How Long O Lord?
Since returning from General Conference, I have been unable to shake the feeling that the United Methodist Church is engaged in yet another cycle of “history repeating itself”. As both a student and teacher of church history, I was not only saddened but also frightened to hear discussion that mirrored dialogue of earlier eras which we now look back on with embarrassment and even shame. Names and faces have changed but the patterns and likely effects are startlingly the same.
From biblical times the religious community has feared that change in the way we experience human community will somehow diminish God. That fear has often resulted in fevered identification and subsequent persecution, oppression or destruction of the perceived “enemy”. By these cleansings we seem to believe we will be able to safeguard the faith.
Jesus met his death at the hands of a religious establishment which was fearful that the perspective he brought threatened the dĕtente precariously negotiated between Temple and Caesar. (“It is better for one person to die for the people,” John 18:14).
The Book of Acts documents the exclusionary inclination of the early church (Peter’s rooftop dream and the Jerusalem Council).
In each setting the religious community sought to conserve what it understood to be sacred by isolating or sacrificing individuals or even entire populations. Post-canonical history has continued the pattern. Well-documented events of the second millennium include:
- Severed relations between Eastern and Western church (1054)
- Crusader assaults to “take back” Jerusalem from perceived infidels which turned out to include the Middle Eastern Christian community (1096 – 1270).
- Ecclesiastical rejection of the emergence of modern science through the suppression of persons like Copernicus and Galileo (who lived the last years of his life under house arrest for asserting that the earth was not flat and, further, that it revolved around the sun).
- Institutions of various Inquisitions (Church Courts) which tortured and killed countless persons suspected of subverting the faith (1233, 1536, 1814). Excommunication of Martin Luther (1521).
- Repeated pogroms against Jews all over Europe culminating in the Nazi holocaust of the 20th century.
America, too, has seen repeated injustice endorsed or even precipitated by the Church in
its attempts to “conserve” what it believed to be essential to the divine plan:
- The Salem witch trials (1692, poignantly documented in Arthur Millers play “The Crucible”).
- Schism among many Protestant denominations over biblical support for the institution of slavery (Methodism 1840).
- Resistance to the inclusion of women as full participants in the life of the church (seats at General Conference, ordination and full clergy membership)
- Affirmation of segregation by the creation of the Black Central Jurisdiction at the Methodist reunion in 1939.
- Rejection by white churches of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s (black Bishop Charles Golden and white Bishop James K. Matthews were refused entry into a segregated Methodist congregation on Easter Day 1964).
Again and again throughout Christian history , the church has sought to preserve itself through the marginalization and suppression of groups or individuals deemed to be unfit or heretical. Again and again we have been forced by the passage of time to recant and repent. The God who self-identifies as continually “doing a new thing” ultimately brings us along. Yet, every “new thing” is a battle. We do not give up our pattern of conservation”.
What is usually “conserved” is the power and control of some faction or group. Every instance of change shifts the locus of power. Repeatedly, the group experiencing the diminution of power targets a subgroup in an effort to re-establish control by organizing the fellowship against some common “enemy”. Initially the “troops” can be rallied, resulting in untold suffering for the select victim population (Canaanites, Gentiles, Middle Eastern Christians, European Jews, Salem’s elderly widows) or individuals (Jesus, Copernicus, Galileo, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King). Ultimately, the march of time humiliates and brings down the “powerful”. The events turn out not to have been about “purity” but about power.
The public debate at General Conference was focused yet again on homosexuality. Delegates “chose up sides” quoting a variety of biblical scholars and citing a variety of scriptural texts. In the end we voted to “conserve” the church but at great expense to a vulnerable segment of our own fellowship (parents, friends, siblings, and children of, as well as, persons of various sexual identities.. The medical community at the dawn of the third millennium is making some interesting discoveries about the nature of human sexuality. Psychiatric professionals have ceased to categorize homosexuality as an aberration. But the church vehemently “conserves” (Galileo revisited?).
Had the homosexual issue been the only issue dividing the Conference it would be easier to believe that the principle concern was one of purity. Unfortunately, other items that received less attention point to conservation of power as the primary concern. For example:
- Adoption of a new formula for distribution of future General Conference seats which significantly shifted regional representation.
- Curious procedures around the election of members to the judicial council.
- A failed attempt to shift funding percentages which would have significantly weakened apportionment support for United Methodist seminaries.
- A proposed change in the mission statement which would have undermined relationships with other world-religions.
The efforts to narrow Methodism’s historic theological and social justice positions were marked. Lines of division were rigid and predictable. Talk was voluble, listening rare and the ability to confer together with one another toward discerning God’s will was negligible. There was a sense in which we experienced a “convention” where sides defend their own perspectives, rather than a traditional Methodist “conference” where participants prayerfully seek the will of the One who calls them together.
Homosexuals bore the brunt, but conservation and preservation of control was the ultimate result. It’s an old pattern.
A prophet once asked a powerful question: “ How long, O Lord?” I returned home from General Conference with an answer written by that wonderful 20th century theologian/ cartoonist Charles Schulz ringing in my ears ¨”All your life, Charlie Brown.”
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The Rev. Linda Campbell Marshall is pastor of the John Street United Methodist Church ion Camden, ME. Her article was written after the 2000 General Conference but has even greater application to the 2004 General Conference.
Copyright © 2005 by the author
All Rights Reserved
John Street United Methodist Church, Camden, Maine
Note: If you are still confused about how a gay Christian can feel they are 'right' with God I encourage you to read the section of the web site entitled "Gay and Christian? YES!"