As I have stressed many times, I totally understand the challenges that religion-beat professionals face when attempting to do short, balanced, accurate hard-news stories about the 40 years of warfare inside the United Methodist Church over issues of marriage, sex, biblical authority and some core Christian doctrines about salvation and Christology.

I understand because I have been covering this story since my arrival at the old Rocky Mountain News (#RIP) back in 1983, with the church-discipline case of an openly gay UMC pastor, the Rev. Julian Rush. The progressive Rocky Mountain Annual Conference backed Rush and, well, the rest is history.

The biggest challenge in this story is helping readers understand why the Methodists who are defending the UMC Book of Discipline have decided to hit the exit doors, even though they have — for several decades — been winning the key votes at the global level of the denomination.

The problem is that the church establishment here in North America is actually running the show and the center-left leaders want to tweak the Discipline to allow more freedom for doctrinal progressives, while assuring mainstream Methodists that nothing will change at the local level unless their congregation wants it to change. See this recent post: “Why are United Methodists at war? Readers need to know that sexuality isn't the only fault line.”

The Associated Press recently shipped a long feature that tries To Explain It All, and there is much to praise in this piece. Here is the stating-it-mildly headline: “United Methodists are breaking up in a slow-motion schism.” Here is a long, long, essential piece of this feature that shows the complexity of these issues:

In annual regional gatherings across the U.S. earlier this year, United Methodists approved requests of about 300 congregations to quit the denomination, according to United Methodist News Service. Special meetings in the second half of the year are expected to vote on as many as 1,000 more, according to the conservative advocacy group Wesleyan Covenant Association.

Scores of churches in Georgia, and hundreds in Texas, are considering disaffiliation. Some aren’t waiting for permission to leave: More than 100 congregations in Florida and North Carolina have filed or threatened lawsuits to break out.

Those departing are still a fraction of the estimated 30,000 congregations in the United States alone, with nearly 13,000 more abroad, according to recent UMC statistics.

But large United Methodist congregations are moving to the exits, including some of the largest in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.

The flashpoints are the denomination’s bans on same-sex marriages and ordaining openly LGBTQ clergy — though many see these as symptoms for deeper differences in views on justice, theology and scriptural authority. The denomination has repeatedly upheld these bans at legislative General Conferences, but some U.S. churches and clergy have defied them.

This spring, conservatives launched a new Global Methodist Church, where they are determined both to maintain and to enforce such bans.

A proposal to amicably divide the denomination and its assets, unveiled in early 2020, has lost its once-broad support after years of pandemic-related delays to the legislative General Conference, whose vote was needed to ratify it.

Thus, reporters face the added challenge of covering a variety of ecclesiastical train wrecks at the local level, with regional UMC leaders often taking different approaches to handling very similar issues.

The AP story features lots of material from leaders on both sides and, well, much of it is rather mild in light of some of the events that keep igniting firestorms on social media. Hold that thought.

Once again, the key issue is whether this is basically a fight over homosexuality (and now trans rights), as opposed to clashes over many small-o orthodox Christian teachings over the centuries. Thus, the establishment keeps saying things like this:

New York Bishop Thomas Bickerton, president of the Council of Bishops, issued a statement in August denouncing “a constant barrage of negative rhetoric that is filled with falsehood and inaccuracies” by breakaway groups. In particular, he disputed allegations that the church is changing core doctrines.

But he said the denomination seeks to find a balance between encouraging churches to stay yet enabling them to go.

Well, who or what is “the church” in this case?

The whole point is that the establishment wants to make it possible for churches to say under the same denominational umbrella, even though they are divided — yes — by disagreements over core issues in moral theology and even some parts of ancient creeds.

Like it or not, this brings us back to the ministry of Isaac Simmons, who is currently associate pastor at Hope United Methodist Church in Bloomington, Ill. Here is their online bio:

Isaac (They/Them) also known as Ms. Penny Cost (She/Her/Hers) studies Business Management and Religious Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University. They are reportedly the first Drag Queen in the world to be Certified as a Candidate for Ordination within the UMC. Passionate in the fields of community development and social equity, Isaac is committed to working across lines of difference to enact change at all levels of the community. Isaac has spoken to congregations across the United States, Canada, and the UK on the topics of Queer Theology, The Spirituality of Drag, and Our Collective Call to Liberation.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, conservatives are saying that contents of one online poem by Ms. Penny Cost — the drag queen preacher’s name is a take on the sacred Feast of Pentecost — raises big questions about several essential doctrines.

Let’s flash back to my earlier post:

“God is nothing,” the self-described “dragavangelist” repeats throughout the poem, adding, “the Bible is nothing” and “religion is nothing.” In the end, he concludes God and the Bible are nothing “unless we wield it into something.”

“God must be f***ing nothing,” he says, “if her boundaryless, transubstantiated bodies of color are run down, beaten, and strewn in the streets of America instead of ruling the runways of life.”

He speaks of God not as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but rather as the source of queerness, describing him as “nothing but a drag queen with a microphone of biblical f***ing proportions,” “nothing, but if she were, she would be ‘yes, queen’-ing her way down the runways of Paris and Montreal,” and “nothing, but if she were, she would be a seamstress of divide couture, weaving together string theory and self portraits to form the fiercest gowns of queer existence.”

Needless today, there are some interesting tweaks to ancient doctrines — such as the Holy Trinity — in that poem-sermon.

Now there is a viral video clip with Ms. Penny Cost addressing children with this message (as stated in one Twitter post): “Romans 12:2 ("Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind") is now a pro-drag queen Bible verse.”

Thus, here is the big journalism question: Does Ms. Penny Cost speak for the UMC establishment, on matters of church doctrine?

That’s a complicated question. The key is that Simmons is poised to be ordained by a regional branch of the United Methodist Church, in violation of the doctrines contained in the current Book of Discipline. However, the establishment’s stated goal is for local and regional UMC leaders to have more freedom to make decisions that fit with the majority of their churches, but would offend many other churches in other regions. This would be possible under the proposed super-flexible form of a future United Methodist Church.

When Ms. Penny Cost is ordained, they will be a pastor with UMC credentials. Period.

This leads to another journalism question: How can reporters cover the current debates in UMC life without including some details about the case studies that conservatives are citing as evidence of major doctrinal changes that are ahead? If there are “falsehood and inaccuracies” in conservative complaints, journalists really need to include verbatim transcriptions from digital materials linked to these events and comments.

Will including these materials in mainstream news reports offend many people? Yes, they will offend United Methodists on both the left and the right, for very different reasons. The left wants silence. The right wants debates out in the open.

But consider this passage in the AP report:

Bishop Karen Oliveto of the UMC’s Mountain Sky region — who in 2016 became the UMC’s first openly lesbian bishop — said via email it is “extremely wounding to LGBTQ persons that our very personhood is being used as a wedge to disrupt unity in the church.” She expressed hope that UMC churches “will be safe places for all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Conservatives have lamented that UMC has failed to enforce its Book of Discipline on standards for ordination and marriage.

Oliveto said, however, that sometimes “the Holy Spirit runs ahead of us and gives us a glimpse of the future to which we are called. This is certainly the case across the denomination, where LGBTQ persons have been examined at every step of the ordination process and found to possess the gifts and graces for ordained ministry.”

In other words, doctrinal progressives in the United Methodist Church believe they are seeing evidence of a new Pentecost, with the Holy Spirit leading the denomination into a new era.

If this is the case, how do journalists leave the work of Ms. Penny Cost, and other activists at seminaries and in other official UMC structures, out of news reports about these conflicts?

Just asking.

FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited illustration with an AmericanPress.com feature with this headline — “A church divided: Split of Methodist denomination already underway.”