Bishop Ives Addresses Virginia Methodist Federation for Social Action

Retired Bishop of West Virginia Clifton Ives addressed the Virginia Conference chapter of the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA) on June 14 in Norfolk, Virginia. 

MFSA is Methodism’s oldest liberal caucus group and pushes for a wide list of political and social causes, including homosexual and abortion rights, and church lobbying for a larger welfare state.  Traditionally MFSA has worked closely with the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society (GBCS).  One GBCS official , Clayton Childers, attended the MFSA dinner, with about 100 Virginia United Methodists.   

Before Ives spoke, the MFSA chapter honored Centenary United Methodist Church in Richmond for having become Virginia’s first “reconciling” i.e. officially pro-homosexuality congregation.

Ives is the current co-president of the national MFSA and is former president of GBCS.  He told the Virginia audience that MFSA is a “witness to the wholeness and brokenness of our church.”  And he urged the “progressive United Methodists” of MFSA to “live closer to the center” and avoid the extremes of left and right, striving to be “centered in Jesus.”

“Jesus didn’t go way out on a ledge,” Ives noted, even though there were lots of extremists in His day.  He reached out initially to fishermen, Ives recalled, who were the progressives of that time.  Ives remembered his own early years of social action, when he sought to join civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama but his local church in Maine restrained him.  His local church also responded with indignation when he invited college student protesters to meet in the sanctuary to protest the Vietnam War and the Kent State killings in 1970.  Ives said the chair of his pastor/parish relations committee threatened he would have shot him had he been armed.

Ives also remembered from his youth that his mother was alarmed by his father’s reading MFSA’s “Social Questions Bulletin” newsletter after the Methodist Church had renounced MFSA in the early 1950’s for its far-left views during the Cold War.  This publication “served us well,” Ives surmised, as he announced that it was becoming an electronic only newsletter named “The Progressive Voice.”  He also noted that MFSA is searching for a new chief since Kathryn Johnson is stepping down after 12 years as executive director.

MFSA is “healing and renewing” United Methodism to become “fully inclusive” as part of the “wind of God’s Spirit,” that is “reaching out to all God’s children, Ives insisted.  He speculated that MFSA has not yet reached a potential audience of “tens of thousands of progressive United Methodists” who could become “agents of God’s justice” with MFSA.

Ives recognized the presence of IRD President Mark Tooley in the room and smilingly observed that the “center” of Virginia United Methodism is so wide that it includes Tooley and General Board of Church and Society chief Jim Winkler.