Two women stood before King Solomon in 1 Kings 3:16-28 with one baby, both claiming it was theirs. So Solomon offered to cut it in two. The woman who actually loved the baby was willing to give it up rather than see it die. The other woman had become so embittered by their argument that she didn\u2019t care if the baby lived or died; what mattered to her was to see the other woman get punished\u00a0<\/em>so that they would both suffer the same grief. It\u2019s an excellent metaphor for today\u2019s conversation about schism in the United Methodist Church. Thinking that we can \u201camicably separate\u201d and create two denominations out of one given the theological diversity within each of our thousands of congregations is about as wise as cutting a living baby in half. It\u2019s a question of whether our ideological commitments, whichever side we\u2019re on, trump the value of the lives and communities that will be torn apart. The question each of us in our respective vantage points face is what control we are willing to renounce unilaterally<\/em> so that the baby can live.<\/p>\n I live in two very different realities of United Methodism. On the Internet, United Methodism is a disaster. People with decades of experience as pastors are slinging mud at each other like a bunch of adolescents in a high school cafeteria. The United Methodist Church of Facebook absolutely needs to schism. And every day that passes without schism is absolutely unbearable. The conservatives should only post in United Methodists for Truth: Doctrinal Discussions for those who are Unafraid<\/em>. And the progressives should only post in The New Methodists<\/em> or Progressive United Methodists<\/em>. And we should either delete the United Methodist Clergy<\/em> group altogether or make it into a DMZ where any post about the topic of homosexuality will be immediately deleted.<\/p>\n All the people who say that they\u2019ve been paralyzed from doing ministry and can\u2019t move forward unless we schism tomorrow because of our intractable conflict over homosexuality can\u2019t seem to stop investing hours of their time each day into \u201cfacebooking\u201d that conflict. It\u2019s such an irresistible addiction for us, and it just seems so clear to me how plainly Satan is using the abstraction of our social media battlegrounds to destroy our church. It may be the case that there are parts of the country where Methodists are as ugly to each other in person as they are online, but that\u2019s certainly not true in my Virginia Conference.<\/p>\n Every year for Lent, I stay off of social media and blogging. During that time, I experience only the non-Facebook side of United Methodism, and that world is thriving. I serve in a theologically and politically diverse congregation where people put aside their differences to serve God together and grow in their faith. Since I grew up evangelical, I have a particular heart for those in our congregation who share my evangelical background, which means that the people I\u2019m closest to here are actually those most likely to disagree with me about homosexuality. I don\u2019t actually know for sure where they fall on the issue, because it hasn\u2019t been relevant to their discipleship to go there in conversation; we simply have too many other things about Jesus to talk about and be inspired by.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the thing. In our congregation, homosexuality is not \u201cthe elephant in the room\u201d that absolutely needs to get addressed and resolved one way or another as soon as possible or everyone will be bald from ripping their hair out. We\u2019re not avoiding conflict when we don\u2019t talk about it; we\u2019re just dealing with what\u2019s relevant to the discipleship within our community as it comes up. At this point, we have a few LGBT people who worship with us. We also have some people who left the liberal Presbyterians for our church because of<\/em> United Methodism\u2019s stance against same-sex marriage. We also have some parents of LGBT kids who grew up at our church who stopped worshiping with us after the 2012 General Conference.<\/p>\n The fact that there\u2019s a Reconciling Ministries Network within United Methodism gives me a foot in the door with the parents of LGBT kids who have been discouraged and stopped coming. I have told them that if they want to start a conversation at our church about being more openly inclusive of LGBT people, that I would support them in that. But I\u2019m not going to push the issue myself. The initiative has to come from them. If it brings people back around to talk about it, then I\u2019m okay with talking about it because then there\u2019s a discipleship reason to do so. Because my job as a pastor is to focus on the discipleship of my congregation.<\/p>\n From my vantage point, that\u2019s what I\u2019m willing to give up so that the \u201cbaby\u201d can live. I have shared on my blog before that several LGBT Christians were instrumental in my spiritual development. The first Methodist church where I worshiped, Central Avenue UMC in Toledo, Ohio, was mostly gay. I have every reason to be a hard-core activist on this issue. It hurts me deeply that the people who taught me the gospel as I understand it are viewed as unfit for spiritual leadership. Every time people say presumptuous, ugly things about gay people, they\u2019re saying in effect that I am spiritually deformed because of how I was mentored by gay people. To paraphrase Psalm 69:9, the insults of those who insult them always fall on me too.<\/p>\n In spite of all this, I\u2019m not going to push any agenda on any congregation I serve that isn\u2019t primarily shaped by my prayerful assessment of their needs for discipleship. If there were a critical mass of people who were deeply concerned about the issue and wanted to have some kind of dialogue, then I would support it and I would try my absolute hardest to make sure both sides of the argument were represented as fairly as possible and not set up a situation in which anyone could feel afterwards that one side had \u201cwon\u201d and the other side had \u201clost.\u201d<\/p>\n This actually came up in a sermon series we did this year called \u201cWrestling.\u201d In order to try to draw people from the community, we covered controversial topics, including sexuality. At first, I was going to try to make my case for my view on homosexuality in my sermon, but God stopped me with an angel in the road like he did to Balaam and convicted me that what I needed to do was not to argue my personal opinion but provide a word from him about sexuality that my people could apply to their lives of discipleship.<\/p>\n So what does it look like for you to be like the woman who stood before Solomon willing to give her son to another woman who had killed her baby and lied about it just so that this son could live? What control are you willing to give up wherever you stand in order that the Methodist baby might live? If you\u2019re on the progressive side, are you willing to honor the boundaries of the Discipline<\/em> in order to stay in good faith conversation with the conservatives? If you\u2019re on the conservative side, are you willing to dialogue about how to structurally create a means for strongly pro-LGBT congregations to follow their convictions that isn\u2019t going to force your congregation to abandon its convictions? If you\u2019re in the middle, are you willing to resist the temptation to heap self-satisfied scorn on both sides and instead play the role of a bridge-builder and try your best to represent each side to the other side in a way that would build sympathy and respect?<\/p>\n People who are so sucked into the tyranny of the argument that they sneer at the logistical nightmare of schism and say things like \u201cWhatever, we\u2019ve already schismed\u201d or \u201cYou\u2019re just worried about your pension\u201d are like the woman who just needed to see somebody else get punished and didn\u2019t give a damn if a baby died to make that happen. Jesus died for our sins to give us the freedom to be unilaterally gracious to one another. If we answer back to the question of what are we willing to give up so that United Methodism will live with some retort about what the other side has done, then we show that we haven\u2019t really accepted Jesus\u2019 sacrifice for ourselves. If your concern is with making sure that \u201cbad behavior\u201d doesn\u2019t go \u201cunpunished,\u201d then what do you say that Jesus\u2019 cross was for?<\/p>\n Any conversation about \u201cmoving forward\u201d should be entirely pragmatic and gracious instead of punitive. I suspect that the vast majority of United Methodist congregations in our country are in the middle like mine is. To try to force my congregation or the majority of other UMC congregations like us to pick between two denominations who split over the gay issue would be absolutely catastrophic. My hope is that those who recognize our primary mission to be making disciples of Jesus Christ will make sure that anyone who is pushing a schismatic agenda, whether conservative or progressive, is not<\/strong><\/span> part of the General Conference delegation in 2016. Those of us who care about the survival of the church should be pulling together a list of names of people that we are not going to bubble in at our annual conferences.<\/p>\n If we\u2019re able to accept the freedom and grace Jesus\u2019 cross has given us to think pragmatically instead of punitively, then the life of the Methodist baby has to matter more than our ideological purity. We need to provide a gracious means for congregations on the two extremes to live out their convictions faithfully; and we need to protect the continued vitality and peace within congregations that are in the middle. Forcing the middle to split because you can\u2019t bear the thought of sharing a denomination with the \u201crebels\u201d or \u201cbigots\u201d on the other side is being exactly like the woman who was willing to cut a baby in half.<\/p>\n As I transition from my work in a moderately conservative United Methodist congregation to an openly Reconciling United Methodist campus ministry, some things will change and some things won\u2019t. I intend to provide a safe space for LGBT Christians at Tulane University who might not be accepted in other campus ministries. I will give them the same counsel about pursuing holiness with their bodies amidst the debaucherous \u201chook-up culture\u201d of college life that I give to straight students. For college kids, being gay or straight is kind of a moot point. Fornication is sinful and destructive to our discipleship whatever the gender of our partner.<\/p>\n Because of my commitment to a good faith conversation within United Methodism, I will not attempt to conduct same-sex marriages unless the Discipline<\/em> changes. Also, I\u2019m going to try my best to give a fairer representation of the traditionalist perspective than I have in the past if we have any kind of dialogue about the issue. That seems like what I can do in my new ministry setting to let the Methodist baby live. What are you willing to give up?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two women stood before King Solomon in 1 Kings 3:16-28 with one baby, both claiming it was theirs. So Solomon offered to cut it in two. The woman who actually loved the baby was willing to give it up rather than see it die. The other woman had become so embittered by their argument that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1934,"featured_media":8857,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[108,109,334,616,1236,1588,1902,2200,2243,2496,2604,2816,2821],"class_list":["post-8856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-1-kings-3","tag-1-kings-316-28","tag-baby","tag-conservative","tag-homosexuality","tag-lgbt","tag-moderate","tag-progressive","tag-psalm-699","tag-schism","tag-solomon","tag-umc","tag-united-methodism"],"yoast_head":"\n