In Which I Am Completely Unhelpful about UMC General Conference

Allan Bevere has carried on a discussion about the 2016 UMC General Conference, in which he is partially responding to another Energion author, Joel Watts.

I have to agree with Allan that closing the floor is unlikely to help. I’m not sure anything will. I see individual United Methodist churches accomplishing things for the gospel. I don’t see the denomination doing so.

One of the favored activities of Christian bloggers is to advocate one form of church organization over another, but that’s not the real question. Methodist can talk about how churches without an episcopal structure have less accountability. Churches that choose their pastors locally can talk about the constraints of a heavy bureaucracy. But the real question is whether whatever structure we’ve created will have Jesus at the top. I’m completely unconvinced that any structure whatsoever will make that certain. Reorganizing won’t help.

I think listening to the Holy Spirit is what will really help, but even I don’t hear the same things from the Holy Spirit that all my friends do, so some holy conferencing needs to take place until we get to Acts 15:28, where the same thing “seems to the Holy Spirit and to us” before we have any solutions. And I don’t mean uniformity. I mean fellowship in a diversity that is still part of God’s kingdom.

But before that happens we’ll all have to be much more broken and humble, definitely myself included, than we are right now.