Uh, oh! The Methodists are breaking up. With the current ideas of freedom, fairness, and the idea of a loving God, it was only a matter of time before things fell apart and the drumbeat of progress was beaten back. Time for the united to become disunited. And, remember, the church will be judged first~! United Methodists are breaking up in a slow-motion schism
I attended United Methodist a quarter of a century ago, and how it handled sexual diversity issues was the big flashpoint at annual conference back then. I am surprised it has not already completely broken apart. There is no way you can make this schism go away. There is no compromise position that will satisfy.
The United Methodist Church went fully woke years ago. In September 2020, the UMC website launched its "Racial Justice Conversation" which included a video discussion titled “theological roots of racism and colonialism”. Theological roots of racism & colonialism (umc.org) From the video: Panelists Willie James Jennings stated white people created a racist colonial Western world in which everything revolves around white people. Then Jennings stated that racism was made possible by Christianity: “Here’s the problem for us. What helped to make that possible, facilitated that assimilation, that joining of whiteness to existential identity if you will was Christianity itself”. Panelist Rev. Colon-Emeric agrees and stated that Christianity and Colonialism always show up together: “…they are distinct, colonialism and the gospel, and yet they only come to us bundled together”. Panelist Dr. Tran says that the Great Commission has been taught as a command to spread “whiteness”, “go out and conquer” and “make the same”. Standard theology is labeled as "white Christianity" and white pastors are so infused with racism that they cannot hold any position of authority until they are re-educated. The panelists claim Christianity is a tool that white people have used to further their “whiteness” and create a “world centered on whiteness”. The UMC claims Christianity is inherently racist, and all white people need to surrender their positions of leadership until they are "re-educated" in correct "Christian" theology. That tells me that all those white people running the UMC are not Christians but "re-educated" and teach some non-Christian non-Biblical religion. The Christian church is being divided, the wheat and chaff are being separated.
Are you really claiming that the unity of the Methodist church DEPENDED on racism??? I highly doubt that. At least, I certainly HOPE that's not true. One of the problems that churches have is that once they have decided that God declared something, it's really hard to decide that maybe He didn't actually say that, or that the Church from its establishment forward just misinterpreted what God said. It's especially hard for religion to allow room for better understanding.
A congregation can just pretty much set up a new church anywhere and do as they like. That is not the real issue. It is the real estate. Unless the big guys decide that a congregation can keep the property when they break away, then they have to find somewhere else to worship as UMC property is held in trust for the entire denomination, not any individual congregation.
But they're not fracturing based along traditional historical lines. Things have become polarized concerning social politics now. A huge number of different Christian Churches are fracturing along conservative versus progressive lines.
Pretty sure the Methodist are doing just fine around here. I drove by their Church the other day and nothing seemed amiss.
I'm a Christian. I've become fairly asocial in my age, but I grew up as a Christian, and I knew many Christians, and I can probably count on one hand how many of them identified as 'Methodist' or 'Lutheran' or 'Presbyterian'... Baptists I noticed would make a point of making it known they were Baptist, especially Southern Baptist... but the rest, well, I never knew anyone actually cared.
Yep, looks like the UMC has a bunch of radical Leftists pushing Critical Race Theory in their church. However, they have two nagging problems on their hands: 1) There are no theological roots of racism and colonialism in the Gospels 2) Elements within the Catholic Church during the Age of Discovery, most notably the jurists and theologians at the prestigious School of Salamanca, were outspoken in their opposition to colonialism and racism. For anyone who is interested: It was on account of these Dominicans and others that the Spanish crown was convinced to prevent the mistreatment of Native Americans: New Laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Laws Bartolomé de las Casas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomé_de_las_Casas Protector of the Indians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protector_of_the_Indians This isn't to say that there weren't racists and xenophobes in the Catholic Church - we all know there were - and that some people didn't use religious/theological arguments to justify the conquest and exploitation of Native Americans and other indigenous peoples. However, as we can see, there were people in the Church who combatted racism and used religious/theological arguments against the conquest and exploitation of Native Americans, et al. What we find here is what one typically encounters with "crits" and their ilk - you never get a full, fair and accurate accounting of things. You get a narrative that is selectively tailored and edited to promote their particular ideology and agenda.
That's the issue with the Episcopal church. The individual churches don't own their own land and facilities. So even though just about every protestant denomination is going through some version of this crack up, the denominations that own the real estate have more leeway to get their way. A Southern Baptist church can simply quit the Southern Baptist convention.
Yeah that's called wielding power that's what the Catholic church has done for 17 centuries. The obvious solution to this is to not place high value on real estate with regard to worship of God. Christ himself said whatever my followers gather to discuss me that's where my church is. It's not in some heaven light years away or entering cathedrals owned by a corporation. I think it's good that there is so many different flavors of Christianity one of the first points of which this started was the Renaissance. And I would argue that the Renaissance was the birth of the current West
Well the Episcopal Church has been declining for decades, so people have been voting with their feet.
I would say so, to greater or lessor degrees. As we enter a post Christian era only the churches that buy into the establishment agenda will have a seat at the table.
That, my friend, would make for an interesting discussion thread, and if you're ever interested in exploring that in depth I have a book for you: Here, in a grand narrative spanning 1,800 years of European history, a distinguished political philosopher firmly rejects Western liberalism’s usual account of itself: its emergence in opposition to religion in the early modern era. Larry Siedentop argues instead that liberal thought is, in its underlying assumptions, the offspring of the Church. Beginning with a moral revolution in the first centuries CE, when notions about equality and human agency were first formulated by St. Paul, Siedentop follows these concepts in Christianity from Augustine to the philosophers and canon lawyers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and ends with their reemergence in secularism―another of Christianity’s gifts to the West. Inventing the Individual tells how a new, equal social role, the individual, arose and gradually displaced the claims of family, tribe, and caste as the basis of social organization. Asking us to rethink the evolution of ideas on which Western societies and government are built, Siedentop contends that the core of what is now the West’s system of beliefs emerged earlier than we commonly think. The roots of liberalism―belief in individual freedom, in the fundamental moral equality of individuals, in a legal system based on equality, and in a representative form of government befitting a society of free people―all these were pioneered by Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages who drew on the moral revolution carried out by the early Church. These philosophers and canon lawyers, not the Renaissance humanists, laid the foundation for liberal democracy in the West. https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Individual-Origins-Western-Liberalism/dp/0674417534 It's a great book. I recommend to all my conservative and libertarian friends. Anyhoo, a lot of historians would agree with you, as they consider the Renaissance the dawn of the Modern Era. Then there are others who consider the Renaissance the culmination of the Middle Ages. But what's interesting about Siedentrop's book is that he traces the birth of the current West back to the High Middle Ages, and he makes a convincing argument in his book (which in many respects is a polemic). The origins of the idea of natural rights that we recognize today was born in the 11th Century and many credit the Franciscan friar William of Ockham (1285-1347) of Ockham's Razor fame, with developing the first right doctrine in the early 14th Century. In fact, many consider Ockham one of the early fathers of libertarianism, including myself. The Idea of Natural Rights-Origins and Persistence Brian Tierney https://scholarlycommons.law.northw...erer=&httpsredir=1&article=1005&context=njihr
Huh... This one seems right up my alley and I might have to take a look at it. So you think this would make an interesting subject for a thread? All of my knowledge on this is layman's knowledge I didn't study it academically. So I imagine I'd be out of my depth pretty quickly
I actually think that's it's a downfall. Giants are for slaying. They're moving away from presenting Christ's message that digestible understandable way and moving war toward jockeying for power. I don't think it will be the death of Christianity it will be it's rebirth.
I thought you might be interested in that, and you're in luck - there's a free online version (PDF format) of the first 18 pages here: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/SiedentopInventingTheIndividualPSPPEdit2014.pdf The book runs chronologically, so the first section is on the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and a lot of the information is derived from this incredible book which goes all the way back to the dawn of Western Civilization: The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-City-Religion-Institutions-Greece/dp/0801823048 And that's one of the great things about Inventing the Individual - it will refer you to other great history books that trace the evolution of the West, like this: The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law 1150-1625 (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion) I do. If you're game I'll open the thread tomorrow. The title could run something along the lines of the birth/dawn of the Modern West. No biggie. There's a lot I could learn myself and it'll get fun, particularly when the Woke start bitching about the subject of the thread ("WAAACIST!!") and how we'd all be living in caves if the Sword of Islam had never visited Western shores.
Yeah I'm game I'm a slow reader so it'll be a while before I can catch up with the book but it sounds like it's right up my alley. But I'll absolutely participate please if you start that send me a link and conversations.
It's a dense, slow read, Poly - take your time and don't even try to rush through it. I had to go over some sections two or three times, but it was worth it. Will do. I'll open the thread in this section tomorrow.
Religion is some shape or form has existed for all of human recorded history and beyond. It will continue to exist. My city has churches everywhere after a century of baptist in-fighting, divisions, "cleanings", etc. The Apostolics run a close second these days in that regard. The Methodists, however, have all the really nice high dollar architecturally noteworthy old church buildings. I am guessing the UMC isn't going to let go of them no matter what the local congregations decide to do. If nothing else, they will rent them out for a chunk of change to other denominations.
Something extremely good will somehow emerge out of this schism........ I suspect that what was shown to former Atheist and near death experiencer Mellen Thomas Benedict will somehow prove to be relevant............ 2023 to 2035 predictions from a near death experiencer, (who was an Atheist).
