Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it

While not surprising, given all we've learned this semester, the comparison between how the United Methodist Church handled/handles issues of racism and how the church handled/handles issues of sexuality are striking.  We've discussed issues of slavery/race already, but we haven't discussed the debate regarding sexuality as much.

Richey outlines the the inception and continued debate over issues of human sexuality from 1968 - 2000.  He notes that the UMC, as progressive and forward thinking as the church seemed to be about some things, also housed a more conservative contingent.  This perhaps isn't surprising either, as some of the rhetoric coming out of the temperance movement appeared pretty conservative too, but in contrast to the progressive energy from parts of the denomination, it stands in contrast.  Richey goes on to say that the UMC was resistant to the socio-cultural environment post World War II, particularly related to sexuality.  After hearing the current debates on this issue, it makes sense that the UMC has always resisted properly addressing this issue.  His description of how the language of "incompatible with Christian teaching" ended up in the Principles, and the BOD, fascinates and horrifies.

As Richey outlines the debate on whether or not the sexuality of a clergy person matters, I was struck by the reaction of the COB in 1984.  Even then, there was resistance to claiming any authoritative response to issues of sexuality; by saying each conference can do its own thing, there was seemingly no leadership on how the UMC should actually address the issue.  This book stops in 2000, but as we've seen every quadrennium since, this issue gets more and more polarizing.  The COB was asked in 2016 to take a stand on this issue by identifying a path for the UMC to address this issue so we can move on, one way or another.

Given the history of the UMC and how we have dealt with this issue for the last 40 years, I wonder what it will look like to have the COB, based on the Commission, take a stand and give us a direction in which to go.

I also wonder how Wesley would have seen this issue, how he would have handled it.  I used to think that he would be all about inclusion, making disciples, and all of that, but after learning in this class all of the nuanced limitations placed on leadership, I'm not so sure he would advocate for the ordination of not straight humans.  That said, he wouldn't have been okay with ordaining women either, so it's probably good that his preferences aren't the only guide marks in our denomination/theology.

War, Peace, & the UMC

In American Methodism:  A Compact History, Richey discusses the multitude of major issues the UMC faced upon its creation, let alone the US.  The biggest issue, of course, was race.  However, I do find it important to also to bring up the other hot topic, namely the Vietnam War.  Three of the first five resolutions dealt with war and peace in the first edition of The Book of Resolutions of The United Methodist Church:  1968; the first being called "U.S. Policy in Vietnam." Considering the UMC's initial social principles regarding military service and composition of the first BOR, I wonder how important the Vietnam War actually was to the merger that created the UMC.  How would the development of our Social Principles, even into the 21st century, be different if war and peace weren't such a prevalent issue in 1968?

What in tarnation...

Until the university severed its ties with the denomination in 1914, Vanderbilt Divinity School was under the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1958, James Lawson- raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion tradition- is attending Vanderbilt Divinity School and using Wesley's example of nonviolent response to mobs opposed to his teaching (Dickerson, 313). How, 140 years after Wesley condemns the enslavement and dehumanization of black people in his Thoughts Upon Slavery, are entire universities being founded by a Methodist tradition that existed simply because of its preference for continuing slavery? How, 184 years after the same condemnation, is Lawson being expelled from an institution founded on Methodism? What breakdowns allowed theologies originating from one tradition stray so far from one another (MECS and AMEZ)? What were MECS members saying of Wesley’s words on the matter?

Unification, and what it meant for the Laity

The Unification of the United Methodist Church is something so far removed from my lifetime that it always feels more distant than it actually is. It always felt as a child growing up in a rural enviroment that the United Methodist Church had always been there, and it wasn't until I was older that I realized it wasn't until 1968. But how could this be the case?

I have to wonder how much the liturgy changed for the laity. Though there was a brand new hymnal as I was growing up(the one we still use today), there still was only one hymnal prior to our current one, which I still find used in Sunday School classes even today. But even so, I heard very little about any problems with becoming a single church: from the liturgy, to the identity of the UMC, to any number of issues that would come from merging an organization. It was as if time only started for the church in 1968, rather than the church having anything to fall back on prior to that.

A Bouquet of Live Wires

Richey's Compact History ends in the year 2000, a time quite removed from the political and cultural forces shaping our current state in the UMC.  However, the issues haven't changed much:  Richey, in chapters 11 and 12, touches on racism, homosexuality, abortion, elder care, divorce, female leadership, and the Church's relationship to war.  With the possible exception of elder care, each of these is still An Issue in conference conversations, especially in last year's scorching General Conference.  Most of these are things that we increasingly don't want to touch in any one-to-one setting, preferring to leave them alone or contain them to the pulpit or denominational gathering.

Knowing that the most important things are rarely ever solved and thus of course keep returning but that our current trend of either ignoring them in hopes of politeness or grabbing hold of them with such force that we harm ourselves and others is unsustainable, how do we as United Methodist leaders take these conversations to the lay level?  (How do we especially as Vandy students learn to have these conversations in ways that honor all the viewpoints brought to the table?)  And in what ways can we partner with other denominations and faith traditions struggling through the same pains (e.g. Unitarian Universalism and their recent conversations about racism in leadership, the Church of the Brethren and their conversations about sexuality, the PC[USA] and its engagement in divestment and moves toward denunciations of war)?  We must, after all, be careful to avoid "agitating conferences with resolutions and proposals" since "such advocacy had the effect of focusing United Methodism on itself" (202) and we should not be our own target audience.

Methodist Interaction

As a child, I had no clue that there was any kind of Methodist other than a United Methodist. Reading through Warner's article brought up a few related questions--how aware were the different sects of Methodism of each other at the laity level? How much did the denominations tend to overlap geographically versus how much did they kind of claim their own territories? Were the denominations that were more open to the ordination of women centered in any certain area?

Dickerson's Outline of the AME Lineage

The Dickerson article outlines how African-American Methodism affected the modern civil rights movement. He mentions that the theology and ethos for slave liberation are "embedded" within this Methodist movement, citing Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois as leaders of a nascent civil rights movement that led to the one we are all familiar with headed up by Martin Luther King, Jr. They adopted a "Wesleyan social holiness" that informed their social justice work to end societal discrimination by demanding a re-creation of God's kingdom of salvation on earth. Dickerson brings up civil rights leaders whom I had not previously identified, including our familiar Richard Allen, Henry M. Turner, and A. Philip Randolph, who worked tirelessly through both governmental and grassroots movements to promote non-violence, which in turn affected the tactics of the 1960s movements. Archibald J. Carey, Jr. also took these tactics but moreover worked within the government itself, which I found surprising for the era before the 60s. In particular, I loved reading about Rosa Parks simply because we have the same hometown - and I had no idea she worked to investigate rape victims. In general, the article does a very good job of establishing the connection between the AME civil rights leaders' work that led to and helped catalyze the 1960s civil rights movements, and it clarified the nature of the pacifism rise within the movement due to these leaders' academic interactions.