The United Methodist Church has offered a compromise with its Woodland Park congregation.
The Green Lake area church wants to keep the openly gay Rev. Mark Williams as its pastor, even though the denomination’s rules prohibit “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from the job. (The congregation had already lost a previous pastor, after she outed herself as a lesbian.)
The new deal: Williams can stick around, but only if supervised by an interim pastor who’d be the congregation’s official senior minister. This arrangement would last at least until October, when the denomination’s Judicial Council next meets.
I’d been involved in several churches back when I was into that sort of thing. The Methodists were the most liberal of the mainline Protestant churches. They (or at least many of them) were big on the “social gospel,” a schtick in which one was expected to show his faith through good works (taking in Vietnamese refugees, recycling, boycotting grapes). Sunday sermons would often be concerned with why we should vote for the school levy or support affirmative action.
Our youth group met in a parsonage basement, whose concrete walls were painted black and adorned with “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things” posters. Some other Methodist youth groups screened explicit sex-ed films for teens (albeit with in-person lecturers explaining the importance of a strong marriage or at least a strong committed relationship).
But this almost-Unitarian do-gooderism annoyed some of the old-timers in certain congregations. These church ladies and gents were more accustomed to the Methodism that was the blandest of the old-line Protestant faiths. (Welch’s Grape Juice was originally marketed to Methodists, as a non-alcoholic communion drink.)
This rift continues, nearly three decades later, and is at the heart of the Woodland Park church’s little brouhaha. And it will probably always be part of that odd denomination; so long as the old-timers control its hierarchy while its social-gospelers take their own “embracing diversity” talk seriously by staying in the church.
