Rev. Mark Holland: United Methodist Traditionalists Are Divisive Trump Evangelicals

on November 23, 2020

Rev. Dr. Mark Holland, director of the liberal Mainstream UMC caucus, a group whose purpose he says is to now support the Protocol and the Christmas Covenant, recently had a lot to say about those across the aisle from him. The pastor from Kansas sees numerous and clear correlations between the political and religious views of American United Methodists. “It’s not an accident, and the things that we have seen in our country, the division we’ve seen in our country, are exactly the divisions that we have seen in the United Methodist Church,” Holland said at the Inclusiveness Conference, sponsored by the Mountain Sky Annual Conference and a number of individual donors, held online Saturday, November 14.

Hosted by the United Methodist Association for Retired Clergy (UMARC), the conference brought together over a dozen United Methodist leaders to speak on social justice issues, most prominently racial justice and LGBTQ equality. You can read about other speakers at the conference in my other article, here.

Before leading Mainstream UMC, Holland was a Democratic politician, the mayor and CEO of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, KS. He pastored Trinity UMC at the same time, and then failed to win re-election after one term in office.

Holland posited that the country had to choose between “two completely different worldviews” in the November elections for president and Congress, and he characterized U.S. political votes as lining up neatly with particular visions for the UMC.

Holland did not hold back in presenting President Trump as a leader who embodies resistance to social justice and morality. This includes actively denying systemic racism, denying climate change, downplaying COVID-19, and supporting people who are white supremacists. Baffled by the continued support of Trump by so many Americans, Holland said, “We have a problem when 71 million people listen to the consistent lies that this man tells.” He later added, “I’m grateful that more people voted for him to not be leading our country.”

Holland portrayed theologically traditionalist United Methodists, especially those involved in IRD/UMAction and Wesleyan Covenant Association (WCA) as part of the devoutly pro-Trump portion of America. Speaking to his deeply progressive audience, he said,

“We also need to know the groups that we’re struggling with in our church… who want to kick people out of the church are the same Trump Evangelicals. When you have the Institute on Religion & Democracy and the Wesleyan Covenant Association, these groups are associated with the same thing, that deny institutional racism, that deny the science. Everyone wants the science that can create a vaccine for COVID-19, but they do not want to accept the science that sexuality in humans is non-binary.”

The IRD and WCA have been far from silent or passive in acknowledging the need to root out racism from the UMC and American society in general. WCA president Keith Boyette spoke out this summer in a short piece called “Make Justice a Reality,” calling United Methodists to actively work to root out injustice in the church and society, concerns that IRD’s UMAction Director John Lomperis has echoed and which we have addressed repeatedly.

Not forgetting those United Methodists tuning in from around the globe, Holland claimed that “the groups that have voted for an America First agenda through our current President are not the folks who are going to support a global church in any true form.” He did not go on to explain what he meant.

Holland further accused the WCA of forsaking the Wesleyan heritage of valuing reason and science alongside faith by writing the Wesleyan Quadrilateral out of the proposed draft of a new Book of Discipline. Traditionalists, who support a misogynistic Trump, Holland claims, are “not working for the full inclusion of women in the denomination.”

In fact, UMAction successfully urged the adoption of a women’s equality amendment to the UMC Constitution two years ago. The Atlanta gathering of traditionalist United Methodist leaders from around from around the globe released a vision document that committed the new denomination “will be a church that is truly global in nature, fully welcomes people of various ethnicities and women into every level of ordination and leadership.”

Finally, Holland asked how pro-LGBTQ United Methodists can get where they want to be.

Importantly, his first answer was to promote the Protocol, the proposed package of legislation that would allow traditionalist churches and annual conferences to move on from the UMC and start a new denomination. As he has said publicly before, Mainstream UMC encourages bishops to help churches to leave the UMC now “in the spirit of the Protocol” with a gracious exit. Whether such an arrangement could ever actually occur remains a big question mark, and all recent history suggests the Protocol is necessary for churches to avoid large exit fees.

Holland’s second answer for a way forward is the Christmas Covenant, a regionalization plan that would allow Central Conferences and perhaps some US churches to have different practices in regards to human sexuality and other matters. The challenge Holland sees is that both the “far right” and “far left” in the church have problems with churches acting differently than they do.

In its recent public statement, the UMAction Steering Committee called “the recently renewed liberal efforts to bring back repeatedly rejected so-called ‘Global Segregation Plans’” part of very regrettable pattern of American liberals seeking to marginalize and limit the power of non-American United Methodists. I reported in May how Holland admitted the “Christmas Covenant” is simply another version of similar plans that have come before General Conference but have always failed. Following General Conference 2019, Holland and other liberal leaders have led a rebellion of privileged, primarily white Americans refusing to listen to or be governed by the global church.

The post-separation UMC must answer a difficult question, then: “How do we model a church, and is there room in a church for people who don’t get it, or for people who aren’t all the way there, or for people who don’t understand but are gracious and wanting to live into it?” Credit to Holland for admitting that you cannot have a church where everyone is completely “woke,” because “no one would be qualified to be in it.”

Holland then went on to warn his audience about the structure of the new traditionalist denomination, at least according to the WCA’s draft Book of Doctrines and Discipline, which at this stage is merely a proposal that the new denomination could change. Holland denounced the new system as “congregationalist” because bishops would allegedly not have appointment authority under the new system. “They no longer have appointment authority, they only sign off,” Holland said. Rev. Holland also argued that the connectional system would be taken away in the new denomination because of how traditionalists have “streamlined the church” by not having as many denominational agencies, which like the bishops, many traditionalists have viewed as abusing their power to promote liberal values.

The reality is that while congregational input is higher in this draft Book of Discipline, it still provides for an appointment process in which the bishops are significantly involved (See ¶422.3.i and 608.6).

To Holland, the lack of trust in the bishops and general agencies is manufactured by attacks from conservative disruptors who seek to undermine confidence in United Methodist institutions and the U.S. federal government alike. “The same attacks on the ‘Deep State’ and the same attacks on authority are the same attacks we’ve seen through the WCA and the Institute on Religion and Democracy against the United Methodist Church,” Holland said.

Holland believes that in contrast to traditionalists, progressives and so-called “centrists” are “a people of process.”  He gave two examples, the processes of the Commission on the Way Forward, which produced the “One Church Plan,” and that of newly revised Social Principles

Unlike the WCA, which he characterized as rushing to write a new Book of Discipline, Holland said he is willing to live without a new one for two to three years. To do it right, he says, requires a very inclusive, long, and deliberate process. He reiterated his support for letting traditionalists leave via the Protocol, but said that “if we take shortcuts setting up the church that we want to be, and we exclude groups for expediency, we’ll be worse off than we are now.”

It is confusing that Holland would critique how traditionalists are preparing a foundation for a new denomination, when he himself explicitly encouraged this back in May. I reported then how Holland said, “We would invite those groups that are forming a new denomination to keep doing [their] work.” The post-separation UMC, by contrast, will have the established UMC framework to guide it in the initial months and years.

Continuing to urge patience, Holland shared his opinion that it is “potentially unrealistic” that General Conference will be able to meet in-person next fall. He made no comments on the potential for a regionalized in-person gathering or going completely online, as Mark Tooley has suggested.

Looking elsewhere in church politics, Holland is keen to see progressive and so-called “centrist” United Methodists expand the majority they already have in the Council of Bishops. However, he put it plainly that funding a full slate of bishops is challenging given current financial struggles. However, he was confident that there was a supermajority of liberal U.S. delegates, who could elect new bishops to further outweigh the voices of conservative bishops, who he accused of “hijacking this church.”

To close his talk, Holland told his listeners to expect to hear more chatter from leaders around the church in the New Year. Once everyone is past the holiday season, “you’re going to see a lot more interest start up in January, February” and he himself will be working to help people share their input on what they hear from leaders and caucus groups on the future of the church.

  1. Comment by Jeff on November 23, 2020 at 2:22 pm

    What a special treat. Wisdom overflowing from the heart of the honorable Rev. Mark Holland (D, Hell).

    I have a feeling the progressive UM handbasket is gonna be picking up speed in 2021. Bye bye Nicolaitan heretics!! Enjoy your trip. Me and my house will be choosing another direction.

  2. Comment by Theodore Miner on November 23, 2020 at 4:24 pm

    “…supporting people who are white supremacists.”

    What does this even refer to? More anti-white slurs. Does the church even want to minister to white people?

  3. Comment by td on November 23, 2020 at 6:03 pm

    It is instructive to note that this guy brings division wherever he goes. The guy couldn’t even win a 2nd mayoral term in kansas city, kansas- he was unpopular with all the groups he claims to be liberating…and also with those he persecutes. He was beat by an unknown city employee who has never run for any political office before. Now he is setting his sights on the UMC!

    Honestly, this man’s actions at and after GC is just as deplorable as Trump’s actions post election.

  4. Comment by Ben Adams on November 24, 2020 at 12:06 am

    I am a member of First Methodist Waco Texas.I have a question for “Rev” Holland.As long as you have the liberal views that you do, why stop at rewriting the book of discipline?(John Wesley would be turning over in his grave) Go ahead and try your hand at a Mark Holland version of the Bible. It would be full of cherry picked verses that liberal theologians are famous for. You wonder why people are leaving the Methodist Church in droves. It is because of liberal pastors such as yourself.

  5. Comment by David Stewart on November 24, 2020 at 7:12 am

    So, like the bartender in the Star Wars bar scene, he’s essentially saying to traditionalists, “We don’t serve [your] kind here [anymore]”, while going about bearing all sorts of false witness against organizations and people whom he does not like or agree with.

    Sadly, this activity is not limited to the UMC. Of the mainline denominations, TEC and PCUSA have their fair share of these typrs as well. Unfortunately, in the PCUSA, this type has thoroughly embedded themselves in the national organization, where you have a leadership and staff, which love to speak out both sides of their mouths. Proclaim tolerance, understanding, and we’re all Americans, yet the official publications generally read like the leftist to far leftist wings of the Democrat Party, accusing people, who in good faith should be able to reasonably disagree about host of issues, of all sorts of -isms under the sun, without ever batting an eyelash to the inconsistency and hypocrisy of their actions and words.

    People such as this guy, Jefferts-Schiori, and the leadership of the PCUSA do not realize, in fact do not care, that they are placing families, particularly spouses, who are split along these lines in very difficult positions. If I am a conservative in a mainline denomination these days, where far too much of the leadership is essentially telling conservatives, we don’t want you here anymore, why should I remain? Yet, for family reasons, some of us may have no other choice. Of course, that is when we must look to those of the prophets, such as Jeremiah, who suffered immensely at the hands of the religious and political leaders of his day, for encouragement and strength, no matter how depressing one may view Lamentations.

  6. Comment by William on November 25, 2020 at 7:58 am

    His “call into ministry” apparently was a call to transition from being a failed civic politician to being a church politician. As a typical liberal politician, he projects onto others, traditionalists here, what he and his liberal colleagues practice — DIVISIVENESS. They’ve been practicing divisiveness for five decades now in the UMC with the resulting schism finally reaching full measure. Notice their latest tactic — an attempt to merge the LGBT+ agenda with the systemic racism agenda and make them one and the same as some sort of convoluted attempt to impress African Methodists and broaden their American base. Their political tactics have no end. They are political operatives working inside the UMC in unison with the greater secular liberal movement — much of which is anti-Christian. They are working to take down historic, traditional Christianity. These people are the epitome of wolves in sheep’s clothing.

  7. Comment by Donald on November 28, 2020 at 10:30 am

    Please see the column on Celebrity Christians by Timothy Whittaker and my reply. Seems to me “Rev.” Holland fits the bill as well as “Rev.” Jim Wallis.

  8. Comment by Star Tripper on December 6, 2020 at 9:23 am

    I am saddened that we let people like this get such a grip on the church. Nice Christianity that allows heretical leaders to “share their worldview” without the proper chastisement is a slow death by compromise with evil.

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