What now?

Some words for my Wesleyan evangelical* friends remaining in the United Methodist Church. With General Conference 2024 completed, the question for many of us is “What now?”

The narrative of our progressive and centrist colleagues is and will continue to be joyous and triumphant. Evil has been defeated. Now the church can move forward in unity. The general conference steeped in liberation and progressive theology and practice will be hailed as a new birth for the denomination. Our brothers and sisters feel they have achieved a great victory, and they are very happy.

Those of us who feel more loss than gain in the changes the UMC is undergoing will need to navigate our way a bit like aliens and exiles in a foreign land.

Here are a few of my suggestions for the road ahead, if there is anyone out there who finds them helpful.

Find Some Friends. If you are an evangelical United Methodist, you have a lot of friends who are no longer a part of the denomination. In my conference, men and women who were mentors, advocates, and defenders of my ministry have left to join the Global Methodist Church or take their churches independent. People I would have turned to for advice and fellowship are gone.

Those of us who remain are scattered and largely disconnected. We will need to work to find each other and create networks and ways to connect. Most of us who remained are neither skilled nor motivated by the kind of political organizing that our departed brothers and sisters so tirelessly engaged in. It is just as well since our numbers will mean we will have little influence in positions of power or the vital votes at annual conference.

Even so, friends will be important in the days ahead. Even in places where tolerance is observed, evangelicals will be marginalized. Progressive and liberation theology will be normative. We will need to talk together, pray together, and encourage each other. We should never retreat to an enclave or gather in opposition to the mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ, but we will need friends now that we no longer have influence.

Figure Out Your Theology. This is something you have probably already done, but it will take discernment in this new UMC to know where we can say “amen” and where we cannot. If we wish to preserve and nurture the Wesleyan evangelical tradition within the United Methodist Church, we will need to be clear about what that tradition is and how to communicate it in our churches and our culture.

To maintain these kinds of conversations, we will have to reach across denominational lines. Many of the best sources of thinking, scholarship, and contemporary preaching in the Wesleyan tradition are not in the United Methodist Church. Evangelicalism has always tended to cross denominational lines, and we will need to embrace this tradition to keep our theological reflection and application robust.

Follow Jesus Christ. The good news in all of this is that our call remains unchanged. We are called to serve Jesus Christ. We are called to save souls. We are called to love people. We are called to confess our sins, receive the pardon of Jesus Christ, and work out our salvation in cooperation with the work of the Holy Spirit within us. That has not changed and will not change.

We are called to carry on in the tradition set in motion by John and Charles Wesley to proclaim a gospel of holiness of heart and life, of redemption purchased by the blood of Jesus, of new birth and sanctification by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are called to proclaim a gospel of grace offered freely to all who repent of their sins and humbly seek forgiveness and pardon.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had conversations with pastors who feel alone, outcast, vilified, and unwanted by the UMC. I understand where those feelings are coming from, but Jesus never said we would be popular or even welcome. He just told us to be faithful.

Some of you might feel you can no longer do that in the UMC. Some of you might feel after hearing Bishop Bickerton preach in Charlotte that you are no longer welcome. That is understandable. As I tell people at every church I have served, the most important thing in your life is to know and serve Jesus Christ. If you can’t do that where you are right now, then by all means find a place where you can.

Over the last several years, I’ve wrestled a lot with what Jesus wants me to do. I’ve prayed quite a bit for clarity about whether he still wants me in the UMC, especially when there were people actively trying to keep me out. I prayed that before disaffiliation. I prayed that during disaffiliation. And I have prayed that in the last couple of weeks. He has told me that this is where he put me and I am not released from that call. So, obviously, here I remain. (If you are in the Indiana Conference and are looking for others to connect with, reach out to me.)

Jesus might tell you something different than he is telling me. God bless you wherever he leads you.

Let us all pray that God will bless the United Methodist Church. Let us pray for each other. In the words of John Wesley, we have no business on earth except to save souls. That has not and will not change.

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*I never liked the word “traditionalist” but was forced into using it by our political conflicts. I know “Wesleyan evangelical” is more clumsy, but it is more accurate to my understanding of my theology. With the traditionalist collapse as a political presence in the UMC, I feel free to revert to my preferred term.

A thin branch bearing a lot of weight

At General Conference, the Connectional Table made a report on the state of the church. During that report, the presenters said we could find more information online about some of the things they discussed. I was interested to learn what more information I could find, especially about reports from various parts of the world speaking to what people valued in the UMC and what they wanted to see for the future of the UMC. So I went digging.

One of the coolest things in the 2023 State of the Church report is the year in photos from UM News. There are a lot of really striking and compelling images in there and it is well worth your time to scroll through that.

One of the most unintentionally ironic parts of the report was the use of John Wesley’s dying words to express our denominational resolve to move forward.

“The United Methodist Church has faced many new challenges over the past couple years, but we continue to see God at work in our daily lives and in our enduring ministries. Like John Wesley, who said ‘The best of all is God is with us,’ we look to God to guide our witness.”

But I was really there because I wanted to read what these reports, collected during a project called Imagining the Future, could tell me about the state of United Methodism. The presentation at General Conference gave a high-level summary of what they took to be most important points, but I was interested in the what each region had to say.

Unfortunately, I could only download 3 of the reports. The report from the conversations in Africa could not be found. There is a page giving some summary of the findings of the Africa report, but the link to download the report itself was broken. When I asked UM News about this on Twitter, they reported that they did not have the full report and changed the link on the report summary page to indicate that it was connected to survey questions rather than the answers those questions generated.

I was disappointed to not be able to read the African report, but the others did provide some interesting reading.

Europe – There was a glitch with this report as well, apparently. There were five online conversations across Europe in 2021 to gather data for the report, but nearly all of the 90 participants in those conversations were from Western European countries, so the report lacked perspective from United Methodism in Eastern Europe.

One or two things that stood out to me in the 5-page report was the clear awareness United Methodists in Europe have of being a tiny minority compared to the national churches that dominate Europe. These United Methodists said that they value their Methodist identity grounded in “classic” Methodist theology. The report includes specific mention of prevenient grace, sanctification, personal piety, and social engagement as core Methodist themes that they value. The report mentions their zeal for scriptural holiness and for meeting the spiritual and temporal needs of people. It highlights the plight of immigrants, climate change, racism, and economic justice as key social concerns. “Europeans want a
Christ‐centered mission grounded in disciple‐ship, the Bible, and prayer.”

The Philippines – This report was collected via an online survey of 357 United Methodists across 3 episcopal areas. The respondents self-identified as 56.3% traditionalist and 44.8% progressive, but said that 68.6% of their congregations were mostly traditionalist. When asked how they would change the UMC, only 10% identified removing language around homosexuality as one of their choices.

The structure of the survey used to collect the data seemed somewhat simplistic or amateurish. Without open-ended questions or more professional survey construction, it was hard for me to see much more of great significance or interest in the report.

The United States – This report is the longest. It was collected from the conversations of 54 groups of people from November 2021 to March 2022. The participants were by invitation only and multiple groups were composed of members of the Connectional Table itself,. The inclusion of the Connectional Table in the data collection is an odd choice if the purpose of the process was to get information that the Connectional Table could use to understand the denomination. The report is aware that its sample could bias findings and mentions that the key themes could be quite different if different groups were invited to participate.

The report is too long to fairly summarize, but a couple of things did stand out to me.

The American report makes reference to “social justice” far more frequently and more prominently than the other two reports. It also places a high emphasis on inclusivity and diversity, while expressing a sense of frustration that we do not live into diversity and inclusivity or put our social justice commitments into action enough.

The report expresses both appreciation for and frustration with our “democratic” polity. The voice we give to laity is seen as important, but our polity can also be a source of division and legalism.

One other thing I notice is a lack of any direct emphasis on salvation or converting people to faith in Jesus Christ. Of the three reports, the American one was the one that seemed least engaged with piety, evangelism, and the Bible. Perhaps I am being unfair. You can read the report yourself and decide.

I am certain that these reports involved a lot of effort, but given the prominence they got in the Connectional Table report at General Conference the reports themselves read to me like rather anecdotal and even a bit haphazard in their data gathering. In the American report, we are told that Connectional Table has been using these reports (including the missing African one, presumably) to cast a vision for the future of the UMC and “coalesce around common ideas” to shape the denomination.

If we are really trying to develop a nuanced and useful understanding of the state of the UMC today and the diversity of hopes and dreams for the UMC in the future, perhaps a more systematic and sophisticated form of data collection would be helpful.

Maybe we should sit down and listen

I want to propose a rule for the upcoming General Conference in Charlotte.

It is not one I expect we will adopt.

The rule is simple: The first speakers in every legislative group and the first speakers to every motion on the floor of the conference must be men and women from annual conferences that have actually grown since the last time the General Conference met.

This would have two effects.

First, it would give non-Americans a lot of air time. It would force us to listen to the perspectives from the parts of the church that are actually accomplishing our mission. It would lift up the voices of people who actually know what it is like to bring in new disciples.

Second, it might actually get us focused on our purpose for meeting in the first place.

I know there is a lot of work that needs to happen to keep the machine running. I appreciate that. I really do.

But in all the talk I’ve heard leading up to General Conference, I’ve not heard much talk about what we need to do to actually save more souls. For the last 50+ years, the United Methodist Church in America has been a withering shadow of its former Christ-proclaiming, soul-winning self. Every year, we counted fewer baptisms and fewer numbers, and somehow we convinced ourselves that it was okay because we ran lots of food pantries and marched in the right parades.

For decades, doctrinal disputes and disobedience rent the American church until, at last, we suffered one of the largest splintering of a denomination in the history of the United States. Depending on how you count it, we’ve lost a quarter to a third of our size in the last five years. At General Conference, the delegates will vote on a budget that is 44% smaller than the one they approved in 2016. Forty-four percent!

If American United Methodism were a college basketball team, we would have fired the coach by now.

Meanwhile, in Africa and Asia, United Methodists with much less of what the world counts as resources have been bringing people to Christ for the last 50-70 years to the point that the American church is no longer the largest part of the global UMC. Perhaps, just perhaps, they have something we in America should sit down and listen to.

I won’t pretend that everything is perfect in the African and Asian parts of our denomination, but at least they are actually doing what John Wesley said was supposed to be our only business on earth — saving souls.

How about we let them set the priorities and the agenda for the UMC for a while?