How orthodoxy is renewing United Methodism
By Thomas C. Oden

A stone’s throw from the Cleveland football stadium, the United Methodist Church General Conference convened in May of 2000. Church representatives met to engage in their quadrennial showdown of legislative and media battles. Near the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Civic Center rocked with inflamed rhetoric outside the assembly, but within the legislative process a new spirit of doctrinal and moral conservatism rolled in.

Legislating within the huge mainline churches encompasses a vast, complex, and messy democratic process, with many voices at the table. The record of this particular conference offers a brief glimpse into the struggle within all branches of the mainline. The evangelicals, orthodox, and traditionalists can take heart from what happened in Cleveland, as these fifteen actions illustrate:

• The conference acted to require evangelism in the curriculum for ministerial ordination. Furthermore, it obliged curriculum planners, lay speakers, and candidates for ministry to follow Wesleyan evangelical doctrinal standards.

• It defeated radical feminist attempts to impose nontrinitarian language on the liturgy.

• It affirmed Jesus as only Lord and Savior of the world against efforts to legitimize the doctrine of universal salvation as if it were a standard Christian teaching.

• It resisted an attempt to dilute confessional membership vows for professing members.

• To prevent regional legislative bodies from defying the church’s long-established sexuality standards, it affirmed that regional annual conferences cannot nullify the Book of Discipline.

• The conference received a declaratory decision from the Judicial Council upholding the Book of Discipline as the law of the church, so that regional “covenant” experiments cannot take precedence over church-wide law (as liberal bishop Melvin Talbert had maintained in a disciplinary case where charges were dismissed against sixty-seven clergy who participated in a blessing of a “same-sex union”).

• The conference defeated an attempt to create a new layer of world Methodist bureaucracies. It mandated a policy to limit bureaucratic stockpiling of unrestricted reserves—stockpiling intended to make the denomination less accountable to the will of the laity in stewardship.

• It permitted annual conferences to distinguish relief giving from conference benevolences, so as to acknowledge greater respect for the conscience of the laity in stewardship decisions (in the context of bureaucracies that have had a history of spending general church gifts for ideologically unacceptable purposes).

• Talk of a church split was decisively avoided by the reaffirmation (by increasing majorities) of the church’s traditional teaching on sexual “fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness.” The conference resisted persistent challenges to allow the blessing of homosexual unions. It firmly retained language declaring that “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching;” defined “practices incompatible with Christian teaching” as “chargeable” offenses, and added the prohibition of performing same-sex unions to the “duties of the pastor.” While affirming evangelical reparative therapy and transforming ministries to homosexuals, it defeated proposals to require the hiring of homosexuals in church positions and to require church-sponsored Scout troops to accept homosexual leaders.

Homosexual advocates experienced the conference as a major setback, with charge after charge being decisively defeated.

• For the first time, the United Methodist Church voted to seek observer status in the National Association of Evangelicals and the World Evangelical Fellowship.

• For the first time, it opposed partial-birth abortion by a vote of 622 to 275, in contrast to its adamant pro-choice stance of previous years. For the first time, the conference officially supported voluntary prayer in public schools and an International Day of Prayer for the persecuted church.

• For the first time, 40 percent of the delegates voted for redefining the formula for distributing the twenty-million dollar seminary funding scheme, showing a large measure of dissatisfaction with current seminary curricula and faculties. (Seminary accountability will become a growing issue for future general conferences.)

• The conference showed surprisingly strong support, though insufficient for a majority, for an Evangelical Missionary Conference in the West as a haven for evangelical churches marginalized by liberal leadership.

• The conference revised delegate representation to reflect growth in traditionalist areas in the South and South-Central Jurisdictions and in the Central (overseas) Conferences, ensuring a stronger evangelical vote in future general conferences and fewer delegates for the predominantly liberal western states.

• The Conference elected three evangelicals to the increasingly important nine-member Judicial Council.

These fifteen actions illustrate an important point: after years of attempts, Cleveland 2000 marked a year of unexpected victories by orthodox voices within the United Methodist Church. These gains came largely as a result of a preceeding and continuing network of prayer, a coalition of numerous renewing and confessing movements working closely together, and widespread demoralization among the old-guard liberals. These may seem like modest gains, but they are among the first evidences of the growing ability of the orthodox center to effect basic change in mainline churches.

The contests will continue.

Emerging evangelical leadership
It is a profound embarrassment to liberal leadership that during its hegemony, the seminaries, and the bureaucracies, the churches have lost ground in a massive membership hemorrhage. Liberals go into a cold sweat trying to explain how, while they owned the infrastructure, the money, the publications, and the leadership, they failed even to hold membership steady. They still nurture the fantasy that they have the high moral ground on sexuality issues, politically correct policing, and standard liberal theological issues such as universal salvation. The liberal leadership is now faced with the desperate dilemma of trying to secure trust and support from its ever-diminishing numbers of constituents.

Evangelicals are now in a determined struggle to recover endowments, libraries, and institutions that have been virtually lost for four decades. (Almost half a century of opportunities for advancement of the gospel wasted!) Ironically, evangelicals have been cast as pariahs within the mainline. The exclusion and marginalization of this sizable constituency—the faithful evangelical minority—has been attempted by those who often imagine themselves as inclusive, tolerant, generous, and liberal.

Why remain faithful to an apostatizing church?
Many free church evangelicals rank liberal mainline struggles very low on their list of matters of importance. They say: So what? Why don’t orthodox believers just walk away from a church long locked in secularizing ideologies?

The renewing and confessing movements are growing firmer in their answer: The mainline is a sleeping giant still capable of recovering its earlier history of evangelical witness and leadership. Its institutions are worth recovering and cannot easily be replicated. Much will be lost by their almost total collapse.

Those involved in confessing and renewing movements within the mainline see the church’s present dilemmas in a very long historical perspective, not merely in relation to the next petty legislative battle. They look not simply to a quadrennium or decade, but to twenty centuries of consensus fidelium. They hold as a model the courageous evangelical Anglicans of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who remained faithful over many decades until they at long last gained significant voice within worldwide Anglican counsels, as seen in Lambeth 1998.  Mainline evangelicals have reason to think that they can reclaim their captive institutions, as have Anglican evangelicals in significant ways. They have good reason to ask other orthodox believers to pray for their efforts to reground the mainline in the gospel, to transcend the secularizing and liberalizing temptations of the last half-century.

Countering schism
Underlying these rather general responses to the question of why faithful believers in mainline churches are called to remain within their conflicted communions to renew and reground them lie specific, well-reasoned arguments:

We are sternly warned by scripture against schism. We dare not further divide the church, which has suffered enough already under the divisiveness of false teachers and ideological advocates who presume to speak for the future of Christianity.

None of us heard the gospel apart from the community of believers who transmitted it to us. To quit contending for the faith is to hold cheap our baptismal vow, which ties us to the larger body of faith. To leave our communion tempts us toward a despairing act of voluntary abandonment of communities and institutions to which our forefathers and foremothers gave blood, sweat, prayers, and tears, and through which the apostolic teaching has been transmitted.

We in the confessing movements do not deny that a sincere believer may leave a faltering church or denomination for good cause, but to leave one structure is to embrace another—and that second structure may have similar limitations or worse. Furthermore, to quit is to leave behind mounting problems that will never be solved unless the faithful are willing to roll up their sleeves and help. The churches need loyal and steady critics more than purists or loners or deserters.

The faithful in our communions have remained voiceless long enough. They stand in need of articulate argument and wise, coordinated strategic action to counter waywardness.

Though I respect and empathize with those who have found the reform of mainline communions virtually impossible, I believe that a turning point has been reached. It seems to me that the apostatizing voices in church leadership, with their weak arguments, are already aware of their approaching collapse. The Holy Spirit is working to renew the church, and we are invited to participate in the renewal. To abdicate our own historical mainline communion now would be wasteful and negligent. It would be like leaving a family in distress just at a time when a fresh start is possible.

Some worshipers, conceding the above arguments, agree to remain within the mainline communion but choose to stay out of the fray. Although it is possible to remain a faithful worshiping member of a local parish and pay no attention to the contested judicatories, people who walk away from the legislative bodies and seminaries of the church may only make things more difficult for the next generation. It is possible to ignore perverse agencies and harebrained publications, but if we do, we deepen the quagmire. The longer we wait to clean house, the harder the recovery of classic Christianity will be.

Although it is sometimes argued that the mainline churches have so fundamentally deteriorated that they are intractable and practically unreformable, the confessing movements disagree, arguing that the Holy Spirit has not given up on our local churches with their families, their roots, their histories, and their promise. Proponents of church reform believe that the Holy Spirit has called us to pray for the various communions that brought us to faith and to remain as agents of witness and reconciliation within them.

It is for all these reasons that we in the renewing and confessing movements are committed to remaining within our communions, however far they may have fallen into confusion and disobedience.

The donor’s complaint
Orthodox believers are making this complaint about self-preserving liberal bureaucracies:

You own our seminaries, you own our boards, you have rewritten our histories, and you are now using our money for purposes we think unconscionable. Given all that, we would like to discuss the ethics of being responsible about gifts and donations received over generations.

The charge of misuse of funds is a serious one indeed, but it is a hard one to deny: millions of dollars now sit in banks, the interest reserved for projects that have nothing whatsoever to do with the purpose for which they were given. Critics believe that there is at least the potential of actual fraud in the administration of some of these funds, meaning that administrators, if challenged, could be found culpable under law. Orthodox believers see this financial and moral dilemma as evidence of the continuing untimely sway of a bureaucracy that has outlived its usefulness.

The orthodox faithful have seldom felt a vocation to enter into the nitty-gritty of legislative activism, or to organize a populist counter-movement, or to plan to elect delegates or a fair judiciary. Evangelicals have preferred to get busy with the Great Commission to make disciples all over the world, abandoning political machinations to those who are perhaps wise as serpents but considerably more harmful than doves. Recently, though, the curve of evangelical political and strategic intelligence is sharply up. This is evidence of the rebirth of orthodoxy.

Redressing institutional theft
When property is ripped off, its owners usually inventory precisely what has been lost and then follow a legal due process for making an accurate claim for recovery. The faithful laity are now registering such a claim.

Religious institutions, publishing houses, mission boards, and seminaries have been seized in an unfriendly takeover by liberal church leadership—a takeover that the denominations, filled with permissive apologists or secularization, have permitted to happen. Ironically, even when outvoted in legislative processes, such apologists have retained their tenure and pensions in church agencies and educational institutions. The longsuffering laity know this, having watched their finest church and academic institutions erode and disappear at the hands of leaders bitterly intolerant of traditionalists. They know that nothing can be done until the faithful, both lay and professional, first gain a new will and courage to speak the truth in love and then work cooperatively and proactively to recover what has been lost.

There is little hint of recognition among those who have stolen the institutions that they are the least bit culpable. They shamelessly imagine themselves to be heroes—even heroes of faith. Among the most insidious offenders are the liturgical experimenters, the sexual liberators, and the doctrinal revisionists who occupy lecterns and pulpits yet remain functional agnostics and deliberate agents of secular liberation. It will not be easy to tell these unfaithful ones the truth or to break through their self-deceptions. But this is precisely the task that faces the faithful today. Little will change until charges are stated clearly and evidence is presented in fair hearings. Insofar as courage is lacking to do this, the precipitous decline will worsen.

Consciousness-raising is needed among those who have benefited from institutional theft and intellectual duplicity. These wrongdoers need to understand precisely what damages they have inflicted on the faithful. They need to recognize their own collusion, understand exactly what has been stolen, and help determine how it can be justly returned to its rightful owners: those who understand and guard the ancient ecumenical consensus of the faithful of all times.

The faithful laity (who have too long delayed gentle admonition) must now enter the conflicted arena of rebuilding, healing, and regrounding religious governance and discipline. This rousing is slow, but it is already firmly under way. The articulate laity have come to understand that they have a decisive interest in the renewal of the institutions and ministries that they have been asked to trust.

Widowed institutions after the death of modernity
The religious community that fastens itself parasitically on the latest movement in modern thought does not easily survive the collapse of that movement. When its host is dead, the parasite loses its nourishment. As modernity collapses before our eyes, those who think of themselves as most up to date are being abruptly outdated. They are the last to recognize the rebirth of orthodoxy.

What is happening amid this hazardous historical situation is a joyous return to the sacred texts of scripture and the consensual guides of the formative period of its canonization and early interpretation. These times call not merely for generating moral outrage. Rather, we are rediscovering how the Spirit is descending upon the faithful, reclaiming them to ancient faith and calling them to repossess captive institutions.

Thomas C. Oden is the Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology and Ethics at Drew University and the author of numerous books including Pastoral Theology, as well as a three-volume systematic theology. He is also a contributing editor to Good News. This article is excerpted from his new book, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity, Copyright © 2003 by Thomas C. Oden.  Published by arrangement with HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins, Inc.

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