[this was initially written as a comment to a friend’s facebook post, but I decided to make it its own thing…]
I certainly can’t speak for people who’ve been in the UMC their whole lives, but … when my partner and I moved to DC and went looking for a church, we looked at a variety, but membership in More Light, Reconciling Ministries Network, or similar was a minimum requirement for me. Even so, I was … wary of going to a place like the UMC that has this ‘incompatible’ language in its canon.
My partner and I haven’t really discussed what we’ll do going forward, but my suspicion is we’ll stay at Foundry United Methodist Church while we’re in DC—its pastors are pretty awesome; it is, if not on the leading edge of, certainly a part of, the movement for inclusion, up to and including baptizing a gay man and welcoming his partner into membership this weekend (it also hosted Trans Pride DC last summer and is hosting queer synagogue Bet Mishpachah while the nearby JCC is under construction…); one of the current pastors is gay, and for a host (heh) of other reasons.
But. If/when we move, it’s going to be extremely difficult for me to consider another UMC again.
At this point, it’s not just that the UMC have this discriminatory, offensive language in their statutes.
It’s not just that their international governing body had another opportunity to remove it and rejected it.
They didn’t just reject all attempts to make themselves more welcoming—even in the face of a statement from the Association of their seminaries that this could hurt new-pastor recruitment for a generation—but in fact doubled down on the hateful language and enforcement.
And did so in the face of not just numerous testimonies of how hurtful and hateful this action is but multiple rulings of the Judicial Council that over half of the Traditionalist Plan is unconstitutional.
The margin isn’t huge, but a significant majority of representatives of this church just declared they would rather do something hateful and hurtful and harmful to themselves as well as others and illegal according to their church constitution than to even allow other people to be Welcoming.
So, we lucked out this time, but going forward I’m going to be awful wary, at best, of the UMC generally….
It’s also to me a little akin to the 2016 election. Like a lot of people, I thought about leaving the country; my mom and I even talked about it. Obviously, I haven’t left yet—indeed, a year later, we moved to DC—but if I weren’t already here, I don’t know that I would seriously consider moving here right now, and looking for opportunities in other countries is far more on-the-table than it ever was before.
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