I would leave a pure, orderly, everything-in-place house. I was in control. I would return to neatness and order.
Several days ago, my husband told me that a relative phoned. She and a friend would be coming to town in our absence and wondered if they could stay at the house for three days. He immediately agreed–they’ve been here before and are great houseguests–and told me later. Multiple houseguests are a part of our life and he had good reason to be confident that I would be delighted.
My inner reaction shocked me. I thought, “But I’ll come home to extra sheets I need to wash and the deep cleaning won’t get done and I won’t have the perfectly ordered, very pure house!”
In other words, my penchant for purity had pushed out my habit of hospitality.
Purity Excludes
Now, should there be limits to hospitality? Limits to whom I invite to stay in this home? Of course. That’s not the point. The point is this: the more we aim for purity, the less open we are to anything . . . and that also, unfortunately, means less openness to the Spirit of God.
Purity makes us exclusionary.
Anytime we see vibrant renewal movements, both written about in Scripture and in history, we see something far more akin to chaos than order and purity. Different people finding God in new and powerful ways make it necessary for the organizations they enter to expand and adapt. The organizations either make room for them OR the incomers will simply break off and create their own church structures.
That’s what happened with the earliest Jesus-followers. They were Jews, seeing no need to leave their Judaism behind in their belief of Jesus. The splits happened because some within the existing structure could not or would not make the necessary adaptions to honor the renewal movement God had brought. Actually, they denied God had done anything or could possibly want to break such careful boundaries.
UMC renewal movement seeks to build high, impenetrable walls
But the renewal movements in the UMC are very different. They don’t seek to break down current walls but to build higher and tighter ones.
On the right or conservative (or “orthodox” as they tend to term themselves), we have Good News and now the quickly organized WCA (Wesleyan Covenant Association). Both are purity movements: pure doctrine (strict evangelical, inerrant Scripture with minimal room for alternative hermeneutical approaches); both exclude anyone who does not agree that God created humans with a rigid sexual binary. Both insist anyone who will not live out of that binary is living in opposition to God’s will.
But they are not the only inhospitable ones in their fight for doctrinal purity. It is just as exclusive on the left or the liberal (or the more-like-Jesus group, as they tend to term themselves), with the Reconciling Ministries Network: a demand that all agree fully that God blesses all sorts of alternative human sexualities. This, again, is a drive for purity that pushes out hospitality. It’s just framed differently.
Both extremes have compelling biblical and theological arguments that support their cases. Both are irreconcilably divisive because those compelling arguments led to radically different stances and neither side will agree that the other viewpoints have legitimacy.
At our last General Conference (May, 2016 where I served as part of the reporting team for the United Methodist Reporter), the two factions operated pretty much like the Republicans and the Democrats in our state and national houses of congress: If one side proposed a piece of legislation, the other side would automatically and unthinkingly oppose it.
We reached stalemate, very nearly shutting the entire UMC down at that point. I believe this is called “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” That’s what happens with the insistence on purity.
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