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I am watching from a distance as I see The United Methodist Church slowly disintegrate into irreconcilable factions led, kind of, by a group of paralyzed Bishops. At this point, they appear\u00a0to be unable to even come to a consensus on who to put on a committee to address the issues nibbling away and destroying our connection.<\/p>\n
The drive for purity, whether it be doctrinal purity\u00a0or purity of total inclusiveness, is the core of the problem.<\/p>\n
I observed with some amusement as the drive for purity started to play out in my personal life in a way that reflects the institutional disintegration.<\/p>\n
It all started for me with a clogged sink.<\/em><\/p>\n About four weeks ago, I was recovering from a necessary cardiac procedure. After several days of post-procedure malaise, I began to see life dawn again. It was a Sunday. We had attended worship, and then came home considering how to honor the day as Sabbath. I had just written a newspaper column on Sabbath practice<\/a> and wanted to live faithfully to my thoughts.<\/p>\n I was still moving with physical caution but sought \u00a0to do something healing both for myself and for our household, particularly as our home was showing signs of neglect during my recovery.<\/p>\n I washed my hands at the bathroom sink and thought, perhaps for the hundredth\u00a0time, \u201cI\u2019ve got to do something about that sink. It drains too slowly.\u201d<\/p>\n After about ten minutes of shoving the baking soda down and drenching it with vinegar followed by hot water, I heard a sudden \u201cglug, glug\u201d and then, voila!\u00a0the sink began to drain freely.<\/p>\n This little task, satisfactorily completed, started a marathon of \u201cDo it now!\u201d I\u2019ve cleaned closets and drawers, redone the flower beds to make the transition from summer to fall, re-potted numerous\u00a0pots that badly needed it, cleaned out my email inbox, re-ordered several thousand electronic files so I could find things more easily, handled hundreds of small tasks I normally tend to put off.<\/p>\n I began to exercise again, discovering to my amazement that I felt better than I had in years and years. I cleansed my diet\u2013nothing but healthy foods enter my system.<\/p>\n My husband and I are leaving town for a few weeks, so I have arranged for the papers and mail to be held or stopped, for someone to take care of the yard and plants, thought through all the things we might need for the trip and have everything ordered, neat, listed, ready to pack. We have a cleaning service and had decided to ask them to do a deep cleaning while we were gone since the normal cleaning would not be necessary.<\/p>\n 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\u2013they\u2019ve been here before and are great houseguests\u2013and told me later. Multiple houseguests are a part of our life and he had good reason to be confident that I would be delighted.<\/p>\n My inner reaction shocked me. I thought, \u201cBut I\u2019ll come home to extra sheets I need to wash and the deep cleaning won\u2019t get done and I won\u2019t have the perfectly ordered, very pure house!\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, my penchant for purity had pushed out my habit of hospitality<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Now, should there be limits to hospitality? Limits to whom I invite to stay in this home? Of course. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Purity makes us exclusionary.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n But the renewal movements in the UMC are very different. They don\u2019t seek to break down current walls but to build higher and tighter ones.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s just framed differently.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n At our last General Conference (May, 2016 where I served as part of the reporting team for the United Methodist Reporter<\/a>), 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.<\/p>\n We reached stalemate, very nearly shutting the entire UMC down at that point. I believe this is called \u201ccutting off your nose to spite your face.\u201d That\u2019s what happens with the insistence on purity.<\/p>\n The UMC plays the same game, just on a smaller playground.<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"bathroom-sink-vanity-sm\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/667\/2016\/09\/bathroom-sink-vanity-sm.jpg\")
I dawned on me: this could be my healing task. So I grabbed the baking soda and vinegar, two items I always keep on hand. I went to work. I pulled out the plug, removed the inevitable hair caught on it, and started my home-made treatment.<\/p>\nI was in control, or so I thought<\/h3>\n
\nI would leave a pure, orderly, everything-in-place house. I was in control. I would return to neatness and order.<\/p>\nPurity Excludes<\/h3>\n
UMC renewal movement seeks to build high, impenetrable walls<\/h3>\n
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On the right or conservative (or \u201corthodox\u201d 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\u2019s will.<\/p>\nWe need dirt to live and thrive<\/h3>\n
\nA giant problem with the purity push: we need dirt. Yes, it is true. We need to be dirty. The more \u201cpure\u201d we try to make our environments, the sicker those very environments become. Consider how the extreme conservatives managed to shut down the US government in 2013. They\u2019d rather massive numbers of people get badly hurt than compromise one of their \u201cpure\u201d conservative principles.<\/p>\n
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