United Methodist Failures with Young People

There were many ups and downs to the recent Global Young People’s Convocation and Legislative Assembly (GYPCLA) recently sponsored by the General Board of Discipleship’s Division on Ministries with Young People (DMYP).

It was unfortunately not terribly surprising to see some young people there denounce United Methodism’s biblical, historic Christian moral boundaries on human sexuality. But probably the saddest part of GYPCLA was observing how open “the adult workers with young people” (as the UMC Discipline calls them) were in supporting this agenda among young people.

Of course, many United Methodists are doing great, faithful ministry with youth and young adults around the world, and that what I saw at GYPCLA was not particularly representative.

But what I saw points to a serious problem we have. One of the Western Jurisdiction adults rather visibly displayed a bumper sticker on her folder touting her support for the LGBTQ cause. Another Western Jurisdiction adult was rather outspoken in the floor debate in opposing church disapproval of homosexual sin. A South Central Jurisdiction (SCJ) adult worker, Kelly Carpenter (Children, Youth & Young Adult Ministry leader for the North Texas Conference), tweeted out a picture of a brief  laying-on-of-hands to prayerfully support one young lady, Miranda Luster, in her fight for “inclusive language legislation” on homosexuality. Carpenter’s tweeted picture appears to show another SCJ adult worker also participating in this show of support. I observed an adult worker apparently coaching Luster during a fast-moving part of one of the homosexuality debates. I noticed a couple of the other folk with official roles in GYPCLA also going around wearing indicators of their biases favoring the LGBTQ cause.

Seeing theologically liberal United Methodists entrusted to be adult workers with young people is hardly an anomaly. The Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN), our denomination’s main revisionist caucus, has recently gone all out to rally around Mary Ann Kaiser Barclay, a young lesbian activist who (unsuccessfully) pursued United Methodist ordination while openly cohabiting with her girlfriend, even before their lesbian “marriage.” Yet RMN has made Kaiser Barclay a poster-child for the sort of role modeling and mentoring they think teenagers need in a youth pastor. (I am still not aware of a single leader in the movement to revise our sexuality standards who has criticized RMN for its embrace of pre-marital cohabitation, even aside from the homosexuality question.) At the Relevance/Lead conference I attended last year (a sort of young-adult retreat for the Western Jurisdiction), I recall a college student indicating that her United Methodist campus ministry thought it was more important to train students in arguments to explain away the anti-homosexuality Scripture verses than to teach them that “Thomas” is not a book in the Bible. Anecdotally, I have seen UMC-affiliated campus ministries occupy a very narrow niche of rainbow-flag-flying, theologically liberal students, while interdenominational evangelical fellowships like InterVarsity tend to be much more popular, even with students from United Methodist backgrounds. The former tend to be rather small, as campus ministries (and churches) that simply echo the surrounding culture have nothing unique to offer.

For those entrusted with serving as a shepherd, teacher, and role model, such open touting of their personal revisionist agendas can have very powerful effects of molding the minds of the young people entrusted to their care. After all, youth is an inherently very formative and impressionable stage of life. And such agenda-touting by those in positions of authority can certainly intimidate those with more biblical perspectives into silence, contributing towards an oppressive culture of presumed liberal consensus within the delegation or group.

Some of the postmodern rhetoric we sometimes hear around such United Methodist youth gatherings asserts that adult leaders should not try to corral the young people to adopt the adults’ views, but rather should simply empower them to “explore their own spirituality.” Ministry workers who in any way push their LGTQ liberation views on young people are failing even that relativist test.

But if these adult workers were to simply refrain from pushing LGBTQ agendas, this would hardly be enough for faithful service.

Officially, the United Methodist Church teaches that sexual relations are only to be had within “the covenant of monogamous, heterosexual marriage” (Discipline ¶161F). Furthermore, that same section of official UMC teaching “deplore[s] all forms of the commercialization, abuse, and exploitation of sex.”

This means no extra-marital sex, no dorm-room hook-ups, no “friends with benefits,” no visits to strip clubs, and no browsing pornography. And no homosexual activity.

Even intellectually honest social liberals will concede that this standard could hardly be more strongly grounded in Scripture and church tradition. And anyone with a truly Christian anthropology, and consequent humility, would have to think twice before claiming to have greater moral insight in such matters than the entire global body of Christ across two millennia.

1 Corinthians 6 even sets sexual sin apart from all other sins, while also listing sexual sin among things that will exclude some people from the Kingdom of God. (As a side note, I have observed that theological liberals who reject the second half of this chapter also have a tendency to reject the first half’s teachings about dragging other church members to court.) And Jesus Christ was rather clear that in the end, there will indeed be “many” who are eternally excluded from His Kingdom.

Basic pastoral compassion should certainly include not wanting any of those entrusted to your spiritual care to be among those who will be eternally excluded. From a Christian standpoint, there is nothing truly compassionate about refusing to teach people about biblical standards for sexual self-control, let alone actually encouraging people to indulge in ultimately self-destructive sin. Some people, such as those who are same-sex-attracted or heterosexually-attracted folk who for many years have been unable to find a good marriage partner, are deserving of extra compassion, since God’s standards can in some ways be more challenging for them.

One major elephant in the room is how for some young church people who are liberal on “the homosexuality issue,” their liberal stance appears to be related to their not wanting to face disapproval for their own heterosexual immorality. After all, if we can reject some biblical standards for sexual self-control by elevating the authority of secular Western culture over Scripture, that has a way of throwing everything up for grabs. Indeed, the proposed new sexuality standard endorsed at the 2010 GYPCLA, and around which liberal delegates at the 2012 General Conference (unsuccessfully) rallied, was promoted under the banner of the LGBTQ cause. But if you read it carefully, aside from some broad disapproval of abuse and commercialization, you will be hard-pressed to find any firm, concrete moral boundaries for sexual relations (like a lifelong marriage covenant). But I suppose “supporting the civil rights of oppressed sexual minorities” is a nobler-sounding banner to march under than not wanting Christian accountability for one’s own lack of sexual self-control.

The fact of the matter is that in the United States and Western Europe today, many biblical moral standards have become extremely counter-cultural.

Thus, if Westerners, especially young people, are not taught and encouraged to accept biblical standards for sexual self-control in the church, where else will they be taught this? Secular friends, educational institutions, popular culture, politicians from both major U.S. political parties, and even now some church leaders, not to mention their own personal struggles with the flesh, are all powerfully encouraging and even expecting young Westerners to adopt very sub-Christian values and lifestyles.

Certainly any good ministry involves listening to the concerns and expressed needs of those we care for. But contrary to the post-modern rhetoric of “we just need to let our young people discover their own truth,” biblical, historic, orthodox Christianity does not see people as starting from a morally neutral position and being independently capable of rationally choosing the best path for their self-actualization. John Wesley had a rather strong view of original sin and total depravity, which remains embedded in the Methodist Articles of Religion which United Methodist ministers vow at their ordinations to “preach and maintain.”

Thus to be in youth and young-adult ministry in the twenty-first-century West is to be in ministry with people who all begin with powerful “orientations” away from the holiness God wants for them. This is due not only to their own sinful natures (exacerbated, for those who are unmarried, by their own stage of biological development) but also due to extremely powerful and pervasive influences from the world all around them.

They need ministers who will invite them to repent, trust in Christ alone, and be made into the new creations we become with Christian conversion. They need to be taught about God’s desire for the holiness and self-denial among those He adopts as His precious sons and daughters. They need to be taught about how what they do with their bodies matters very much to God, and that their sexuality is a special gift God wants them to treasure, honor, and care for according to His compassionate boundaries. Having the courage, with God as your helper, to do all of this is a very minimum spiritual qualification for anyone who would be a leader in youth or young-adult ministry.

But instead, far too many United Methodist leaders of youth and young-adult ministries are enjoying nice salaries drained from church offering plates while causing lasting spiritual harm to their young flocks through either the poison of false teaching or the cruel starvation of non-teaching. As you read this, they are in the process of actually enabling and encouraging the young people our churches are called to serve, in all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, to dismiss historic, biblical Christian standards for sexual self-control as outdated and irrelevant. They are actually providing the young people they should be leading towards Christ with convenient ammunition to excuse their indulging in temptations to sin that leads directly away from His Kingdom.

In one of His more sobering teachings, Jesus warned that when anyone, let alone an ordained Christian minister, causes young Christians to stumble “it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” While in context, Jesus was using the example of “a little child,” this also has clear implications for causing anyone who is “young” in their faith to stumble.

But the rest of us are far from guiltless when we are not more careful and diligent with who our bishops appoint and our congregations, campus ministries, annual conferences, and general agencies hire to be in ministry with young people. United Methodist parents and pastors generally need to be far more discerning, and far less automatically trusting, in which church camps and other resources they entrust with spiritually forming our youth.