Tense Love at the Louisiana Annual Conference 2019

Long time, no post.

I've just gotten back from the 2019 Louisiana Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church in Shreveport, LA. Most Annual Conference meetings are a combination of dull procedure, happy fellowship, and occasionally tense votes.

This year, "tense votes" was practically the conference theme.

The actual theme was love. "All you need is love," we sang nervously, anticipating the next vote, the next motion, the next speech.

Some 800 clergy, laity, and assorted staff gathered for the first time in the wake of February's Special Called Session of the General Conference (i.e., the quadrennial global meeting of the UMC). That session was a rare, desperate, emergency measure to resolve intransigent debates about homosexuality in the church. Rejecting the carefully vetted "One Church" plan, delegates narrowly approved the "Traditional Plan," a hodgepodge of alterations to the Book of Discipline that reaffirmed and redoubled stances against homosexuality. Penalties became more severe, surveillance and inquisition more invasive. News media everywhere reported how the Church had delivered a strong message: homosexuality=yucky. 

For many of us, especially LGBTQ+ folk and their allies, that outcome constituted a shock on par with the 2016 US Presidential election.We're still reeling.

My own reeling has turned into heavy involvement with national, state, and local conversations about What To Do Next. Secret gatherings. Whats App strategizing. Zoom meetings. Constant texting. Politicking at Aaron Sorkin movie script levels. Plans within plans within plans.

It's been all-consuming, a heart-soul-body-mind ordeal, exhausting, incredibly complicated, and nearly impossible to explain to non-Methodists. I liken it to waking up from some fugue in which you experience an entire lifetime in full, vivid detail, only to snap back and it's only been three seconds later to everyone else and they're staring at you funny and you're like, "No, see, I had grandchildren..."

In a way, the strategizing sessions--and Annual Conference itself--become one of the few places where everyone else got it. Everyone there is living that same fugue life. No funny looks, no strained explanations. Just hugs and "how ya doin'?" inquiries from people who have earned the right to ask that question and expect an honest response.

I've met so many amazing people across the state and nation I'd never have encountered were my Church not on the verge of shattering into a million little Wesleyan shards.

And what makes it church, in part, is how we salt all of these processes, all this tension, with reminders of Why We're Here, living this Game of Thrones-ish version of Methodism. We touch. We embrace. We pray.

We pause to support, to reflect, or even just to hum along to an old pop song repurposed as a hymn.  

All you need is love. Love is all you need. 

In the tension, the tune's comfort becomes a challenge: make love all you need. Need only love.

Can strategy be an act of love?