“encouraging” or “requiring” certain actions. It re-affirmed the longstanding principle that annual and jurisdictional conferences may pass resolutions that aspirationally hope for some future change in the UMC as long as they do not in the meantime amount to any “call to action” that violates the present standards of church law. That involves somewhat ambiguous questions and fuzzy boundaries over such minutiae as the technical extent of the differences between “imploring” and “urging” vs. In Decision #1483, the Judicial Council issued a combined ruling on both challenges.Īside from the affirmation of United Methodist abeyances, Judicial Council members had some disagreement with each other over the implications and permissibility of other parts of the resolution. A member of our UM Action Steering Committee submitted a similar challenge in the South Central Jurisdiction. jurisdictions, at the same meetings that elected these new bishops, overwhelmingly adopting almost identically worded resolutions entitled the “ Queer Delegates’ Resolution to Center Justice and Empowerment for LGBTQIA+ People in the UMC.” Among other things, this resolution “Affirms the spirit of the abeyance or moratorium as proposed to the General Conference…until changes can be made in The United Methodist Book of Discipline.”Īs a delegate to the North Central Jurisdiction, I prepared, publicly read, and duly submitted a legal challenge to this resolution, in the form of a request for a decision of law. This expectation was emphasized by all five U.S. bishops elected in 2022 have been expected to extend these United Methodist abeyances. Since then, numerous bishops have made such declarations. They could just declare that all complaints against clergy who violate the United Methodist Discipline’s biblical standards related to homosexuality would be “held in abeyance,” indefinitely! ![]() When the Traditional Plan took effect in January 2020, liberal bishops discovered a new trick for threading the needle of allowing defiance of our supposedly governing Discipline by clergy below them while still claiming that they were technically not getting their hands dirty by personally, directly violating the Discipline. When the 2019 UMC General Conference adopted the Traditional Plan, it essentially closed several of these key loopholes on which liberal bishops and others had relied. He sounded a bit frustrated in his demands. Indeed, at the 2022 North Central Jurisdictional Conference, I observed a gay activist clergyman use a public meeting to urge an episcopal candidate (who was later elected bishop) to not just find creative work-arounds within the Book of Discipline to accommodate non-celibate gay clergy, but to actually have the courage to “break the Discipline” in order to pander to such clergy. bishops have usually tried to avoid crossing the line of saying, “well, I as the bishop am just going to openly disobey what the Discipline requires me to do here.” Instead, they have preferred seeking gaps in church law in order to effectively allow clergy to violate these standards with no real accountability, while rather Pharisaically claiming that as bishops, they personally are technically not violating the letter of the law, somehow. Western Jurisdiction, when faced with a formal complaint against activist ministers violating our rules against performing a same-sex wedding or being sexually active outside of monogamous, heterosexual marriage, liberal U.S. And yes, many United Methodist bishops are complicit in choosing to allow or even encourage this to happen.īut there is an important nuance that many miss. ![]() Yes, the clear public record shows that across the connection, many liberal United Methodist clergy have enjoyed free rein to defy both the basic doctrine of what the UMC Doctrinal Standards teach about Jesus Christ and the rules of the UMC’s supposedly governing Book of Discipline for clergy behavior. This pulls the rug out from under a main tactic that bishops have recently used to protect liberal activist clergy who choose to violate the UMC’s biblical standards on marriage and sex. In Decision #1483, the Judicial Council essentially outlawed the practice of liberal bishops refusing to hold clergy accountable by simply declaring that complaints against clergy violating biblical United Methodist standards “will be held in abeyance” when the bishop does not feel like enforcing the standards at issue. The United Methodist Church’s supreme court, the Judicial Council, has just dealt a notable blow to the disobedience movement overwhelming our denomination.
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