, the lack of mandatory-minimums in our Discipline has shaky legitimacy, given how the current state of church law is based on a flagrant upending of proper procedure.

Meanwhile, since 2011, a number of radical-dominated United Methodist annual conferences, including the Pacific-Northwest Conference, have adopted resolutions urging that clergy who violate our denomination’s biblical policies on sexual morality be let off with no greater penalty than a meaningless “24-hour suspension.” While the Judicial Council has deemed such resolutions non-binding, they reflect the attitudes of the dominant faction in a few radicalized annual conferences like Pacific Northwest.

This latest episode further highlights the importance of the 2016 General Conference adopting minimal standards to require integrity in how the United Methodist Church upholds biblical standards for sexual self-control. And of cutting off the funding stream that drains money away from the ministries of United Methodist congregations around the country to underwrite the Western Jurisdiction’s “autonomy.”