WASHINGTON (ABP) — Conservatives in the United Methodist Church scored several victories on Reformation Day Oct. 31, but liberals viewed them more skeptically.
A divided nine-member Judicial Council, the highest court in the hierarchical denomination, defrocked a Philadelphia minister for admitting that she is in a covenanted lesbian relationship. The council also reinstated a Virginia pastor who had been suspended for refusing to allow an openly gay man to join his church.
The court said the national denomination's stance overrules two resolutions from regional bodies that were more inclusive of gays and lesbians.
In the first and best-known decision, the council permanently removed the ministerial credentials of Beth Stroud, who had been an associate pastor at Philadelphia's First United Methodist Church of Germantown. Stroud had been stripped of her credentials in 2004, after coming out to her congregation and telling them that she was in a same-sex relationship. In April, a regional appeals panel overturned that decision. The latest decision reverses that.
Stroud's case has been a flashpoint in disputes over homosexuality in the denomination since she first made her announcement in 2003. Church law does not ban gay and lesbian clergy, but requires them to be celibate.
But the Virginia decision may have “larger implications for the church,” according to a progressive United Methodist group.
In that case, Ed Johnson, pastor of the 600-member South Hill United Methodist Church in South Hill, Va., refused membership to an openly gay man who had been an active participant in the church's life. The man, who church officials have declined to name, was involved in a relationship with another man.
Charlene Kammerer, Johnson's bishop, told him church policy required that he not discriminate in his offer of membership on the basis of sexual orientation. Johnson refused, even after Kammerer's decision was ratified by a lopsided vote of Johnson's fellow Virginia Methodist clergy earlier this year. Kammerer then placed him on involuntary leave.
The Judicial Council overturned Kammerer's action on a 5-3 vote. One of the three dissenters, Susan Henry-Crowe, wrote, “This decision compromises the historic understanding that the church is open to all. The Judicial Council cannot interpret something that is not stated in the [United Methodist Book of] Discipline. Nothing in the Discipline gives pastors discretion to exclude persons presenting themselves for membership in the church.”
Kathryn Johnson, executive director of the Washington-based Methodist Federation for Social Action, asked how far pastors' discretion would extend under such an interpretation. “Can a person be refused membership based on a person's race or their immigration status? What of the person who is divorced and remarried? Until today, membership in the United Methodist Church has been open to all persons willing to take the appropriate vows.”
But Mark Tooley, a conservative United Methodist activist, said the decisions signal that the nation's second-largest Protestant denomination is moving rightward on the issues that have divided virtually all other historic Christian denominations in the United States
“These rulings show that United Methodism is not moving in the direction of the Episcopal Church and declining liberal Protestantism in the West,” said a statement by Tooley, who works for the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington. The group is dedicated to reviving conservative social agendas in the nation's mainline Protestant denominations. “Instead, America's third-largest religious body is moving in the direction of global Christianity, which is robustly orthodox.”
Tooley said the rulings simply comport with the denomination's standards on marriage and sexuality, which the denomination has repeatedly reaffirmed since the 1970s.
“Undoubtedly, some in the declining regions of the church will continue to try to find ways to circumvent church law,” he continued. “The debate over this issue will certainly continue for some years. But the future of the church, whose membership is increasingly international, belongs to theological orthodoxy and historic Christianity.”