Archive: Bishops Back UMC Moral Standards

Responding to efforts by some groups to liberalize United Methodism’s stance against homosexuality, United Methodist bishops issued a statement in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, November 19 calling for high moral standards.

During its semiannual sessions, the Council of Bishops also reminded church members that only the General Conference, not the general boards and agencies, speaks officially for the denomination.

Their “statement of concern” was prepared in response to a presidential address given early in the international body’s week-long meeting by Bishop Earl G. Hunt Jr., Lakeland, Florida. Bishop Hunt urged colleagues to lead the church in warfare against evil, beginning with racism and sexual immorality.

The church’s official stance on homosexuality as found in the 1984 Book of Discipline acknowledges that “homosexual persons, no less than heterosexual persons, are individuals of sacred worth, who need the ministry and guidance of the church” and that their civil rights should be ensured. However, the statement adds, “we do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching.”

Other sections prohibit the use of United Methodist funds by “any ‘gay’ caucus or group” or “to promote the acceptance of homosexuality,” and ban the ordination or appointment of “self-avowed practicing homosexuals.”

The homosexual issue has heated up in recent weeks as official and unofficial groups within the denomination have announced proposals they will take to General Conference in St. Louis April 26-May 6. These include deletion of language condemning the practice of homosexuality and prohibiting ordination of homosexuals.

Noting “this very volatile and controversial issue facing our church and society,” the Council of Bishops called on all United Methodists to “join with us in being faithful to the standards, fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness, which have been adopted through the struggles of our covenant community of faith over the years.

“At the same time,” the bishops continued, “we call on United Methodists to exercise the utmost pastoral sensitivity and gracious understanding as we seek to maintain high moral standards and to discuss in a good spirit issues of human sexuality.”

In his address, Bishop Hunt said, “I believe the intercession of episcopal leadership on this issue is warranted because of the involvement of basic principles of historic Christian teaching. I also raise the matter in this setting because I believe the church’s response to serious overtures for radical change in our present positions rising from the proposals now being generated could affect substantively the unity of United Methodism in the next quadrennium.”

The bishop cautioned against compromise saying, “Our collegiality with friends and coworkers who favor a more liberal perspective on human sexuality has often made us reluctant to voice convictions which might offend them, and so we have risked becoming unintentional accomplices in the perpetration of a monstrous and fatal compromise.” He added, “Mere endorsement of ‘safe sex’ is an incalculably weak position to be assumed by a church dedicated to the promulgation of high moral principles and fundamental Christian values. Our worldwide community of Christian believers has a right to expect far more of us.”

He said a statement from the bishops is needed to assure the church that “we will never surrender to the pressures of articulate and persistent groups who propose to write a new chapter for Christian sexual ethics quite apart from the total impact of Scripture and ecclesiastical history … when those people represent only a small contingency in United Methodism.”

Calling for retention of language now in the Book of Discipline, Bishop Hunt said it provides balance between “clear, historic Christian principles and insistence upon all-embracing Christian pastoral compassion and love.”

Bishop Hunt said the potential for divisiveness around the issue of homosexuality is “monumental.”

“Methodism in the 1840s was ruptured by differing views about human slavery,” he said. “It could be that our church in the 1980s must decide if radically differing views on human sexuality will be allowed to rupture it again.”

On the second “evil,” Bishop Hunt called racism “the most disgraceful scandal in United Methodism.”

“The long trains of change seem to be lumbering to a halt in the North as well as the South,” he said. “The latent, inbred racism of my generation of whites … has begun to move in upon our moral exhaustion and bring once more the discouraging specter of satisfaction with the status quo.”

He called on the bishops to take the lead in arresting this “ominous development.” Battle lines within the church, he said, are open itinerancy (bishops’ appointment of pastors to churches regardless of race), ministerial recruitment and stronger clergy leadership in predominantly ethnic minority congregations.

Ethnic quotas in national and regional church organizations have taken leaders from local ministry to “more glamorous and often better-paid positions,” he said.

“Satisfying quotas at the expense of the very constituency such quotas were designed to protect is grotesquely self-defeating.”

In closing, Bishop Hunt said, “we bishops … must lead vigorously in converting or ‘turning around’ the mind of United Methodism to a fully Christian view on the issue of race and to a creative use of the principle of open itinerancy.

“Likewise we must not fear to try to sway the mind of the modern world toward a philosophy of human sexuality that will honor Scripture and civilized tradition as well as safeguard the integrity of the family and the health of the human race.”

About 90 bishops attended the meeting November 16-20. The council includes 46 active bishops in the United States, 15 from overseas, and about 50 retirees.

The council agreed to address the issue of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) at its next meeting, saying, “increasingly, United Methodists will be exposed or touched in some way by the effects of this disease.”

The body also commended Soviet and U.S. leaders for their efforts to negotiate elimination of intermediate-range nuclear forces and to cut by 50 percent strategic nuclear weapons. The bishops designated December 6 as a special day of prayer across the church about these negotiations.

The council heard from several study commissions that will report to the 1988 General Conference. A full evening was given to a critique of a report from a commission charged with studying ministry.

The next meeting of the council will be held in Kansas City, Missouri, immediately preceding the General Conference in St. Louis.

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