UMC Should Not Be Unitarian Methodist Confederacy

While the UMC’s official, “on paper” Doctrinal Standards and its Book of Discipline’s stance on marriage remain theologically orthodox, how much have United Methodist bishops done their job of upholding, defending, and clearly teaching either? When denominational leaders undermine belief in the full divinity of Jesus Christ, this promotes an essentially Unitarian rather than Methodist or Christian worldview. A recent interview has now exposed the lengths to which our denomination’s leadership has chosen to go in order to keep the United Methodist Church safe for Unitarianism.

The highest levels of United Methodist leadership have become a haven for Unitarian teaching. Those complicit in making this happen include top leaders of an entire region of the UMC and more than one president of the global UMC Council of Bishops, among others.

The typical first responses of denominational officials and liberal “Be UMC” leaders has been to falsely accuse those raising concerns about Unitarian influences among United Methodists of “spreading misinformation.” When confronted with specific examples, they pivot to claim we      unfairly cherry-pick an extreme fringe that should be ignored.

This second response is disingenuous regarding someone like Karen Oliveto who has been elevated to the level of bishop, and even president of a regional college of bishops. Remember, Oliveto’s six-figure salary is subsidized by apportionments taken from congregations across the country (not just the Western Jurisdiction).

In 2005, Oliveto was a key speaker for a conference of the Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN), an unofficial caucus of liberal, LGBTQ liberationist United Methodists. I reported firsthand on Oliveto’s teaching about both “the benefits and flaws” of Scripture, repudiating the red-letter teachings of Jesus Christ about separating sheep from goats, and bizarrely defending the alleged benefits of being possessed by a demon! My article was widely discussed, including by bishops. Yet for 18 years, no one present has disputed the accuracy of my reporting of Oliveto’s teachings.

Despite Oliveto’s Jesus-criticizing, pro-demon worldview, in 2016, the Western Jurisdiction ultimately unanimously voted to elect her as bishop.

In a late 2017 post for the Yellowstone Annual Conference (worth reading in full), Karen Oliveto used her contested occupancy of the office of United Methodist bishop to attack the divinity of Jesus Christ. Oliveto taught that we should not “create an idol out of him,” insisted that Jesus was guilty of such sins as “his bigotries and prejudices” and having “made his life too small,” and that as an adult, He needed another human to teach him God’s will so that “he changed his mind” and experienced “his conversion.” By definition, creating an idol out of something means treating something that is not God as God. So the plain meaning of Oliveto’s words is that Jesus is not truly, eternally, fully and perfectly God. In other words, this United Methodist bishop promotes a more Unitarian than Christian view of Jesus, which she has not retracted, after national media attention and much criticism.

In 2018, Pastor Bob Barnes filed a formal complaint against Oliveto for heresy (“dissemination of doctrines contrary to the established standards of doctrine of The United Methodist Church” in UMC-speak), outlining specific doctrines in our Methodist Articles of Religion and EUB Confession of Faith contradicted by Oliveto.

Whatever happened to this complaint?

For his “PlainSpoken” video series, Oklahoma Pastor Jeffrey Rickman recently interviewed Barnes, who shared what he could, while respecting confidentiality guidelines.

The full interview is worth watching, to learn the untold story of what happens and consider the major implications for the UMC.

Barnes stresses the “broad degree of complicity,” beyond any single person, in “an allowance of this teaching” of Oliveto’s in the UMC. Furthermore, Oliveto is not alone in the UMC with such beliefs. Barnes recalls hearing this same false teaching alluded to in a recent clergy training. A while after Oliveto sat in judgment over Jesus Christ for his alleged “bigotries and prejudices,” a UM Communications survey of Americans in United Methodist congregations found 38 percent likewise believing that “Jesus committed sins like other people.” Last fall, the CEO of an apportionment-funded UMC agency echoed Oliveto’s anti-Wesleyan 2017 teaching.

This interview reveals key facts. On September 28, 2018, Barnes mailed his formal complaint letter protesting Oliveto’s 2017 teaching. Barnes reports that at no time in this process, which involved more than two bishops, did anyone say that “he seriously misconstrued her teaching.” In October, Desert-Southwest Conference Bishop Robert Hoshibata, then the president of the Western Jurisdiction College of Bishops, acknowledged receiving Barnes’s complaint. In September 2019, about a year later, Barnes was notified via letter that the Western Jurisdiction response team “unanimously agreed” to dismiss his complaint. Per Discipline ¶413.3.d.i, the complaint could have alternatively been (1) settled via a “just resolution” signed by both Barnes and Oliveto, (2) reclassified as an administrative complaint, or (3) escalated into a judicial process by referral to a counsel for the Church.

Instead, multiple denominational leaders chose to dismiss it. Per Discipline ¶413.3.d.i, the fact that the complaint against Oliveto’s Unitarian teaching was dismissed means that this dismissal was supported by the college of bishops president (Hoshibata), and by the bishops of this United Methodist region, and the Western Jurisdiction committee on episcopacy.

Barnes reports that there was no disciplinary or remedial action of which he is aware, no acknowledgment that any part of Oliveto’s Unitarian teaching was wrong, and no claim that Barnes as a supporter of United Methodist Doctrinal Standards and Oliveto shared the same view of Christ. Instead, Barnes offered a “slight paraphrase” of the dismissal letter’s rationale: that Oliveto’s teachings “fell within the scope of United Methodist doctrine and are in keeping with newer understandings of our historical doctrinal standards.”

Oliveto’s Unitarian teachings clearly contradict the articles of the United Methodist Doctrinal Standards publicly cited by Barnes.

And yet by dismissing the complaint, the top leadership of an entire region of the UMC—multiple bishops in addition to others—chose to defend and support the highest levels of United Methodism spreading an essentially Unitarian view of Jesus!

There is another level: of the entire global Council of Bishops (COB), under the leadership of Bishop Ken Carter (now of Western North Carolina) operating in blatant violation of the church law they promised to uphold, all to protect Unitarian teaching by a United Methodist bishop.

The 2016 General Conference amended church law, including with a subsequently ratified constitutional amendment, to stop accountability for bishops from being strictly regional. By the time of Barnes’s complaint, Discipline ¶413.3.d.ii required that, for complaints against American bishops, “If within 180 days of the receipt of the complaint … the supervisory response does not result in the resolution of the matter, and the president or secretary of the College of Bishops has not referred the matter as either an administrative or judicial complaint, then the matter will move to” a nation-wide panel of one bishop from each U.S. jurisdiction.

Since Hoshibata received the complaint by October 2018, the deadline passed by April 2018. The complaint process continued well beyond then.

The COB president was Bishop Ken Carter, then of Florida. Under his leadership, the COB was clearly required by church law to convene a nationwide panel to address this complaint beyond the Western Jurisdiction. However, Barnes reports, “that didn’t happen.”

Barnes shares that at the beginning of the complaint process, he wrote directly to Carter to notify him of his complaint, and after time went on with no resolution, he wrote Carter again, “asking him about the appointment of that panel which was supposed to happen.” The interview’s 49:58 mark, even displays the certified-mail receipt confirming that Carter indeed received Barnes’s letter on July 1, 2019.

But Barnes “never heard back” from Carter.

Separately, I emailed Carter in October 2019, asking him for the record how the COB, under his leadership, was implementing the new non-geographic accountability requirement in general, as well as specifically with this specific complaint, since nothing had been reported after the Christian Post first publicized it. Carter generally dodged my questions, although he notably did not deny, when asked, that the required national panel of bishops had never been convened for the Oliveto complaint. Despite at one point offering to “get a good and clear answer for you,” the most substantive on-record response he offered was: “Although I am the president of the Council of Bishops, I do not speak for the council on matters of church law.  That being said, I am advised by the legal advisor to the council that there are likely constitutional questions concerning ¶ 413.3d.”

This is simply a vague rationale for not convening the required panel. However, regardless of his advisor’s or anyone else’s opinion, as a bishop, Carter is obligated to obey such church laws unless and until they are invalidated by the Judicial Council or changed by a later General Conference.

In refusing to do so, Carter broke his sacred promise to God and the people of our denomination to do a bishop’s job of “guard[ing] the faith, order, liturgy, doctrine, and discipline of the Church” (¶403.1).

The failure of both Western Jurisdiction leaders and the Carter-led COB to uphold our doctrine and Discipline here is yet another example of the integrity of the UMC’s systems and processes collapsing under liberal political pressure.

Multiple other bishops, beyond the Western Jurisdiction, have been part of this pressure.

Oliveto’s bizarrely pro-demon, Jesus-criticizing theology was doubtless heard by Bishop Sally Dyck, who was a speaker at the same RMN event. Yet in 2017, she went out of her way to celebrate Oliveto being a bishop. Dyck is now, the UMC’s Ecumenical Officer, one of the top leaders of the COB.

Even after Oliveto’s infamous 2017 teaching, Sue Haupert-Johnson, then bishop of the North Georgia Conference (America’s largest-membership annual conference), and still a leader in Adam Hamilton’s liberal UMC Next caucus, went out of her way to praise Oliveto as “one of the finest bishops I’ve ever seen.”

A few weeks after Barnes filed his complaint, current COB president Thomas Bickerton of New York spoke at a liberal caucus event and, as we reported,

gave very high praise to “Bishop” Oliveto, remarking that he is awestruck by her current ministry. He even admiringly told her, “I can’t believe I’m standing on the turf where you preside as a bishop of the church.”

With such prominent support, it appears that even more orthodox UMC officials are too intimidated to challenge Oliveto’s Unitarian perversion of Methodist doctrine.

When Chicago Bishop Joseph Sprague infamously denied that Jesus was born the Christ and that he truly rose from the dead, Bishops Timothy Whitaker of Florida and Marion Edwards of North Carolina publicly challenged their colleague and defended orthodox doctrine.

But we have not seen a single United Methodist bishop with the courage and conviction to similarly challenge Oliveto.

Again, Oliveto’s essentially Unitarian teaching clearly contradicts the official, on-paper United Methodist Doctrinal Standards (Discipline Paragraph 104). But as Barnes observes, these “are not being treated as standards or cornerstones or guardrails, but more as museum pieces,” with the dismissal letter suggesting that “the [Methodist] Articles of Religion are what people believed in then, but this is what we believe in now.” As the PlainSpoken interview discusses, the Western Jurisdiction leadership’s dismissal suggests that the de facto reality is that the UMC is operating according to “a different set of Doctrinal Standards” into which Oliveto’s theology fits, but “the church in general does not have access to” what exactly these alternative doctrinal standards are.

Oliveto has apparently used these alternative standards to harshly judge congregations insufficiently enthusiastic about her leadership as not legitimately United Methodist.

But what is this alternative United Methodist doctrine that welcomes Unitarianism while abhorring a biblical view on marriage? It appears that each bishop is now effectively allowed to make individual decisions about which parts of the UMC Doctrinal Standards remain operative in his or her area, and which parts are replaced by “newer understandings.” This is the same approach bishops are already obviously taking with other parts of the Discipline, particularly marriage and ordination standards. This moves the UMC into less of a connectional denomination than an awkwardly regionalized confederacy of semi-autonomous fiefdoms of increasingly dictatorial bishops.

You may hear assurances about the UMC’s official, on-paper doctrine remaining orthodox. But such rhetoric flies against the reality of how leading bishops, caucuses, and delegates, as well as most U.S. United Methodist seminaries, have chosen to be complicit in establishing this new de facto reality how unbiblical and even Unitarian beliefs are accepted and encouraged in much of the United Methodist Church.

No bishops or district superintendents decrying this article should feel entitled to your trust if they are unwilling to clearly, publicly say, when their liberal friends can hear, that Oliveto’s teaching is unacceptable from a United Methodist bishop.