Transitional United Methodist Integrity

United Methodism is in a slow-motion split. For members and pastors who remain United Methodists for now, what do integrity and faithfulness look like in this transitional season?

It is clear that the Global Methodist Church will be the home for United Methodists with traditional, biblical, doctrinal and moral standards, while the post-separation United Methodist Church will increasingly radicalize, on more issues than just gay weddings.

But just because we may personally expect to be in another denomination at some point in the future is no reason we cannot defend biblical faithfulness in our own church, until the day it is no longer our church.

God always calls Christians to defend faithfulness and integrity wherever we are, for however long we are there. There is never a period when it is bad for Christians, even United Methodists, to defend faithfulness and integrity, or when it is commendable for a Christian to support or participate in unfaithfulness.

While some liberal leaders try shaming United Methodists into silence if they may eventually end up in the GMC, I have not seen any such leaders adopt a consistent standard of saying that liberal delegates like Dorothee Benz or Alex da Silva Souto should have abstained from voting at the 2019 General Conference because they left the UMC not long afterwards. No delegates are required to commit to remain United Methodists for any length of time after they do their best work as delegates to vote and act for what they believe is best for the UMC at this time.

Beyond our local congregations, prudent stewardship of time and resources may now mean drawing back from certain unfruitful or counterproductive denominational commitments.

But faithful Christians, as long as they remain United Methodists, should still attend conferences and meetings when we have a chance to make a relative difference by voting for fairness, integrity, and biblical faithfulness. This is especially the case for elected jurisdictional conference delegates. Some actions like approving ordination or commissioning candidates for boards of ordained ministry only require 25 percent to block destructive actions, as recently seen in Florida.

Faithfulness will also at times include filing formal complaints against clergy violating the biblical standards of what remains our denomination.

Let’s remember our United Methodist membership vows, found in ¶ 217 of the UMC Book Discipline. We vowed to “receive and profess the Christian faith as contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.” Voting against candidates and challenging actions contrary to Scripture honor this sacred membership vow.

We vowed to “confess Jesus Christ as Savior, put their whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as their Lord.” Honoring this membership vow includes defending Christ’s lordship over all human life, including sexuality.

We also vowed to “be loyal to Christ through The United Methodist Church and do all in [our] power to strengthen its ministries” (emphasis added). Blocking clearly unfaithful candidates from being approved as clergy protects both the church and the candidates themselves from needless harm. Clergy who openly oppose clear biblical values weaken the UMC’s ministries, and so challenging their unfaithfulness is one indispensable way of fulfilling our vows to strengthen the UMC’s ministries.

Yes, many resent biblical standards and Christ’s lordship, and will respond with angry protests and accusations of meanness.

But don’t let liberal bullies intimidate you. And please don’t take their sanctimonious rhetoric seriously. It is clergy’s unfaithfulness, not accountability, that is responsible for hurting the church and its people. No one is entitled to be ordained. Among the questions the Discipline requires our ordinands to answer:

• “Have you studied the doctrines of The United Methodist Church?” (¶¶ 330.5.d.8, 336.8)
• “After full examination, do you believe that our doctrines are in harmony with the Holy Scriptures?” (¶¶ 330.5.d.9, 336.9)
• “Have you studied our form of Church discipline and polity?” (¶¶ 330.5.d.10, 336.11)
• “Do you approve our Church government and polity?” (¶¶ 330.5.d.11, 336.12)
• “Will you support and maintain them?” (¶¶ 330.5.d.9, 336.13)

Those ordained elders are also asked, in reference to our church’s doctrines, “Will you preach and maintain them?” (¶¶ 336.10).

Yet we see so many of our clergy and even bishops recklessly preach against our church’s doctrines and otherwise violate our church law (“government and polity”). 

The sad fact of the matter is that many cynically took these vows without meaning them.

One cleric (who thankfully later converted) frankly admitted how he became a United Methodist pastor without even being a Christian: “I lied.”

In a Twitter exchange some years ago, one young liberal United Methodist ministry candidate publicly declared, “If every clergymen was honest [sic] none would be ordained.” He later slightly backtracked to say that many would not be ordained if everyone was honest. But he went on to become a pastor as well as a national leader in a powerful liberal denomination-wide caucus, the Reconciling Ministries Network.

Other clergy may protest they were sincere when taking these vows but subsequently changed their views. In his essay on “Christian Apologetics,” C.S. Lewis responded to such trends in his own denomination:

But this simply misses the point which so gravely scandalizes the layman. We never doubted that the unorthodox opinions were honestly held: what we complain of is your continuing in your ministry after you have come to hold them. We always knew that a man who makes his living as a paid agent of the Conservative Party may honestly change his views and honestly become a Communist. What we deny is that he can honestly continue to be a Conservative agent and to receive money from one party while he supports the policy of the other.

Whether unorthodox clergy consciously lied their way through United Methodist ordination or later changed their minds, where is there any integrity in their remaining as clergy in this denomination without continued faithfulness to their vows? For many, it is a simple fact that this is personally financially beneficial. But their entire “ministries” are based on self-serving falsehood. They cripple the church through cynical infiltration.

There’s nothing nice or loving about dishonesty before God and the church, or shaming church members who call for integrity.

Many liberal activists and leaders even mimic the patterns of abusive families whenever they try to bully or silence United Methodists calling for integrity. And when they try to make loyalty to Jesus Christ and Scripture secondary to superficial institutional loyalty, they effectively redefine our membership vows as unconditional fidelity to fallible persons or bureaucracies rather than our vow to “be loyal to Christ through The United Methodist Church.”

Our denomination is splitting precisely because of widespread clergy dishonesty about their vows. This is utterly unsustainable in the long-term. But as of this moment, most of us find ourselves in an awkward transitional period. 

Liberal institutionalists now dominating the United Methodist bureaucracy are pursuing a bizarre combination of chasing out faithful members but also, in so many ways and cases, needlessly hindering and blocking conferences and congregations from continuing with like-minded United Methodists into the Global Methodist Church.

From the Old Testament to Jesus Christ’s interactions with corrupt religious leaders to teachings throughout the New Testament directed to future Christians, we find repeated warnings about people who infiltrate themselves into proper positions of spiritual leadership while serving something lesser than God.

Of particular note are Jude 1:4’s warnings about people claiming “that God’s marvelous grace allows us to live immoral lives,” who “have wormed their way into your churches” and acquired some sort of teaching influence, as well as 1 Timothy 6:5’s warning about false teachers who cynically use religion for their own financial gain.

Of course, we must be very careful about applying general biblical warnings to any particular individuals. But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that our denomination’s bureaucracy is somehow all magically exempt from the possibility of such biblically forewarned infiltration.

We traditionalists must recall we have all the rights of being United Methodists until the second we leave. Let us “striv[e] together as one for the faith of the gospel without being frightened in any way by those who oppose [us]” (Philippians 1:27-28).

Let us continue to show up and stand up to defend our denomination’s biblical values, vote our convictions, and find ways to defend United Methodist integrity.

Since liberal leaders continuously claim the new UMC has “room for all,” even us traditionalists, and have, in the majority of cases, refused to make it easy for us to leave the UMC, how can they expect us to do any less?