United Methodist Bishops Can No Longer Hold Complaints in Abeyance

The United Methodist Church’s supreme court, the Judicial Council, has just dealt a notable blow to the disobedience movement overwhelming our denomination. In Decision #1483, the Judicial Council essentially outlawed the practice of liberal bishops refusing to hold clergy accountable by simply declaring that complaints against clergy violating biblical United Methodist standards “will be held in abeyance” when the bishop does not feel like enforcing the standards at issue. 

This pulls the rug out from under a main tactic that bishops have recently used to protect liberal activist clergy who choose to violate the UMC’s biblical standards on marriage and sex. 

Yes, the clear public record shows that across the connection, many liberal United Methodist clergy have enjoyed free rein to defy both the basic doctrine of what the UMC Doctrinal Standards teach about Jesus Christ and the rules of the UMC’s supposedly governing Book of Discipline for clergy behavior. And yes, many United Methodist bishops are complicit in choosing to allow or even encourage this to happen. 

But there is an important nuance that many miss. In most cases outside of the U.S. Western Jurisdiction, when faced with a formal complaint against activist ministers violating our rules against performing a same-sex wedding or being sexually active outside of monogamous, heterosexual marriage, liberal U.S. bishops have usually tried to avoid crossing the line of saying, “well, I as the bishop am just going to openly disobey what the Discipline requires me to do here.” Instead, they have preferred seeking gaps in church law in order to effectively allow clergy to violate these standards with no real accountability, while rather Pharisaically claiming that as bishops, they personally are technically not violating the letter of the law, somehow. 

Indeed, at the 2022 North Central Jurisdictional Conference, I observed a gay activist clergyman use a public meeting to urge an episcopal candidate (who was later elected bishop) to not just find creative work-arounds within the Book of Discipline to accommodate non-celibate gay clergy, but to actually have the courage to “break the Discipline” in order to pander to such clergy. He sounded a bit frustrated in his demands.   

When the 2019 UMC General Conference adopted the Traditional Plan, it essentially closed several of these key loopholes on which liberal bishops and others had relied.

When the Traditional Plan took effect in January 2020, liberal bishops discovered a new trick for threading the needle of allowing defiance of our supposedly governing Discipline by clergy below them while still claiming that they were technically not getting their hands dirty by personally, directly violating the Discipline. They could just declare that all complaints against clergy who violate the United Methodist Discipline’s biblical standards related to homosexuality would be “held in abeyance,” indefinitely! 

Since then, numerous bishops have made such declarations. New U.S. bishops elected in 2022 have been expected to extend these United Methodist abeyances. This expectation was emphasized by all five U.S. jurisdictions, at the same meetings that elected these new bishops, overwhelmingly adopting almost identically worded resolutions entitled the “Queer Delegates’ Resolution to Center Justice and Empowerment for LGBTQIA+ People in the UMC.” Among other things, this resolution “Affirms the spirit of the abeyance or moratorium as proposed to the General Conference…until changes can be made in The United Methodist Book of Discipline.” 

As a delegate to the North Central Jurisdiction, I prepared, publicly read, and duly submitted a legal challenge to this resolution, in the form of a request for a decision of law. A member of our UMAction Steering Committee submitted a similar challenge in the South Central Jurisdiction. 

In Decision #1483, the Judicial Council issued a combined ruling on both challenges. 

Aside from the affirmation of United Methodist abeyances, Judicial Council members had some disagreement with each other over the implications and permissibility of other parts of the resolution. That involves somewhat ambiguous questions and fuzzy boundaries over such minutiae as the technical extent of the differences between “imploring” and “urging” vs. “encouraging” or “requiring” certain actions. It re-affirmed the longstanding principle that annual and jurisdictional conferences may pass resolutions that aspirationally hope for some future change in the UMC as long as they do not in the meantime amount to any “call to action” that violates the present standards of church law.

Much more consequentially, the Judicial Council was unanimous in officially making clear that bishops cannot “hold in abeyance” complaints against clergy violating United Methodist standards related to homosexuality, or other standards that bishops simply don’t feel like enforcing. 

As I pointed out to the Judicial Council before they made this decision, the only time where the word “abeyance” appears in the Discipline is in Paragraph 362.1.g.  As my submitted legal briefs explained, this provision imposes certain limits on holding United Methodist complaints in abeyance, requiring the abeyance to be regularly reviewed and preventing any abeyance from being a unilateral action from the bishop—both of which are a far cry from how liberal bishops have issued blanket declarations that they will indefinitely hold some complaints in abeyance, with no checks or balances. 

More fundamentally, ¶362.1.g clearly states that United Methodist complaint abeyances are only an option if “civil authorities are involved or their involvement is imminent on matters covered by the complaint.” Waiting for police to complete an investigation is generally not a concern for clergy accused of violating the UMC’s marriage standards. 

So the Judicial Council’s unanimous ruling, now authoritatively binding in every region of the UMC, is that “It is only in the context of ongoing or imminent civil or criminal proceedings that abeyance can be contemplated.”

So not only has this key provision of the “Queer Delegates” resolution now been invalidated, but the Judicial Council has more broadly clarified that in our church law, United Methodists may not use or even “contemplate” abeyances for clergy accountability matters not involving any sort of criminal proceedings. 

These decisions come on the heels of the Judicial Council’s recently affirming the ruling of Bishop David Bard that a conference adopting a liberal resolution on marriage and sex, such as the North Central Jurisdiction did in 2021, does not “limit or restrict the rights or obligations of bishops, district superintendents, counsels for the church, committees on investigation, trial courts, boards of ordained ministry, or district committees on ministry to fully comply with and uphold Paragraphs 304.1-3, 341.6, 362, 635, 2701, 2702, 2704, 2706, and 2711 of The Book of Discipline” (provisions forbidding gay weddings and “self-avowed practicing homosexual” clergy). That ruling resulted from another legal challenge I submitted as a North Central Jurisdiction delegate.

To be fair, the idea of widespread United Methodist “abeyances” for sexuality-related complaints originated with the “Protocol on Reconciliation and Grace through Separation.” Apart from its legislation, it included paired moratoria in which the 16 Protocol Mediation Team members agreed to delay closures of congregations and also support holding in abeyance “all administrative or judicial processes addressing restrictions in the Book of Discipline related to self-avowed practicing homosexuals or same-sex weddings” from January 2020 until the end of the post-separation UMC’s General Conference. However, this was never binding on anyone other than the 16 original Protocol signatories, and never had authority to supersede any requirements of the Discipline.

Furthermore, this talk of abeyances was agreed to with the understanding that it would be extremely limited in scope. The initial stage of any complaint filed against a wayward minister takes up to four months and can take longer for complaints against bishops), and at the time the Protocol Agreement was announced, the next General Conference (which would then take the proper steps to formalize moratoria and abeyances in church law) was scheduled to meet in about four months. Traditionalist supporters of the Protocol never intended to agree to a new system extending indefinitely across multiple years of liberal bishops creating new facts on the ground and establishing a new de facto reality of transforming our denomination into one that actually does allow clergy to have same-sex partners and officiate gay weddings. 

In any case, provision I.5 of the Protocol Agreement was clear that the line about complaint abeyances “shall not be severable from the remainder of the Protocol.” But then after the major, painful concessions the Protocol demanded exclusively from traditionalists were effectively secure, liberal bishops and caucus leaders on the Mediation Team cynically abandoned their end of the bargain, in some cases by being part of the angry political campaign to prevent General Conference from meeting and adopting the Protocol in 2022.

Meanwhile, our denomination’s slow-motion separation has been made much more painful than it needs to be because of heavy-handed bishops and other annual conference officials choosing to make it more difficult and costly, often prohibitively so, for traditionalist congregations to disaffiliate. Such officials sanctimoniously offer such assurances as “there is no reason for traditionalists to leave the UMC” and “you will still be fully welcome in the UMC even if you believe marriage is only for one man and one woman.” If such promises have any honesty and sincerity—beyond what one “Stay UMC” bishop described as a message of “You are welcome if you stay quiet and pay your apportionments”—then those bishops, district superintendents, and others making such assurances, without any clear limitation or qualification, should expect traditionalists remaining in the UMC to continue promoting and defending our values. 

How could anyone expect us to do otherwise?  After all, this is still our church. And the assurances we hear of “you traditionalists are welcome to stay” is very different from “you are only welcome to stay IF you abandon traditionalist beliefs.”

When we see those who have been entrusted with set-apart leadership as clergy betray that trust by choosing to violate our biblical standards, there is nothing mean-spirited about challenging such misbehavior through our Discipline’s established complaint process. Rather, this is a matter of lovingly defending our connectional church from harm from those who have chosen to abuse the ministerial office, ideally leading to repentance and restoration.

On a practical level, even when clergy violate our sexuality standards, I do not expect many formal complaints in annual conferences in which traditionalist congregations have been allowed to disaffiliate without any bullying, intimidation, additional barriers, or restrictions on free speech from their bishop and other conference officials. Where the truly traditionalist constituency is all gone, who would be left to file a complaint?

But in the many situations in which congregations have been coerced into remaining, for now, with the rapidly changing UMC, this does not mean that their theologically traditionalist members suddenly stop being theologically traditionalist.

We are always called to pursue and defend faithfulness in whatever denominational situation we may find ourselves.

For those remaining in the UMC interested in protecting our denomination from the harm of clergy betraying our denomination’s biblical standards, we at UMAction are happy to be a resource for you.