I don’t need to write a new GetReligion post about this week’s “Crossroads,” do I?
After all, this podcast conversation with host Todd Wilken (click here to listen) focuses on why United Methodists on the doctrinal left and right, as well as establishment players in the middle, are now bracing for divorce. In one form or another, I’ve been writing this post since the early 1980s.
What we need is a time machine (I’m a fan of Doctor Who No. 4) so that I could let readers bounce around in United Methodist history and see why all those new headlines about a proposed plan to break-up this complicated church need to be linked to trends and events in the past.
So here we go. Stop No. 1 in this time-travel adventure is Denver, in the year 1980 (care of a GetReligion post with this headline: “United Methodism doctrine? Think location, location, location”).
… It was in 1980 — note that this was one-third of a century ago — that Bishop Melvin Wheatley, Jr., of the Rocky Mountain Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church announced … he was openly rejecting his church's teaching that homosexual acts were "incompatible with Christian teaching."
Two years later, this United Methodist bishop appointed an openly gay pastor to an urban church in Denver. When challenged, Wheatley declared: "Homosexuality is a mysterious gift of God's grace. I clearly do not believe homosexuality is a sin."
This date is crucial, because it underlines the fact that the United Methodist Church’s doctrine that homosexual acts are “incompatible with Christian teaching” has been on the books for decades.
That’s why the following passage — from the New York Times a few days ago — is so misleading. The wording here gives the average reader the impression that this doctrine is something that conservatives pulled out of their hats in 2019. This Times report stated that a global split has been: