Editor’s note: As the article below indicates, BNG previously published an article the author here took extreme issue with. In fairness, we hear his perspective on the larger issue at hand. Our intent is to illustrate the great differences of opinion that exist today among Methodists in America.
How to review a book that never should have been written, much less published?
How to analyze a book about which someone, somewhere and at some point should have called an audible?
How to engage with a work that author should have halted, editor should have stopped, publisher should have nixed?
How to assess a memoir the memoirist admits his colleagues and friends urged him not to write?
These questions and more confront me as I open up Will Willimon’s latest title from Abingdon Press, The Church We Carry.
Talbot Davis
Here’s the story — and the story behind the story — in a nutshell.
Vast influence
William Willimon is United Methodism’s leading pastoral theologian. His vast influence comes from his distinguished career as pastor, professor, bishop, author (more than a million volumes sold), and mentor to generations of UMC clergy through his longstanding role on the faculty of Duke Divinity School.
Willimon’s childhood church, Buncombe Street United Methodist in Greenville, S.C., disaffiliated from the denomination in 2023, joining more than 7,800 UMC congregations nationwide making the same decision.
In response, Willimon set out to write an expose on how and why Buncombe Street did what it did.
In the course of Willimon’s investigation in the latter half of 2024, Buncombe Street’s senior pastor, Justin Gilreath, took his own life. The suicide was on Nov. 16, 2024.
Willimon was the subject of an interview regarding his forthcoming book that posted Nov 26, 2024. The interview became part of an article by fellow Duke Divinity School Professor Curtis Freeman, posted on Baptist News Global. Freeman’s essay, and Willimon’s part in it, was silent on the suicide but scathing toward Gilreath’s preaching style.
Did Willimon know of the heartbreak at Buncombe when he was interviewed? Did Freeman know about it when he wrote and posted the article? Given the fact that Willimon had invested so much time, energy and muckraking moxie into Buncombe Street (he tells of watching “120 sermons”), how could he not have heard of Gilreath’s fate 10 days after the fact?
However we answer those questions — pastoral insensitivity, journalistic oversight or simply “a failure to communicate” — the Freeman/Willimon story’s timing was awkward at best and scandalous at worst.
In spite of the tragedy with which Buncombe Street was and is dealing, Willimon persevered in his research and his writing.
Abingdon Press, Willimon’s long-time publisher, likewise persisted in publishing the narrative.
And that is how I find myself reviewing a book that never should have been written, published or marketed.
What we learn
As I read The Church We Carry, I realized early on this particular book tells us much more about William Willimon than it does about Buncombe Street Methodist Church.
The observer becomes the subject whether he realizes it or not.
Some of what we learn about Willimon from Willimon is amusing. For example, it’s clear that his favorite author is … Willimon.
Will Willimon
The book contains at least 18 examples of the author quoting his own works. The pattern begins early as the prelude features a transcript of a sermon he delivered at Buncombe Street in January 2022. Willimon functions as his own book’s prologue.
From the sermonic prelude, Willimon goes on to cite his own publications, lectures and, yes, more sermons throughout the book. The self-reference barrage culminates in one of my favorite passages in The Church We Carry:
I’ve frequently boasted to the Global Methodist Church, even though they weren’t listening, “There’s nothing you can say as harsh, critical and scorned by bishops, The UMC, or the present Book of Discipline, as contemptuous as what I’ve said, years before you, in print, mind you (except for your looney obsession with drag queens). Rekindling The Flame, Resident Aliens. A New Connection: Reforming The United Methodist Church. Bishop. Don’t Look Back. Check ‘em out.”
Translation: I’ve run out of individual quotes. Just read all of them!
We also learn much that is curious about Willimon. Why does he open the Prelude (even before reprinting his own sermon) with this admission: “I was told not to write this book”? Even his episcopal colleagues in the UMC urged him: “’Frankly, many of us are exhausted by this disaffiliation thing and are ready to turn the page. Wish you wouldn’t bring this up,’ said more than one bishop.”
As if disaffiliation fatigue is the great scandal of this particular story.
Why does he persist in spite of the opposition? Indeed, why does opposition fuel his resolve to continue?
Self-owns
Why does Willimon fill his own pages with arguments and anecdotes that undermine his defense of United Methodism? The young kids call these “self-owns” these days, and Willimon is an unwitting expert in them. For example:
- His litany of failed Buncombe Street pastoral appointments buttresses the church’s ultimate decision to leave the denomination. Why stay part of a connection incapable of providing effective leadership?
- His citation of Corinthian correspondence as part of his larger defense of the sexual revisionist teaching now ascendant in the United Methodist Church. Given the content of 1 Corinthians 6:9-20, Willimon should avoid the context of the Corinthian letters altogether.
- His admission — even if by proxy through a nationwide church study — that “theological orthodoxy and church engagement go hand in hand.” Well, yes, yes, they do. Said another way: “Theological progressivism and church apathy walk around arm in arm.”
- His criticism that the largest churches over whom he had presided as bishop in Alabama “are now affiliated with the Global Methodist Church.” Does that say more about those congregations’ lack of institutional loyalty … or the denomination’s lack of theological integrity? Many of Willimon’s attempted salvos function much more like boomerangs. Curious, indeed.
Conflicted
Yet above all else we discover about Will Willimon in The Church We Carry, we learn much that is conflicted. There is an ever-present yet unacknowledged tension in the book between the author’s condescension and his self-reflection. The narrative swings back and forth between these two extremes, and if you read closely, you might be surprised at which side ultimately ends up winning.
“There is condescension aplenty in this book.”
There is condescension aplenty in this book. Some of that derision is directed at those with almost nothing to do with the Buncombe Street Story: John Piper, Bill Hinson, “conservative Asbury Seminary,” “lowly local pastor(s)” and other “uncredentialed” clergy, “notorious” John Ed Mathison, unnamed “upstart” Methodist megachurches, current Buncombe pastor Lonnie Pittman, whose ministerial career he badly mischaracterizes, and people who believe in a physically located heaven and hell.
Yet Willimon reserves his greatest disdain for the people of Buncombe Street themselves, especially those who engineered and supported disaffiliation. Although the church is comprised in large part of what we would call “the professional class,” in Willimon’s eyes they never should have been trusted to hire their own staff without “denominational vetting or episcopal oversight.” As if people who run medical practices and law firms can’t be trusted to lead their own congregation.
Misdiagnosis
The scorn with which he regards the majority contingent of the church leads to a remarkable misdiagnosis of both their motives and aims:“ The disaffiliates’ affection for church property was a chief motivation for the path they took, even though there is not a shred of biblical support for such love.”
No.
What Bishop Willimon fails to understand is this: The disaffiliators at Buncombe Street and elsewhere refuse to be part of a denomination that redefines what Jesus reinforced.
Buncombe Street and the Global Methodist Church of which it is now a part genuinely believe that by endorsing same-sex marriage and LGBTQ identity, the United Methodist Church has committed the most lethal of heresies.
Despite claims that “Jesus never spoke about homosexuality or same-sex marriage,” the fact remains that he did; the UMC and its loyalists just don’t like what he said in Matthew 19 or Mark 10. What’s more, Moses, Peter, Paul and our church ancestors up until 1970 or so all speak with a singular and decisively negative view about same-sex intercourse.
That same unanimity today continues in the church of the Global South, with sexual revisionism’s only adherents hailing from North America and Western Europe — and even then found almost exclusively in old-line denominations that are quickly vanishing from the ecclesiastical landscape.
“You don’t have a different interpretation; you have a new religion.”
If no one read the Scriptures and church history in the way of sexual revisionists until 50 years ago, you don’t have a different interpretation; you have a new religion.
Buncombe Street and others who left the UMC decided they liked the religion they inherited and wanted no part of one the denominational elites invented.
Throughout the book, Willimon treats the redefinition of marriage as an afterthought, as if it can’t be a heretical move simply because he says it isn’t. He also ridicules the conservatives’ “looney obsession with drag queens” and “isolated, obscure events elsewhere” as if sexual revisionism in one corner of the denomination cannot possibly impact life in another corner (wait … are we connectional or not?).
Then, as if on cue, as I was preparing this review, came some United Methodist news from Chicago where Darren Calhoun, an ordained worship pastor, made these claims about his domestic partnership:
For my relationship, which will be four years this month, I would call my partner an “anchor partner,” but we are non-monogamous. We are in an open relationship. … Relationship anarchy is a perfect descriptor of what we wanted and the frustration we felt in previous connections. One moment was really important for me was when he was dating someone and they had a breakup. I remember feeling sad with him about the breakup and simultaneously feeling so much joy that I could be there with him in his breakup.
I don’t think Wesley had that in mind when he spoke of the trust clause.
Such clergy freedom may not have been the original goal of the sexual revisionists, but it is the inevitable outcome.
Codified heresy has become embodied apostasy.
This is why Buncombe Street and 7,800 other congregations departed a once-great denomination. No amount of condescension can alter those facts.
There’s more
Yet just when I couldn’t feel more … well, condescending … toward the author, I encountered some moments of extraordinary self-reflection. Willimon tells us of the time when, as a young pastor, he read Dean Kelly’s Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. What did he observe with a growing dread?
Kelly implied that liberal, Mainline, thin theology churches (Buncombe Street all over) were doomed with increasing numbers of Americans wanting more out of church than inoffensive, innocuous theology … masquerading as gospel. Looking back, maybe the disaffiliates had the guts to embrace the change I feared.
At that last sentence, I stood up and took notice.
Willimon becomes more reflective — and more personal — later in the book, especially as he considers the undeniable appeal of Gilreath’s preaching: “Maybe Justin’s hellfire-and-brimstone sermons received such a positive hearing at The Table (Buncombe’s contemporary service) because some people had tired of saccharine Methodist schmaltz.”
Then his self-analysis becomes most poignant on page 129: “And how has my preaching been in rebellion against the sermons that I grew up with at Buncombe Street, even as Justin rebels against the preaching he heard as a student at Duke Divinity? Is Justin’s the homiletics of the future?”
And, by implication, is Willimon’s preaching a thing of the past? Eloquent, articulate, beautiful even, but time-stamped and time bound? Could the preaching of a troubled, hurting firebrand be in some sense timeless?
Yes, we learn much about Will Willimon in The Church We Carry. When you peer through the scorn, you’ll see the scars. Knowingly or not, he offers himself up for your analysis as he moves into the final years of public ministry.
Ultimately, I wonder if that self-reflection, hiding in plain sight of this memoir, is Willimon’s subconscious admission: “Actually, I don’t think I should have written this book either. I just couldn’t help myself.”
Talbot Davis is a graduate of Princeton University and Asbury Seminary. Since 1999 he has been the pastor of Good Shepherd Church in Charlotte, N.C., a congregation that disaffiliated from the UMC in 2023. He has published six books with Abingdon Press and seven with Invite Resource. He authors “Come Alive Daily,” a weekday Bible study with more than 3,300 subscribers.