United Methodists youth, young adults, and adult workers in youth and young-adult ministry gathered from all around the world in the Philippines July 16-20 for the Global Young People’s Convocation and Legislative Assembly (GYPCLA).
It began with quite a bit of drama, as Typhoon Glenda forced an evacuation in the middle of the first night from the city of Tagatay to a new location. It was a good thing they did not wait until the morning, since the ceiling collapsed and the windows shattered in some of the sleeping rooms shortly after the evacuation! I was told that the typhoon hurt no one from GYPCLA, although, tragically, it killed dozens of people and displaced or cut power off to many more in the Philippines.
The staff of the General Board of Discipleship’s Division of Ministries with Young People (DMYP), who organize the quadrennial event, gets credit for doing a good job of helping people stay in good spirits and bounce back from such a disruption. They arranged a time to prepare relief food packages for those displaced by the storm. And I found them to be extremely hospitable and helpful to me.
I was far from their only guest. In addition to the delegates, others there included several bishops, a staffer of the lefty Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA), staffers of various UMC denominational agencies (there were a remarkably large number from the General Board of Church and Society), a representative of the World Methodist Council, and dozens of young adults preparing for missionary service.
A Tense, Young Mini-General Conference
The part of greatest interest for many was the legislative assembly, which dragged on until 2am on the penultimate night. This was a sort of “mini-General Conference,” in which delegates got to have similar debates over various structural and social issues as they decided which petitions they would submit in the name of GYPCLA to the 2016 UMC General Conference.
Of the ten petitions, all were submitted by Americans, and none expressed a clearly evangelical perspective. Three were submitted by a single individual, twenty-one-year-old Miranda Luster from the South Central Jurisdiction (SCJ).
At times, it looked like liberal delegates from the Western and South Central Jurisdictions were coordinating their efforts.
Two of Luster’s petitions were among the three that very clearly and directly addressed the morality of homosexual practice. As reported earlier, all three were defeated.
As we have seen at General Conferences, GYPCLA had some delegates not voting in a consistently liberal or conservative way on such matters. One petition from an SCJ teenager would have deleted the sentence declaring homosexual practice to be “incompatible with Christian teaching” (while actually leaving in place our teaching that sexual relations are only for the boundaries of “monogamous, heterosexual marriage”). It failed by the narrowest-possible margin to get majority support. The submitter may have confused some delegates when he bizarrely claimed (and was echoed by a supportive Western Jurisdiction adult worker) that one’s views on sexual morality were somehow “irrelevant” to this particular petition. Rather, according to this young man, the petition was about welcoming people as Jesus would without turning off would-be churchgoers.
But the votes to reject Luster’s gay-marriage petitions were significantly stronger. One of hers would have deleted the Discipline’s binding prohibition on same-sex unions, which failed in a 42-58 vote. The other would have changed the UMC’s definition of marriage from being a covenant “between a man and a woman” to one “between two people,” and was rejected by 61 out of 105 delegates voting on that one (58.1 percent).
Virtually nothing new was said in these debates. But it was interesting to hear the prominence and frequency with which delegates urging adoption of the homosexuality-related petitions appealed for crossover support, asserting in various ways that these petitions would not get the UMC to affirm the non-sinfulness of homosexual practice. I suppose this is true in one misleadingly narrow, technical sense for the three petitions mentioned above. But the practical effects and public perception would be about the same. It will be worth watching how much other theologically liberal United Methodists shift to making a key part of their argument just giving up on seeking to change orthodox member’s minds about the central moral questions.
By far the most lopsided vote on a divisive issue concerned non-marital civil unions. Shelia Jordan of the Southeastern Jurisdiction moved to amend Luster’s petition to not only change the Social Principles’ definition of marriage but also explicitly endorse and claim God’s blessing upon gay “civil unions.” In the standing vote taken, it looked like that amendment had the support of less than a dozen out of slightly over 100 voting delegates.
Miss Luster’s other petition would amend ¶4 of the Constitution of the United Methodist Church to prohibit, at all levels of the church, any discrimination based on gender or “sexual orientation.”
It was adopted by less than 55 percent of delegates, but only after they were severely misinformed about the nature and implications of this petition.
No gender discrimination is generally a great principle. But to so broadly outlaw any “organizational unit” of the UMC from excluding anyone on the basis of gender would outlaw women’s or men’s groups. I saw no hint that the teenagers and college students hastily voting for this proposed new requirement had even thought of that. Furthermore, I saw no one bother to explain to these young delegates the importance of thinking twice before trying to change not just the Discipline but the very constitutional foundation of United Methodist church law. The Constitution is not the place to hastily insert some broad expression of good intentions without carefully considering the implications.
Furthermore, delegates were rather misleadingly assured by Luster that this constitutional amendment was not about changing the denomination’s teaching and policies on marriage. And she likely won some swing votes when a Congolese delegate asked her if there was any exclusion currently occurring in the UMC based on sexual orientation, and Luster replied that as she saw it, there was “no statement in the Book of Discipline that overtly discriminates based on sexual orientation.” At one point, an adult worker rushed to protect her from answering a direct question (which was ruled out of order) about whether or not she believed that homosexual practice was sinful.
Thus, Luster, and her adult handlers, won their narrow “victory” by assuring fellow delegates that this amendment was not about the denomination’s positions on marriage, and that her petition was not coming from a perspective that saw the denomination’s sexual-morality rules as discriminatory.
But then later in the legislative session, when she presented her petition to redefine the UMC Social Principles’ definition of marriage, she declared that the current, man-woman definition “outright excludes, marginalizes, and discriminates.” So apparently she does think parts of the Discipline are discriminatory, after all. But was willing to say that she does not in order to help her other petition narrowly pass.
Indeed, theologically United Methodists have for a while sought to add such a somewhat innocuous-sounding amendment to the UMC Constitution, so that shortly thereafter our prohibitions of same-sex unions and homosexually active clergy can be judicially invalidated as contradicting the UMC Constitution. Any liberal member of the UMC’s “supreme court,” the Judicial Council, could be expected to call our policies sexual-orientation-based discrimination.
On the other hand, in all my years with UMAction, I have never heard someone in the UMC’s evangelical renewal movement say that anyone should be excluded from church membership or ordination simply for experiencing same-sex-attractions. Not once.
But the movement to amend this particular section of the UMC Constitution originates from a case in 2005 involving the Rev. Ed Johnson, a small-town Virginia pastor. Johnson compassionately welcomed a certain man into the life of his church. Holding to a traditional Wesleyan view of the covenantal nature of Methodist membership, and actually taking the UMC membership vows seriously, the mild-mannered pastor saw that this individual was not ready for immediate church membership until he gave up an ongoing pattern of homosexually immoral behavior. After all, the Discipline’s required church-membership vows include commitments to repent, renounce sin, and accept the authority of Scripture. But bizarrely misnamed “reconciling” United Methodists expressed outrage, and were rather shameless in their willingness to bear false witness against him by claiming, as Bishop John Schol did, that Johnson withheld membership “because the man is gay.” From such liberal outcries (and distortion of facts) came the movement to amend this same particular section of the UMC Constitution along the lines of what Miss Luster (rather unoriginally) proposed. The explicitly stated intention of this earlier amendment movement was to overturn a specific Judicial Council decision, support the bullying attempts of Pastor Johnson’s (now retired) liberal bishop to force him out of the denomination, and to make any other United Methodist pastors who similarly hold traditional Wesleyan Christian values liable to be subjected to church trials.
Yet nowhere at GYPCLA did I see anyone acknowledge this important historical context for this petition.
In any case, this petition is likely to go nowhere at the next General Conference, given the high hurdles our system has for constitutional amendments.
I suppose some of the logical leaps and less-than-fully-accurate presentations of facts by homosexuality-affirming delegates can be chalked up to youthful inexperience. But having been at the last three General Conferences, I’m not sure the UMC gives young liberals many role models for making better pro-homosexuality arguments.
By far the lengthiest petition was a six-pager jointly submitted by Jamie Michaels, a campus minister in California, and Melissa Engel, a youth-ministry intern trained at Iliff School of Theology. Entitled “Aligning Investments With Social Principles,” it largely treated Israel as the villain in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and called for widespread United Methodist Church divestment “from companies that support the Israeli occupation.” Engel urged fellow delegates to join this “prophetic call” to join the Presbyterian Church (USA) and unspecified Quakers in this resolution to single out the world’s lone Jewish state for divestment.
As at other relevant United Methodist discussions, there was no acknowledgement of what happened in 1967 that resulted in the occupation, and it was unclear how many there even knew.
None of the delegates who spoke on this pro-Palestinian resolution defended a more pro-Israel perspective. One European delegate, however, noted that things are “not as black-and-white” as portrayed in the resolution, and reported that Israelis he knew would not accept how it frames the situation. Otherwise, delegates seemed to simply accept, without seeking to do their own research or hear from all sides, the claims that Israel was committing “atrocities” in which the specific targeted companies were complicit. Translation failures gave many central-conference delegates no opportunity to do their own research.
Given this one-sided presentation, it was no surprise that this resolution was endorsed by a slight majority of delegates present. A large number abstained, I suppose commendably recognizing that they were not prepared to cast an informed vote.
Delegates may have been influenced by Bishop Warner Brown of San Francisco, the new Council of Bishops President. Earlier in the conference, he had urged prayer for the crisis in Gaza, and made a point of stressing that there had been hundreds of Palestinian deaths and one Israeli death by that point. However, neither Bishop Brown nor anyone in the resolution discussion mentioned the over 1,000 rockets fired at Israel in the week immediately preceding GYPCLA, let alone admitted that Israeli rocket casualties would be rather high if it were not for Israel’s American-supported “Iron Dome” defense system.
During the closing night’s lengthy worship service, Ann Jacob, a young GBOD board member and DMYP leader, surprisingly moved the gathering into legislative session. (Although she and I disagree on sexuality issues, I appreciated her efforts to preside over the late portion of the legislative session in a professional, fair way.) The purpose of this quick special session was the undebated, unanimous adoption of a “unity statement” that had been developed by delegates from opposing sides of the previous evening’s sexuality debates. The statement noted recent talk of a possible UMC schism and declared a strong desire for unity (it can be read here). As such feel-good, “bipartisan” statements go, it characteristically was short on detail and is open to being spun in various ways. But the statement’s “urg[ing] everyone to seek solutions that promote our global unity as the United Methodist Church of Jesus Christ” means rather little if it does not, among other things, reject the tactic of renegade United Methodist clergy flippantly breaking their promises to Christ and the rest of the church to uphold our biblical standards on marriage.
Other Highlights
Another major part of the conference was the commissioning of some 42 young-adult Global Missions Fellows from 11 countries. This new program of the UMC’s General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM) sends people aged 20-30 to various service projects around the world for two-year terms.
GYPCLA also offered brief workshops on various topics. In the one I attended on Scripture and sexuality, the leader Mike Ratliff (the lead staffer for DMYP), did not really push any particular agenda beyond encouraging us to listen to each other. Helpfully, at one point he observed that Scripture did clearly teach against sex outside of marital commitment, and also helpfully noted the range of sexuality-topics hotly debated in different cultures, from homosexuality in the United States to bride prices in parts of West Africa.
There were several times of lively worship. Bishop Eduard Khegay of Moscow gave an encouraging sermon in which he shared his story of becoming a Christian in 1992 thanks to a GBGM missionary.
I personally rather enjoyed being a co-leader of a small-group that included folk from very different backgrounds and perspectives than my own.
I was glad to have been a part of GYPCLA.
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