Shift 3: United Methodism!

Fiftieth post--woo-hoo!

So--the three key changes in my high school years that marked a transition from conservative evangelicalism to...a different kind of Christianity. First, there was theatre, and the attendant self-confidence/perspective/maturity it opened for me. Second, there was my encounter with a radical (for me) theology that stressed unconditional love rather than fear/anxiety of hell.

The third change: my family went Methodist.

As I've written, my father--an ordained Southern Baptist minister--was in the early 90s not able to find livable employment from a Baptist church. Churches were too poor and the denomination had become too conservative. Daddy found work instead as the custodian for the university-affiliated Baptist church in the town we lived in.

Around our third year of membership, the pastor of that church and his wife divorced. A common reality for many (even most) heterosexual couples in the US, divorce generally spells the death of a career as a Southern Baptist minister. Baptist standards specify that church pastors not be divorced.

The church's minister switched to the United Methodist Church, becoming initially a "Locally Licensed Pastor" (the term is different nowadays)--basically a lower-level certification for ministry in UM churches. With a few more seminary courses, though, the UMC would formally accept his Baptist credentials. He could become a fully ordained Methodist minister.

He advised my father to do the same, and thus began our family's transition into the Methodist denomination.

I had been only vaguely aware of what Methodists were beyond "that church over there" as a Baptist. Most of the places I had lived were so heavily Baptist (or half-Baptist and half-Catholic) that the other Protestant varieties seemed exotic. I soon learned, however, that Methodists were in fact quite different from Southern Baptists in organization, practice, and theology. In the interests of time, I'll summarize brutally:

1) Organizationally: Although they operate under the aegis of the Southern Baptist Convention and affirm its statement of belief (The Baptist Faith and Message), each SBC congregation is autonomous. Pastors are, as I've noted, free agents, hired and fired at will by individual congregations. Practice and theology between churches can vary greatly (some SBC congregations have even ordained women, facing disfellowship from the Convention itself).

The United Methodist Church operates connectionally rather than congregationally. Individual conferences are less autonomous, more tied to the approved procedures contained in the UMC-wide Book of Discipline. The UMC is structured into subdivisions called "Conferences," most of which the US correlate to a state (those in the North and West US organize regionally, e.g., the "California-Pacific Conference"). Each conference has a Bishop appointed to it. Bishops act mainly as managers or CEO's, assisted by several "District Superintendents," each of whom in turn is responsible for managing regional areas.

Ministers in the Methodist church are not free agents but lifetime employees of the Conference they serve. One of the Bishops' main tasks is appointing pastors to individual congregations. While the Bishop (in consultation with local and district personnel) try to create a positive match between pastor and local congregation, at the end of the day congregations do not wield the same hire/fire control over their ministers as do Baptists. Moreover, most Bishops like to rotate pastors every 3-5 years, meaning that almost all Methodist ministers are itinerant.

On the one hand, this means that sometimes it's difficult for ministers to set down deep roots in a single congregation (though most successful ministers develop such skills early in their careers). On the other hand, though, the connectional system communicates the sense that pastoral authority is not something subject to the whims of an individual congregation. Methodist ministers are to a certain extent freer to "afflict the comforted"--challenging their congregations to grow, to give, and to live in more Christ-like ways. It also means that ministers get a guaranteed position with a guaranteed wage--quite a change from the uncertainties of Baptist pastorates.

2) In practice (i.e., Sunday morning services), the Methodist church is more formal, more "high church," that Baptists. Their hymns are slower, fewer, and generally less exuberant than those sung in the average Baptist service. Methodists favor the affirmation of classical creeds of the church (e.g., the Apostles' Creed) and memorizing/reciting such creeds forms a standard component of worship services. They offer communion (what Baptists call "Lord's Supper") more often than Baptists do. They Baptize infants as well as adults, and they generally do so by sprinkling instead of dunking. They celebrate Ash Wednesday, Lent, and Advent and are on the whole more connected to the liturgical year than are Baptists.

But the biggest differences--the ones most related to my personal faith shift--have to do with differences in theology.

More tomorrow,

JF