Monday Miscellany, 11/17/25

The UMC is now divided into eight regional conferences: Africa, Congo, West Africa, Central and Southern Europe, Germany, Northern Europe and Eurasia, Philippines, and the United States. Each region now has authority to craft its own operational rules, including whether to accept LGBTQ people as ordained clergy and to allow UMC clergy to perform same-sex marriages.

This change has been in the works for five years.  It originally was intended to prevent the African and Asian churches from continuing to vote down the Americans’ attempt to liberalize church teachings on LGBTQ issues.  The American Methodists would have autonomy, allowing them to change church teachings at will.  After the split, the Americans have pushed through the reorganization to keep the African and Asian church bodies within the larger denomination, allowing them to have the autonomy to refuse to go along with the liberalized teachings.

The change is being heralded in woke terms as “decolonizing” the churches.  In the words of the church official, “Regionalization is the opportunity to de-center the church so that it isn’t a U.S.-dominated church but that United Methodism in every region is a unique expression of the church.”

But the colonialist spirit isn’t quite done away with.  The news story reports,

Almost overlooked in debates about regionalization, inclusiveness and racism was the amendment that standardizes educational requirements for those eligible to vote for clergy delegates to General Conference. The General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, which proposed the legislation, said the amendment’s intent was to ensure clergy delegates had sufficient education to understand and adapt the UMC’s theology and structure. Opponents contended the high-level educational requirement disenfranchised nonseminary-trained pastors.

The condescension, elitism, and liberal racism remain in the assumption that potential delegates from the new regional conferences of Congo or West Africa may not have “sufficient education to understand and adapt the UMC’s theology.”  Knowledge of the Bible is not enough; to be acceptable, clergy must have knowledge of progressive theology as taught by UMC seminaries.

Meanwhile, the Global Methodist Church, the international church body formed by congregations leaving the liberal United Methodists, has grown to over 6,000 churches.

BBC Heads Resign Over Bias

On January 6, 2021, President Trump gave a speech in which he said, “We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Fifty-four minutes later, in another context, President Trump said, “and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”

The BBC edited out the part about “peacefully and patriotically” and spliced in what was said nearly an hour later, making President Trump say this:  “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”  Thus making it sound like Trump was inciting the rioters at the Capitol building.

In the U.S.A., if a news network edits Trump to make him look bad, we’d say, of course it did.  Nothing new about that.  But this was a particularly flagrant example not only of bias but of the willingness to falsify the news in support of that bias.

An official UK watchdog caught the whopper and wrote a memo to the BBC board that also  cited other examples of bias in its anti-Israeli coverage of the Hamas war and on LGBTQ issues.  For example, the BBC disciplined a newsreader for adding the explanatory word “women” to a script referring to “pregnant people.”

In response, the head of the BBC and its news director both resigned.  At least the Brits tend to have the integrity to resign when they are caught misbehaving.

This controversy came at a time when the government is considering changes in the funding and operation of the BBC.  The Wall Street Journal explains:

The BBC is a “public broadcaster” in a way that would shock Americans. Any household that watches live television—even if they never watch the BBC—must pay an annual television tax of £174.50 called the license fee, or face a fine of £1,000. The tax generates £3.8 billion in annual revenue, despite falling household compliance.

The public is tired of that arrangement, which uses taxpayer money to shelter the network from market pressures, so the network is suddenly becoming responsive to criticism.