Battles, Wars, and the Kingdom of God

A friend of mine sent me a blog post today from a group called Mainstream UMC, a coalition of Methodists invested (pre-February 2019) in passing the One Church Plan and now (post-February 2019) in exploring What's Next for centrists and progressives in the UMC.

In the post, "A Texas-Sized Wakeup Call for the WCA," the the group's Exec Director Mark Holland cheers the election of mostly (68%) centrist/progressive General Conference 2020 delegates in Texas's four annual conferences. "Thanks to the Wesleyan Covenant Association for freely publishing their slate of preferred candidates in most conferences," he writes, "so we can see how they did:  they…were…crushed.: These conferences also elected majority centrist/progressive delegates for the Jurisdictional Conference in 2020. With those results, the South Central Jurisdiction (eight states, twelve annual conferences) looks like it will be at least 2/3 stocked with people who oppose the Traditional Plan. The Rev. Dr. Holland is understandably pleased with this result, noting the disappointed reactions of WCA leaders in some ostensibly super-conservative Texas conferences.

I'm pleased about these results, too. I've heard indications that other US Jurisdictions have mirrored this trend (with the possible exception of the Southeastern Jurisdiction). It's heartening to see how the odiousness of the Traditional Plan has prodded centrists and progressives into (re)action. Electoral and legislative strategizing on our part helped translate that reaction into results.

But I'm wary of cheering too much for three reasons.

First, although I don't think these results are false or meaningless, they're still only the latest news in a long-term, ongoing struggle. Politics--especially democratic politics--change constantly. Instability defines the game. Results from one struggle get overturned in the next one. That's the scary thing about ostensibly immutable, eternal values in democratic systems: they're only as stable as the support they're given from vote to vote, legislature to legislature.

As Stanley Fish once quipped, democracies all have a self-destruct button installed in them in that they can always vote to un-democratize themselves. Dystopian worlds--or, less melodramatically, schisms--always lie only a couple of votes away. We voted in the Traditional Plan. We can vote it out (conceivably), but nothing really stops us from voting it or something worse right back in again. So the killjoy in me responds to electoral good news with a bit of, "That's great! What's next, though?"

Second, I note that our victories here aren't all that sweeping. Progressives and centrists like me were quick to point out how the margin of victory for the Traditional Plan was, by any standard, pretty thin (55%ish). As William Willimon noted in the wake of St. Louis, "Every pastor knows not to go into a building program with less than 60 percent of the vote." When 40% of your membership is dead-set against the plan you adopted, you have to wonder about the viability of the plan. I'm not sure that advice changes with the 70% progressive/centrist victory in Texas.

I'm curious about the extent to which splits like this in Methodism occur between churches (70% of churches are anti-Traditional Plan, 30% are pro-) or within congregations, between parishioners. Are we sorted into red churches versus blue churches, in other words, or or are we more a denomination of purple churches? Is it more the case that 3 in 10 churches in the US want the Traditional Plan or 3 in 10 members? Is resistance to the Traditional Plan proof that we're mostly blue or that we're mostly, stubbornly purple? (Perhaps these results indicate that the Traditional Plan foists an all-or-nothing redness on purple congregations that they viewed as a step too far?) These are vital questions, I think, and not ones that surface results from Annual Conference votes necessarily illuminate.

Finally, cheering too triumphantly (and I'm not suggesting that Rev. Holland does this) can shift our attention away from our ultimate concerns as Christians. Research on polarization suggests that humans fall very easily into a kind of "teamism" in which we get more invested in winning for our team (or, really, defeating the other team) than in realizing our goals. At the UMC Next meeting, many of my colleagues from other Annual Conferences expressed their weariness at constantly having to fight for their dignity and standing in the Methodist Church. Someone at my table (from New Jersey, I think?) mentioned that the struggle isn't merely tiring but addictive. The danger, she said, is that we come to view fighting and struggle as a permanent posture rather than as one means to get to who and where and what we want to be.

What we want to be, of course, is the kingdom of God, the beloved community. When the world sees our community, Jesus warns us, it should say, See how they love one another! "By this shall all know that you are my disciples..." My pastor father used to tell his parishioners that this was the most dangerous verse in scripture. Christ grants to the world--to non-Christians--the ability to measure our discipleship. They get to hold us accountable, to judge whether we're practicing what we preach. And the ruler they use to measure us isn't our good intentions. It's not our rationalizations for how loving we're really being no matter what the appearance. The criteria rests in how they see us engaging with each other.

Whenever I find myself cheering a win on "our side" or lamenting a win for "their side," I have to pause for a little Christlike killjoy reality check. What does the world see when I cheer or jeer the results of our latest struggle? Where is the Kingdom of God in how I respond to victory or defeat? Where is Christ manifested in the ways I talk about my siblings in the Wesleyan Covenant Association? 

Don't get me wrong. I think my "side" does move us closer to the Kingdom. I think the world is already judging Christians harshly for how shoddily we treat LGBTQ+ people (to say nothing of how it treats other marginalized groups). We must repair that witness. I'm by no means saying this struggle is unimportant or that we can simply cease arguing, agree to disagree, etc.

But how I live out this struggle matters: how I strategize, how I describe the "other side,"--and how I cheer.

More tomorrow,

JF