assumption that the fellowship of believers is completely separate from the church as an institution. The institutional aspects of the church are interwoven with its fellowship, and they affect each other. Such a dichotomy reflects the cheap distinction often heard in society between “spiritual” and “religious.” The connectional nature of our tradition assumes that the local and the general are connected. The holistic vision of Wesley will not allow for any sharp distinction between “mission” and “administration.”
Leeway: Let me continue with my second point. The church is founded on the grace of Jesus Christ—which is another way of saying that the church is maintained by the presence of the Holy Spirit. The church does not exist, will not be preserved, and cannot be renewed by our acts of moral purity. There may be times when the church gets it wrong. Yet we assume that through the error, God’s grace is sustaining us and God’s Spirit is uniting us.
Anchor: That sounds like “cheap grace” that Bonhoeffer warned us about.20
Leeway: No, it is costly for those whom God uses as a means of grace. For example, think of the former Central Jurisdiction as a theological case study. Was the Methodist Church (1939 to 1968) the church according to the marks of the creed, specifically the mark of holiness? The Central Jurisdiction was the systemic embodiment of the sin of racism; segregation was encoded into the very DNA of the denomination’s constitution.21 This was not just the racism of an individual member or local congregation; the denomination was a racist institution. And yet, I doubt if any of us are willing to say that the Methodist Church was not a part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.
I would add that during those decades of segregation, God’s grace was being channeled through our members who protested the segregation and through our African American congregations who stuck it out. The gift of the Spirit was seen in this remnant band. I am not equating their story with either side in the homosexuality debate. These faithful few were the channel of grace that represented the mark of holiness. What I am saying is that the denomination can be in error on some fundamental things but still be a part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, because it is by grace that the church is saved and not by our works.
Hound: But the crucial difference between the issues of race and homosexuality is that the morality or spiritual equality of African American members was never in question. The question was whether that equality should be practiced in the church on earth. It should come as no surprise that Methodists have struggled longer than other mainline denominations with homosexuality because we still contain the residue of the holiness tradition, which smacks at the heart of sexuality in a way that racial segregation never did.
Credo: Leeway, are you suggesting that God will never reject the United Methodist Church? You make it sound like grace is irresistible: “once saved, always saved.” Wesley must be rolling over in his grave! His understanding of the providence of God also means that if a congregation or denomination stops being faithful to the mission of Christ then God will stop using them. We have to receive God’s grace by faith. To be sure, the ability to believe is a gift from God. Still, it requires a human choice. This is also the presupposition when he says that “the Church is called ‘holy’ because it is holy; because every member thereof is holy, though in different degrees, as he that called them is holy.”22 To your point about the Central Jurisdiction, there was a remnant of faithful believers who resisted the unholiness of the rest of the denomination. If God Rejected the denomination then those who remained faithful were the true church.
But how long will our denomination grieve the Holy Spirit by our lack of faithful obedience to God’s law? At some point, it is not unreasonable to assume that God will abandon our a denomination. This in no way means that the church earns the designation “holy.”
Leeway: In that case, my historical analogy of the Central Jurisdiction should give you reason to stay in the denomination when it errs so that you can be the remnant band that provides a channel of grace.
Can We be United in Mission?
Temperate: Both of you are wrong. The real problem of separating over this issue is that it threatens the mission of our denomination. This is the greatest threat to our identity as the church. There was a distinctively pragmatic dimension to Wesley’s ecclesiology. It is in the mission of proclaiming the salvation of Jesus Christ that the spiritual unity and visible holiness of the church find their truest expressions. Listen to this wonderful quote from Wesley in which he explained the missional nature of the church:
This is the original design of the church of Christ. It is a body of men compacted together in order, first, to save each his own soul, then to assist each other in working out their salvation, and afterwards, as far as in them lies, to save all men from present and future misery, to overturn the kingdom of Satan, and set up the kingdom of Christ. And this ought to be the continued care and endeavor of every member of his church. Otherwise he is not worthy to be called a member thereof, as he is not a living member of Christ.23
For Wesley, the nature of the church was wrapped up in the mission of the church, which proclaims the salvation of Jesus Christ. When this ceases to be at the center of the church then the church ceases to be.
South: But how can we “overturn the kingdom of Satan” if we have not been freed from the devil? Our mission is only effective if we have experienced and are offering the transforming power of the Gospel. And we cannot offer it if we question its truth. For years there has been a small radical minority advocating that we abandon the apostolic faith and the church’s orthodox teachings on human sexuality. They are out of step with the vast majority of Christians around the world and throughout the ages.
They want to lead us down the path of further decline. Their churches are in decline in the Western and Northeastern Jurisdictions. We also know that in those places where our churches have been growing, such as the South Central and Southeastern Jurisdictions in America and in the central conferences in Africa, it is where the truth of the Gospel and the apostolic faith are being proclaimed.
Leeway: So does this mean that once we see numerical decline in those annual conferences that the apostolic faith and the church’s orthodox teaching are no longer true? How do you explain the growth of some of our largest churches that are open and affirming of gays and lesbians?
Anchor: These churches have sold out to the dominant culture.
Leeway: Couldn’t the same be said about our conservative churches? Aren’t they riding the wave of the popularity of the Religious Right?
South: To be sure, the Gospel in the global south has been linked to certain cultural norms in order to make it relevant. Throughout the history of the church there has been a tension between two missional questions: relevancy and integrity. Making the Gospel relevant to particular cultural settings requires a process of using and transforming the ideas and symbols of the context. One the other hand, that process can go too far, and the message is fundamentally distorted when we accommodate too much of the culture. Liberals in North America claim that acceptance of homosexuality is missionally relevant, but for those who are in Africa, the opposite is true. How do we make the message relevant while maintaining the integrity of the message?
Embrace: Could it be that the African churches have accommodated the extreme prejudice against homosexuals that is in their cultures? Is that not a distortion of the message?
South: We can all agree on protecting the rights of gays and lesbians without agreeing on whether or not homosexuality is a sin. The question before us is this: How do we remain united when the contextual demands are diametrically opposed to each other?
Anchor: I refuse to accept the premise that this boils down to regional differences, whether those differences are international or within the United States. What is right is right, regardless of the context.
