Who’s In Charge At Your Church

Most Methodist leaders I know are still fuming at the denomination’s Judicial Council over its Decision 1032, a decision which gives pastors the sole discretion to determine a person’s fitness for membership in their congregations. It is, indeed, an astonishingly bad decision. But it is not quite as bad as the pastoral action that gave rise to it in the first place, denying membership to a gay man ostensibly because he would neither repent of his sexual orientation, nor deny its overt expression in a committed relationship.

Part of what makes 1032 potentially so destructive is the obstacle it presents to staying focused on its central issue, the meaning of church membership in the United Methodist tradition. It is all too easy to get distracted by yet more rounds of unhelpful venting about gays and the church. But unless the majority of the Council who voted for 1032 can be shown either to have slept through the hearing altogether or to have been motivated from the start by a malign intent, their otherwise off-base decision might best be regarded as pointing to more ambiguity in the Methodist Book of Discipline than many have believed. 

For example, I have worried that the Discipline may pay insufficient attention to sexual orientation in comparison with its powerful condemnations of excluding people on the basis of race, color, national origin, status, or economic condition. Taking up the issue of gays and lesbians in the context of affirming inclusiveness unambiguously would surely make for more edifying discussions at the next General Conference than those that Methodists have had to endure for quadrennia now. Surely the church can do better than rote recitation of “chastity in singleness,” a phrase crafted especially with non-straights in mind.

Does anybody really know what Methodists should mean by this Medieval-sounding phrase anyway? General Conferences continue to avoid taking responsibility for it by leaving unreconnoitered the critical term, “chastity.” Their inaction left me with little to go on a while back when an unmarried seminary student, worried about his practice of masturbation, asked me if I thought his behavior made him unchaste, and therefore unfit for the ordained ministry. It used to be that the church’s more conscientious youth wondered about even their opening gambits in parked cars on Saturday nights. Nowadays, from other teen-agers and even a former President, the view has emerged that not even oral sex should be counted against either virginity or fidelity. Can we get off the singling out of gays and lesbians and get on with clarifying what chastity means for all singles?

But back to Decision 1032. (Remember what I said about distraction?) Robin Lovin, Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University, got down to its real issue succinctly and well when he wrote recently: “… a member of the United Methodist Church joins the whole connection, so we have not followed some congregational traditions that give the local congregation a decisive role in determining a candidate’s readiness for membership.” (United Methodist Reporter, November 25, 2005.) What this means in specific is that a United Methodist pastor’s bishop and  “collegial guidance by the Annual Conference” have important roles to play in the discerning of anyone’s readiness for membership in the church. Both roles are undermined by Decision 1032.

One of the most powerful images that Christianity has ever offered for understanding and appreciating the identity and role of its leaders is the image of “pastor,” from poimen, shepherd. The pastor of a local congregation is like the shepherd of a flock. The qualifier is crucial. Like shepherds, pastors have both considerable responsibility for and considerable power over the members of their respective flocks. And like shepherds, pastors constantly confront the sobering reality that the responsibilities they bear often outrun the power they have to bear them effectively. However, with every analogy, this one also has its limitations.

Unlike shepherds, pastors do not suborn the fleecing of their flocks. (At least, most of them don’t.) And unlike shepherds, pastors do not fret over how to improve their flock’s gene pool. One in Christ Jesus, their members do not have to be one in race, color, nationality, gender, economic condition, social standing, mode of baptism, marital status, musical preference, commitment to tithing, doctrinal understanding, or sexual orientation as well. When pastors get confused about any of this, and the real owner of their flocks seems otherwise occupied, it is a good thing that there are other Christians higher up on the spiritual food chain to step in and help them out. And when The Book of Discipline becomes too confusing for the Judi-ciary whose job it is to interpret it, it is a good thing that there is a judi-catory available to clear things up.