During his church trial for defying the United Methodist Church’s official ban on blessing same-sex unions, the Reverend Gregory Dell told the jury that if they were to remove him, they would set in motion “the dynamic of denominational cleansing.”
Apparently, cleansing has replaced witch hunt, McCarthyism, and Inquisition as a term of opprobrium for those with whom one disagrees. But associating the church court’s guilty verdict with a horrifying allusion to the racist ethnic cleansings of our decade is not merely over-the-top rhetoric or a clever, made-for-the-media soundbite. It is serious misrepresentation of what is happening in the United Methodist Church.
First, denominational cleansing misrepresents what happened in Dell’s own case: Dell was not the victim of a McCarthyesqe purge mounted by the denomination’s conservative activists. After the UMC’s highest judicial body had made it clear that the denomination’s ban on blessing same-sex unions had the force of church law, Dell created a test case, and his own bishop, a liberal who publicly agreed with Dell’s stance, filed the charges against him. The trial was entirely Dell’s doing.
Second, it misrepresents the realistic and restrained mood among the UMC’s conservatives. As CT reported in its April 26, 1999, issue (p. 16), while Dell’s supporters demonstrated outside the trial venue, conservatives chose not to mount any organized counterdemonstration because “it would only fan divisiveness and be seen as a personal attack on a brother in Christ.” Similarly, conservatives have avoided triumphalist comments following Dell’s suspension, but have spoken realistically about the debate that lies ahead. “This restraint is a sign that conservative forces … know how fragile the connection is at this point, and they want to do everything they can to preserve that connection,” said Maxie Dunnam, president of Asbury Theological Seminary, in an interview with CT.
Third, to call church discipline “denominational cleansing” is to misunderstand the purpose of disciplinary action in the Wesleyan tradition—and in the biblical vision of the church as well. Discipline, as the word’s root shows, is about making disciples. And when disciples wander, discipline is about bringing them back. The Wesleyan tradition had such discipline at its core from its eighteenth-century beginnings when John Wesley structured his movement around small, disciple-making, mutual accountability groups.
Thus Dunnam told CT, “Our Wesleyan position on holiness addresses the issue of how we live together in community and hold each other responsible in our ethical and moral lives.” The Dell trial, he points out, “is part of a normal process that we have not practiced enough because [in recent years] we have bent over backwards … to be fair and respect people’s consciences.”
This disciple-making approach to discipline is reflected in the penalty placed on Dell: he is suspended from active ministry until he promises not to violate the ban on blessing same-sex unions—or until the church’s policy changes. Dell was not defrocked or disfellowshiped. Instead, he was told he could function again as a United Methodist minister when he would function as a United Methodist minister. That is hardly, as the Christian Century‘s Jim Wall wrote, “a moralistic bludgeon not unlike the one wielded by Martin Luther’s tormentors . …”
How wide the divide? If UMC conservatives are not an army of inquisitors wistful for the era of the rack and the thumbscrew, what is going on in the UMC? For some, the issue of blessing same-sex unions is a matter of justice, making available to gays and lesbians the same kind of support the church gives to heterosexual couples. Viewing it as a matter of supporting “fidelity” wherever it is found, liberal Methodists have compared the current issue to earlier struggles in the church over racial and gender issues. But the issue is certainly not merely one of an anachronistic and oppressive church slow to catch up with society on this issue.
The issue of same-sex unions is “only symptomatic of a different theological mindset that exists within the denomination,” said the Reverend Phil Granger, chair of the Good News board of directors and district superintendent in Kokomo, Indiana. The deeper divide in the UMC is about how we know what God wants to tell us creatures about what is best for us. “We don’t have the same understanding of revelation, we don’t have the same understanding of biblical authority,” says Dunnam. Much theology today is not derived from biblical revelation, but from reflection on human experience. “We are a divided church theologically,” Dunnam says, “and as a result, we are not able to deal very well with issues like the practice of homosexuality.”
This divide is to some degree the result of Methodism’s own theology: unlike the sixteenth-century Reformers who shouted, Sola scriptura!, Wesley and his followers lived in the Age of Reason. Wesley believed that theology needed to take into account not only Scripture and tradition, but reason and experience as well. Scripture was, for Wesley, the norm that judged all other norms. But Wesley’s heirs have often let their reading of human experience trump Scripture.
This theological divide is not easily understood by the mainstream media. Much journalism is devoted to telling stories of oppression: oppression by corrupt city halls, oppression by sweatshop owners, and oppression by resurgent Islamic fundamentalism. Journalism in a therapeutic culture is also often about victimhood. It is easy for the chroniclers of our times to cast any story about a group that stands firm for what it believes as a story about an oppressive institution that won’t let people be true to themselves.
Gregory Dell’s own career is in many ways a commendable history of fighting oppression and putting himself on the line for other people’s liberation. According to Scott Field, the Northern Illinois director of Good News, “If there’s a barbed-wire fence, Greg will throw himself on it.” Dell sees the ban on same-sex unions as an injustice, and consistent with his history, he has charged into the barbed wire.
Our culture’s way of framing these discussions places a tremendous burden on conservative forces, such as United Methodism’s Good News and Confessing Movements, to communicate clearly their concern for truth, for institutional integrity, and for genuine pastoral concern. Genuine pastoral concern always works to save people from their sins rather than merely to help them feel strangely warmed by appropriate empathy and misguided affirmation.
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