San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Conservative Methodists detail breakaway
‘Diversity,’ ‘traditional’ marriage among tenents
Conservative leaders within the United Methodist Church unveiled plans Monday to form a new denomination, the Global Methodist Church, with a doctrine that does not recognize same-sex marriage.
The move could hasten the long-expected breakup of the UMC over differing approaches to LGBTQ inclusion. For now, the UMC is the largest mainline Protestant church in the U.S. and second only to the Southern Baptist Convention, an evangelical denomination, among U.S. Protestant churches.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the UMC’s General Conference — at which the schism would be debated — has been postponed and is now scheduled to take place in Minneapolis starting in late August 2022.
The Rev. Keith Boyette, a Methodist elder from Virginia who chairs the Global Methodist initiative, said he and his allies do not want to wait that long to formally leave the UMC. They have asked that the schism be added to the tightly limited agenda of a special one-day General Conference to be conducted online May 8.
“The church is basically stalemated
right now,” Boyette said. “We don’t believe an additional year is going to be helpful for anybody.”
However, Louisiana-based Bishop Cynthia Fierro Harvey, who heads the UMC’s Council of Bishops, said debate over a schism would involve “delicate deliberations” and attempting to conduct them online in May “does not seem wise or ethical.”
If the issue is not addressed May 8, Boyette said, he and his allies would be willing to delay
until the 2022 General Conference, but only if UMC centrists and progressives remain committed to previous agreements about a breakup. Any lessening of those commitments might prompt the conservatives to bring the new church into existence, Boyette said.
Differences over same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBTQ clergy have simmered for years in the UMC and boiled over in 2019 at a conference in St. Louis when delegates voted
438-384 to strengthen bans on LGBTQ-inclusive practices. Most U.S.-based delegates opposed that plan and favored LGBTQfriendly options; they were outvoted by U.S. conservatives who teamed with most of the delegates from Methodist strongholds in Africa and the Philippines.
In the aftermath of that meeting, many moderate and liberal clergy made clear they would not abide by the bans, and various groups worked on proposals to let the UMC split along theological lines.
The most prominent plan, the Protocol of Reconciliation & Grace Through Separation, has some high-level support, including from the Council of Bishops and the Global Methodist group. Under the protocol, conservative congregations and regional bodies would be allowed to separate from the UMC and form a new denomination. They would receive $25 million in UMC funds and keep their properties.
On a website launched Monday, the Global Methodist organizers said the new denomination would allow women to serve at all levels and seek a membership that is “ethnically and racially diverse.”
Regarding LGBTQ issues, organizers said the denomination would adhere to “the traditional understanding of Christian marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman and as God’s intended setting for human sexual expression.”
Bishop Karen Oliveto of the UMC’s Mountain Sky region — who in 2016 became the UMC’s first openly lesbian bishop — said in an email that “it is heartbreaking when the Body of Christ fragments itself.”
“I pray that those who are called into the Global Methodist Church will find themselves free to be the people whom God calls them to be,” she added.
Formed in a merger in 1968, the United Methodist Church claims about 12.6 million members worldwide, including nearly 7 million in the United States.
Maybe the past year of pandemic and a reckoning over racial injustice have readers turning to lament. Maybe polarizing politics have them feeling imprecatory.
But several new books about prayer from popular Christian authors have landed on bookshelves in the past month — and they seem to be resonating with readers.
“A Rhythm of Prayer: A
Collection of Meditations for Renewal,” edited by progressive Christian author Sarah Bessey, made bestseller lists last month in the United States and Canada.
Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor-atlarge of America Magazine, appeared on “A Late Show with Stephen Colbert” to discuss his latest book “Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone.”
Host Stephen Colbert was quick to tie the topic of prayer to the pandemic, asking Martin, the unofficial chaplain of Colbert Nation, for suggestions on different ways people can pray, even as they are unable to participate in person in other religious activities.
“I know that so many people in COVID right now — many people are turning to their faith, and it’s very frustrating for them because of the limitations of social distancing. People don’t feel comfortable going to church,” Colbert said.
Here’s a look at three new books about prayer and thoughts from their authors on why the topic is resonating.
Learning to Pray
It makes sense to Martin that the topic of prayer is resonating with readers right now.
“During a time of pandemic and division in the country, it’s natural for people to be worried and turning to God,” he told Religion News Service.
“But also during this pandemic, we have all become involuntary monks, and so prayer becomes more of a natural part of our lives. I think for so many different reasons, we’re turning more towards prayer.”
The Jesuit priest defines prayer as “conscious conversation with God.”
In “Learning to Pray,” Martin said he wanted to make prayer accessible to everyone, to explain what happens when one closes his or her eyes and bows his or her head.
For Martin, there is no “right way” to pray — prayer can look like a number of different things, from viewing nature as an image of God to practices like Lectio Divina or Ignatian contemplation.
“If it brings you into an encounter with God, it’s a good prayer,” Martin said.
Prayer in the Night
For the Rev. Tish Harrison Warren, a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and author of “Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life,” praying Compline — a nighttime liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer — is what got her through the compounding grief of one of the hardest pre-pandemic years of her life, including the death of her father, two pregnancy losses, a surgery and a cross-country move.
She documented what she learned during that time in her latest book, “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.”
It was a time when, Warren said, she was “a priest who couldn’t pray.” She needed those wellworn words of a familiar prayer.
Compline prayers include words like, “Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night.” They acknowledge sickness and peril and darkness and death. They gave Warren the words when she wanted to pray but was too weary and heartbroken to find them, she said.
And she has discovered that the book she wrote largely in 2018 about prayer and doubt and mortality now seems “weirdly timely,” she said.
“Part of me, because I’m a Christian, I’m like, well, the Holy Spirit knew the church would need prayer right now. It’s a terrible, terrible time, and we’re all separated,” Warren said.
“But prayer life can continue. Prayer life can continue online with other people in the church, but also individually.”
A Rhythm of Prayer
“A Rhythm of Prayer” features a number of different types of prayers written by theologians, pastors and authors from a number of Christian traditions.
They include a benediction by Bessey; a poem by Potawatomi Christian author and speaker Kaitlin Curtice; a prayer based on a chicken soup recipe by pastor and peacemaker Osheta Moore; “A Liturgy for Disability” by author and disability advocate Stephanie Tait; a “Prayer of a Weary Black Woman” by clinical psychologist and womanist theologian Chanequa Walker-Barnes; and even blank pages for those times when it feels like there aren’t words.
That’s partly because there are as many different ways to pray as there are people who pray, and she didn’t want to make something as personal as prayer “incredibly prescriptive and formulaic,” Bessey said.
Still, Bessey said she was surprised when she learned last week that the collection was a New York Times bestseller, ranking No. 5 on the newspaper’s list of “Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous” books.