Rebuilding and Defending United Methodism Today – Part 1 of 9: The Need to Rebuild Our Church Cultures

The following is an excerpt from the text for a speech delivered by UMAction Director John Lomperis on Thursday, November 21 at historic Boehm’s Chapel.  The gathering near Lancaster, Pennsylvania was hosted by the Eastern Pennsylvania Evangelical Connection. That evening included lively discussion with the audience. For the convenience of online readers, the speech is divided into nine sections here.   

Part 1 of 9: The Need to Rebuild Our Church Cultures

I am the United Methodist Action program director for the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD).  IRD’s president is Mark Tooley, a lifelong UMC layman.  I direct the IRD program specifically focused on our denomination.  While I don’t mind labels like evangelical or theologically conservative, I personally prefer to say that UM Action hails from the theologically United Methodist wing of the United Methodist Church.  We work to promote biblical, Wesleyan faithfulness and a disciple-making focus within our denominational culture, and to challenge those who would distract us from our church’s holy mission.

Now I know that we’re all keenly interested in the developments of the last couple of weeks related to our denominational accountability systems addressing some renegade clergy, like Mr. Schaefer and Mr. Talbert, essentially declaring that they are no longer in covenant with our church.

I will be addressing some of the specifics of what these recent events mean for our church in a bit.

But the fact of the matter is that even if Talbert, Schaefer, and every single same-sex-union-blessing clergy in these other cases were defrocked tomorrow, that alone would not cure the underlying diseases within the United Methodist Church that brought us to this point today.

If we are truly to renew and reform our beloved church, we need to have the patience, deep commitment, and long-term stamina to not just respond to these specific high-profile episodes, but to constructively address the deeper underlying issues as we follow the obligation God has given all of us, whether we are laity or clergy, to build up our local churches.

So for the first part of my speech, I will be talking about the need for us to work intentionally and systematically to build congregational cultures in United Methodist churches characterized by biblical groundedness, orientation for conversion, and covenant accountability.  Then I will address the specific recent cases we’ve had of covenant-breaking and where do we go from here.

To be clear, I am an optimist when it comes to the future of our denomination.  I am as aware of the problems in our church as anybody.  That’s kind of my job.  But this so-called “biblical disobedience” movement of United Methodist clergy defying our Discipline and blessing same-sex unions does not reflect growing momentum for theological liberalism – quite the opposite, in fact.  This narcissistic campaign, while rather noisy, disruptive, and attention-grabbing, reflects the desperation of a radicalized minority of the church, many of whom are now openly despairing of ever getting official UMC policies to their liking, watching the trend of General Conference move in an increasingly orthodox direction (on sexual morality as well as other issues), and using language like, in the words of one prominent liberal caucus staffer, that they “felt like the church was slipping away” from them at the last General Conference.  We see such positive developments as one of our own official United Methodist seminaries, United Theological Seminary in Ohio, going through a dramatic reorientation towards Christian faithfulness and watching its enrollment triple, while our more radicalized seminaries decline.  There seems to be a shift at least towards the center in several of our denominational general agencies.  And now even our Council of Bishops is finally willing to publicly say “Enough is enough!” to one of its own most radicalized, iconic members.

The problems we see in our denomination today, while serious, are NOT some strange, new, unusual thing.  Rather, they are the very predictable fruit of humanity-glorifying, God-demoting theological liberalism dominating so much of the official hierarchy of our denomination over the course of the last hundred years.   For those of us biblically grounded evangelicals who have still stuck with the United Methodist Church after a century what needs to be named as spiritual corruption, the time to lose heart, give up, and leave is not now when the tide finally seems to be turning.

Centuries ago, when God’s people were able to finally come out of exile and back into the Promised Land, that was a very good thing.  But when the exiles returned, they did not come back into a paradise where they could just sit back, relax, and enjoy how wonderful everything was.  They really had their work cut out for them to rebuild the Jewish nation from so many decades of spiritual, structural, and physical devastation.

We United Methodists who would call ourselves theologically evangelical, conservative, orthodox, or traditionalists also have several decades of devastation from which we need to rebuild.  It is simply not enough for us to reject theological liberalism, agree with biblical teaching on sexual morality, have a high view of Scripture, and be excited about evangelism – as essential as all of those things are.

If we really want God to bring our denomination out of the culturally conformed, liberal-mainline rut we’ve been stuck in for decades, then I am convinced that we must follow Him in working to very intentionally and systematically rebuild a church culture that is biblically grounded, oriented towards conversion, and fundamentally shaped by covenant accountability – beginning at the congregational level and then spreading upwards and downwards from there.

I note that the sorts of suggestions I am offering here not only apply to better reaching the unchurched and better discipling our members, but also are ways in which we can consciously organize our congregations to attract an important third group of people: the sort of biblically grounded, spiritually mature Christians who may or may not have a Methodist background but who perhaps recently moved into our towns, are looking for a new church home, and are exactly the sort of people we need in our churches as small-group leaders and other backbones of our congregational ministries.

Part 1: The Need to Rebuild Our Church Cultures

Part 2 : Biblical Groundedness

Part 3: Oriented for Conversion

Part 4: Covenant Accountability, Counting the Cost of Church Membership

Part 5: Covenant Accountability: The Obligations of UMC Membership

Part 6: Why United Methodist Liberals are Now Focusing on “Biblical Disobedience”

Part 7: The “Biblical [Dis]obedience” Siege vs. the Basis for Unity in the UMC

Part 8: The Latest with Melvin Talbert

Part 9: Where Do We Go From Here?