Foolish Liberal Methodists Thought is Was a Big Tent



[To readers of my blog this site, The Skive, will be shutting down during the next week. My thanks to the people who organized this effort and hosted my blog along with others. My blog will continue on another site, Blogspot. I will leave a link to it each day to reminder readers how to reach it. Thank you, too, to readers who have continued to participate. We are on the way to 2 million visits to the blog.

For over a decade, Methodists have been debating whether gay clergy can serve and whether the denomination can endorse gay weddings. All this time, liberals thought conservatives saw their denomination as they did, one with a long history of tolerance the civil resolution of differences. They diddled away years when they could have started a "Reformed" Methodist denomination that was inclusive and tolerant. Now, they are realizing inclusion of gay Methodists was never an option.

At the national conference where votes on such matters takes place, a majority of U.S. delegates have voted twice to allow gay pastors to serve and for all pastors to perform gay weddings. When the votes were counted this year a strong majority of delegated from countries such as Africa voted to stiff arm gay people.

This experience puts forward the question as to whether Christian churches in the U.S. should put millions of dollars into missionary projects. It is safe to say there would be virtually no Christianity in Africa were it not for missionaries. Now Methodism in Africa is a different version of the faith than that practiced by the majority of Methodists in the U.S. The cultures are different. Therefore the religious beliefs are different.

When the Christian faith admonishes its followers to go off and evangelize it does not take into account that other cultures may well make the faith into something new and different. In the case of Africa, the new and different is unacceptable to millions of Methodists.

The late politician Rep. Tip O'Neill is famous for saying, "All politics is local." That seems for the most part to be true of religion as well. The god people chose to worship came out of their local mythology and trying to put that god in some other culture often is a mistake.

Liberal Methodists would do well to spend no more money on missionaries.

My blog will continue here:  

https://freethinkerjon.blogspot.com/2019/06/foolish-liberal-methodists-thought-is.html

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