Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Mercy Not Sacrifice

Home
About
My Book
Archives
More
- Theology
- Culture
- Politics
- Sermons
- Bible
- Devotions
- Daily Office
- Podcast

Home
Progressive Christian
Should the #UMC ask King Solomon how to cut a baby in half?

Should the #UMC ask King Solomon how to cut a baby in half?

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 10:17 am by Morgan Guyton

Should the #UMC ask King Solomon how to cut a baby in half? 2014-07-17T10:17:19-05:00 Morgan Guyton

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

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’t care if the baby lived or died; what mattered to her was to see the other woman get punished so that they would both suffer the same grief. It’s an excellent metaphor for today’s conversation about schism in the United Methodist Church. Thinking that we can “amicably separate” 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’s a question of whether our ideological commitments, whichever side we’re 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 so that the baby can live.

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. And the progressives should only post in The New Methodists or Progressive United Methodists. And we should either delete the United Methodist Clergy group altogether or make it into a DMZ where any post about the topic of homosexuality will be immediately deleted.

All the people who say that they’ve been paralyzed from doing ministry and can’t move forward unless we schism tomorrow because of our intractable conflict over homosexuality can’t seem to stop investing hours of their time each day into “facebooking” that conflict. It’s 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’s certainly not true in my Virginia Conference.

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’m closest to here are actually those most likely to disagree with me about homosexuality. I don’t actually know for sure where they fall on the issue, because it hasn’t 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.

That’s the thing. In our congregation, homosexuality is not “the elephant in the room” 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’re not avoiding conflict when we don’t talk about it; we’re just dealing with what’s 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 United Methodism’s 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.

The fact that there’s 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’m 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’m okay with talking about it because then there’s a discipleship reason to do so. Because my job as a pastor is to focus on the discipleship of my congregation.

From my vantage point, that’s what I’m willing to give up so that the “baby” 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’re 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.

In spite of all this, I’m not going to push any agenda on any congregation I serve that isn’t 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 “won” and the other side had “lost.”

This actually came up in a sermon series we did this year called “Wrestling.” 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.

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’re on the progressive side, are you willing to honor the boundaries of the Discipline in order to stay in good faith conversation with the conservatives? If you’re 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’t going to force your congregation to abandon its convictions? If you’re 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?

People who are so sucked into the tyranny of the argument that they sneer at the logistical nightmare of schism and say things like “Whatever, we’ve already schismed” or “You’re just worried about your pension” are like the woman who just needed to see somebody else get punished and didn’t 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’t really accepted Jesus’ sacrifice for ourselves. If your concern is with making sure that “bad behavior” doesn’t go “unpunished,” then what do you say that Jesus’ cross was for?

Any conversation about “moving forward” 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 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.

If we’re able to accept the freedom and grace Jesus’ 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’t bear the thought of sharing a denomination with the “rebels” or “bigots” on the other side is being exactly like the woman who was willing to cut a baby in half.

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’t. 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 “hook-up culture” 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.

Because of my commitment to a good faith conversation within United Methodism, I will not attempt to conduct same-sex marriages unless the Discipline changes. Also, I’m 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?

Previous Post

June 3, 2014

When "the Bible is perfectly clear" becomes the reason it can't teach us anything

Next Post

June 7, 2014 Pentecost: when God rebels against her handlers

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Advent Beauty Will Save the World Bible Big Picture: Ephesians Bloggers Book Christian salvation and the Beautitudes Culture Daily Office Danceable Homiletics Deadly Sins Deep Roots: Genesis Devotions Dominican Republic May 2011 El Principio Misericordia (The Mercy Principle) Five verses God tattooed on my heart Fundraising FutureGospel Good Biblical Words Henri Nouwen Interview Jennings' Christian Imagination Jesus inside the beltway Jesus Is My Candidate Jesus vs the Pharisees Jesus vs. Plato Journey to Eternity Looking Back on 2012 Love Actually Monday Merton Monday Merton Music Occupy the manger On Earth As It Is In Heaven Original Sin Podcast Poetry Politics Prayer Psalm 119 Radical Jesus 101 Reviews Sermon on the Mount Sermons Spanish Bible study Special Series Spiritual but not religious Synchroblog Theology Things that made me think Thomas a Kempis Ugliness Into Beauty Uncategorized Viaje Dominicano 2013 Walking in the Valley (Lent) Welcome: It's More than a Mat Wild Goose 2013 Wrestling

Select a Month March 2022 January 2022 December 2021 September 2021 April 2021 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

I hid two spies on my roof and tied a scarlet cord in my window to save my family. Who am I?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Ruth Tamar Rahab Deborah