The UMC and the Challenge of Unity

The branches and leaves in this tree are not unlike the many
branches and denominations of Christianity.

The recent struggles in the United Methodist Church (UMC) over LGBT inclusion raise perennial questions for me:

What does it mean to be “church”? Is there a certain level of agreement that is necessary? Or is fellowship, work and worship with people of diverse viewpoints part and parcel of the necessary work that needs to be done? 

But even so, aren't there hard limits? Deal breakers?

I come from the Roman Catholic (RCC) tradition. If you expect this 2,000 year old, global behemoth of as many as 1 billion people to perfectly represent your own private, individual viewpoints as of February, 2019, you are in for some pretty quick disappointment. I have not yet met a single person who is perfectly on board with every teaching. Nevertheless, you just can't put your life on hold just because the RCC doesn't change. That doesn't stop conservatives, liberals and everyone in between from complaining, however.

The fact that this body changes very slowly is one of its strengths--and some would argue one of its weaknesses. The RCC can quickly remind you that it’s not all about you. This can be a good thing--and a bad thing. You have a choice as a Catholic: You can give up because the church is not the way you want it to be (i.e. made in your image) or you can roll up your sleeves and get to work right here and right now. Bloom where you're planted. It will never be perfectly as you want it, and perhaps it shouldn't be. It forces you out of your self-contained universe. Even if it were to eventually change to suit you better, there is a lot of life to be lived and a lot of work to be done right now.

I'm reminded of that song lyric: "Don't surround yourself with yourself." Good advice.

Many Catholics sit with it this way: They have small body of relatively like-minded people they associate with—perhaps their school, missionary society, charitable works organization or friends and fellowship group they lean on for mutual support. But they also belong to this wider body of the whole Catholic Church. They keep at the very least their toe dipped into the larger pool while also finding that smaller group of people with whom they see eye-to-eye on most things. You end up with the peace activist sitting next to the military general at Mass on Sundays, and on Mondays they go to work against each other again. 

I'm reminded of James Joyce who said of Catholics: "Here comes everybody." Is that a strength or a weakness? Yes.

When you come to a fork in the road such as what the UMC is experiencing right now over LGBT inclusion, it is easy to justify a divorce. The pain is real. The differences in opinion are real, too. But when I look back over the 500 years of Protestantism, I wonder if all that splitting and re-splitting has gotten them anywhere. Some estimate that there are as many as 50,000 denominations! Perhaps divorce is not always the answer. Were all these breaks necessary as people simply ran out of options to stay together? Or were they the result of people who got lazy and didn’t want to be uncomfortable and learn how to sit with real differences? And where are they going with all this fracturing--is there an end game to it all? Are any of these new denominations any better than the previous ones, or are they just re-living the same ole sins and human tendencies in a new form?

Will it just keep fracturing until every single individual is his or her own "denomination"? I say this quite seriously that it may not be a bad thing to simply play out that logic to its inevitable conclusion in this way. After all, each individual already has his or her own theology regardless of which denomination they belong to. Maybe it will help Christianity arrive at a post-denominational point. We'll still need community but maybe not in the way we've been doing it, and this experiment has to play itself out this way to help us get there.

This is not to judge or begrudge anyone who feels their experiences in a particular church community are simply too painful, or the issues too serious, for them to remain. I can't weigh in on someone else's decision. People have experienced very deep wounds and abuses of all kinds, and I do not intend to make light of those in the least. "Unity" has often been used as a justification for sweeping all sorts of misbehavior and injustices under the rug while blaming the very people who are so hurt they feel forced to break away.

After all, what good is unity if you end up supporting a morality that you simply cannot condone? But on the flip side, community is fundamental to a Christian. Learning how to congregate is part of discipleship. Among may other things, it forces us to come to terms with our triggers and internal challenges, to ultimately see a world bigger than ourselves.

I know all too well the struggle and the tough choices that struggle demands. For long periods in my life, I have toggled on the razor's edge between staying or leaving my church. I debated this with myself on an almost daily basis. I was even convinced for a while that living with that tension must actually be our call rather than resolving it either way. All this to say: I get it. 

Community is unquestionably hard. Finding that gospel ideal of perfect unity in perfect diversity is an ever-elusive challenge. I've only experienced it myself in fleeting moments throughout my life. Some communities lean on the side of denying the individual for the sake of conformity. Others celebrate the individual at the expense of the group.

The fracturing of Protestantism has created smaller denominations with oftentimes like-minded people who could perhaps go further in their particular mission than they ever could if they remained within the larger parent group. Some found a safe haven after leaving a painful situation. But there's a cost that comes with that fracturing--the cost of unity and the cost of not practicing how to sit with real diversity (again, not to minimize the real efforts that people have gone through in order to prevent divisions).

People in the UMC are in pain and some are talking schism. It's painful to talk schism. Not to sound glib, but what's one more split in a long history of splintering?  After all, the UMC exists as a result of schism in the first place. Another way to look at it:  If a split in the UMC seems painful today, perhaps that can remind us how painful previous splits must have been (and perhaps still are) and awake in us a desire to mend those fences from previous splits.

Does it matter that there are others out there who call themselves "Christian" who have nothing to do with your particular group? As we ponder a potentially very painful split in the UMC, perhaps it can help us think about all the splits that have occurred in Christianity and ignite in us a desire to heal those wounds, too.