Let It Turn To Something Else: The Coming Red Dawn of United Methodism (and what can be done about it).
My favorite movie of all time is the classic 1984 film Red Dawn. It served as the launch pad for a cast of 1980’s actors and tells the story of a group of teenagers turned guerrillas in an alternate history of a Russian led invasion of the continental United States.
At a pivotal point in the movie, brothers Jed and Matty (played by Patrick Swayze and a pre-tiger blood Charlie Sheen) mourn the death of their father at the hands of the occupying force of their hometown of Calumet, Colorado.
With Matty crying, his brother clutches him and in an attempt to console utters the phrase
“Let it turn to something else”.
It is at this point in the movie the rag-tag bunch begins seriously taking their task of causing chaos and fear into the Russian and South American forces who now have assumed authority over the region. They are now actively shifting into the role of fighters instead of just survivors.
Red Dawn is a story of a world that can never be the same again. It isn’t just about the tension points that exist between the high schoolers (branded as The Wolverines, after the High School mascot) and the invaders, but one of a multitude of factions. Inside of the Russian led coalition are multiple parties who till this point have always been insurgents, not invaders. They carry the mid-80’s tension of the Russian conflict in Afghanistan and the mid-century revolutions in Central and South America. The students are constantly asking themselves if they are doing the right thing and swing from pacifism to outright rage.
The entire conflict is seen under the social guise of “this eventually had to happen”.
Our Current Crisis
In United Methodism, everything was hurtling towards 2019 General Conference. Most folks felt that either nothing would happen, or everything would happen. What emerged was something entirely different from what we came in with.
It is clear that we can never be the same.
The word “harm” has been thrown around a great deal, and from every side. To the LGBTQI community, the votes of the General Conference continued the harm that has been done by the church to that group of people. But harm must be contextualized and the realization of the minority reports language of “virus” and the comparison of traditionalism to the Ebola virus cannot be undone either.
The gloves are off.
We can’t ever be the same.
To believe that we can move past and through this and continue on in some unified sense of big tent Methodism is impossible. We are simply too diverse (you can read my earlier thoughts In Search of Normative Methodism) to assume this level of cooperation for the sake of theological congruence or mission. We are in fact doing harm to all sides by insisting on the acceptance of this 50 year failed experiment of the United Methodist Church.
To make bring this even deeper, I would imagine the multiple sides at play in this ecclesial civil war would all define not just “harm”, but the entire framework of Wesley’s “General Rules” in a different manner.
The Two Biggest Kids On The Block
At the middle point of the movie, Andy (played by Powers Boothe) is shot down by a Russian Fighter pilot after dog-fighting with multiple other Russian fighters. This is the first contact the Wolverines have had with the outside world and the first time they learned the story of how everything happened.
When one of the kids asks Boothe why, he responds with this line,
“No one really knows, two toughest kids on the block, I guess…bound to fight sooner or later”.
This quote speaks to the larger theme of the movie, that all of the events of the world led this to eventually happen.
Since the beginning of The United Methodist Church, we have been playing this game back and forth. You could almost say the time between 1972 and 1988 were a theological cold war. The arguments of pluralism as an official stance and the growing variance between the theological beliefs of the clergy and the local congregations created a situation in which 2019 had to happen. The rapid expansion of African Methodism was never part of the plan and when it began happening, we really didn’t know what to do with it. They were the third world that we forgot about…not part of the equation or the carving up of an idea of a global Methodist super-power.
The two toughest kids on the block. Mainline Methodism and Evangelical Methodism. And each of them has its allies and strategies. In a post-GC article, RevDC posted this article called “Unprophetable”. I think the entire article is a great read on the situation.
Tribalism is in full effect. We are now in a state of affairs in which people are either “for” or “against” each other, and there is no room for compromise. We cannot have a discussion with people we consider our “opposition” without getting into…
What we missed…
Serving as the best slow burn on 2019 on twitter was the Connectional Conference Plan. While many people wrote it off early on, as the three ring circus of General Conference performed in front of the world, more and more people began to think that this hair-brained and constitutional nightmare might actually be the only thing that could save us.
Since then, Rev. Chris Ritter, the author of the CCP has called for 2020 General Conference to be a Constitutional Conference, thereby eliminating the biggest hurdles that the CCP, or a like-minded plan, would face. Any hope of moving forward and avoiding outright and open conflict should be focused around a new vision for United Methodism. And this isn’t just the two toughest kids on the block anymore. I imagine we actually have 4 distinct units right now.
- The Western Jurisdiction and the Reconciling Methodists.
At the end of GC, the Western Jurisdiction stood up to make a statement. I actually thought they were officially leaving the church, but instead, they called for other like-minded folks to begin following them as they developed a plan for the future. - Adam Hamilton (the Old Mainline).
For someone who was a very vocal part of making 2019 happen, you could tell the tension and heart of Adam Hamilton at GC2019. He quickly began calling others together and has multiple different conversations going on about what a future for Mainline Methodism might look like. I believe that Hamilton and the Western Jurisdictions party are theologically diverse enough to separate the two. - The WCA/Good News/Global UMC.
While much has been written disparaging the WCA, they are simply the gathering point of the loudest Traditionalists. It is a conglomeration of several different groups that soldiered on quietly through the doctrinal controversies of the 80’s and 90's. - The Unknown Right of Center.
I truly believe there is a large grouping of centrists who have shifted further to the right after GC2019. They are uncomfortable with the language of the WCA but also hold to other convictions that are outside of the other groups. These are the people who might be willing to take a wildly different look at what it means to be a Wesleyan/Methodist in the 21st century and hold in the tension of current society.
All four of these are diverse enough to need missional distinction. To attempt to combine the four will limit the effectiveness of all involved. It’s time to begin thinking about something radically different in order to avoid what is now inevitable.
Let It Turn To Something Else
So we’ve tried and failed at name-calling and mistrust. I don’t think anyone thinks it will be worth it to try again in 2020. The best thing that we can do right now is to make every effort in realizing that we can still love alike. The first step we must take is to willfully repent of the sins of judgment and rumor and make personal decisions to stop.
Our mistrust and anger needs to turn to love.
Hearts made perfect in Holy Love.
This will only be possible if we agree to do all this for the sake of finding the best possible move forward, one that allows Methodism to again be missionally faithful and that faithfulness will probably look different enough for us to no longer be a single denomination. We can be related, and even cooperative, but we need to find a different organizational strategy.
If we don’t, we will be throwing ourselves to more and more continued guerrilla warfare. And there will be a time in the future where the combatants no longer remember anything about the beginning controversy, just mutual hatred towards each side.
Things can never be the same, but we can build something significantly stronger for the sake of the future.
