The Democrat-Gazette's March 19 Religion Page offered a review of the mostly united but occasionally tumultuous 54-year history of the United Methodist Church.
Readers may be surprised its history is so brief. Methodism itself dates back to a movement within the Church of England led by John Wesley in the mid-1700s. After the American Revolution, the movement became its own church in the United States. The birth of the Methodist Church arose from a split.
Well before that, Eastern Orthodox Christians split from the Roman Catholic Church in disputes over the role of the Pope and other practices. Five hundred years later, Protestantism was sparked through the writings of Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic priest in Germany who challenged many of the Catholic Church's practices. His original intent was to reform the Catholic Church, but Luther was excommunicated. That may be the ultimate church split.
It's not hard today to grasp that the pursuit of understanding God and how God creates and interacts with human beings have led to many Scriptural interpretations. That's why there's a Church of England. That's why there have long been Episcopalians, Calvinists, Presbyterians, Puritans, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, Lutherans and many other offshoots.
When the Bible became available for more and more people to read, is it any wonder that some of the particulars of its wonderful message could be interpreted differently by different individuals and groups? Faith is such a personal thing.
Today, the United Methodist Church finds itself in the midst of what will almost certainly be a church split. It's characterized as being over the question of homosexuality and whether it is viewed by the church as compatible with Biblical teachings. It's also about church discipline, such as whether a church's foundational statements of beliefs will be adhered to by its leaders unless and until the church collectively comes to a different understanding of those beliefs. In the spirit of John Wesley, such understandings come through Scripture, influenced by tradition, reason and Christian experience.
No matter which side they fall on, your United Methodist friends are in the midst of heartbreak over the probable dissolution of a denomination many have spent their entire lives in. My parents were part of the Methodist Church before its 1968 merger with the United Evangelical Brethren Church created the United Methodist Church. I was 3 at that time, so I've known nothing but the UMC.
As I grew in the church, my teachers helped me to understand the "catholic" (small c) church in which we believed wasn't the one with the Pope, but the church universal. In other words, the church as a body of believers as it has existed through all times and all places since the ministry of Jesus on this earth. But we have differences.
The United Methodist Church, like all others, is an organization of human beings seeking to express their faith corporately. All of its members are flawed. Methodism has never required members to agree on everything. There's lot's of room for differences. But the fight over the church's response to homosexuality has gone from disagreement to a winner-take-all fight. As it has grown more intense, it's become a barrier to unity even in the work we all support. The General Conference, held every four years to make decisions for the church, has become a battleground from which participants come home battered and heartbroken rather than reinvigorated.
If you've ever seen a marriage the spouses cannot save even though they love each other and always will, I'd suggest that's where the United Methodists are today.
God's work in this world did not begin in 1968. The people called Methodists can continue to be part of that even if, in the 21st century, they cannot figure out how to remain United.