Kentucky Methodists Are Dividing — And Division Is An Age-Old Tradition In Itself
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(OPINION) Well over 250 United Methodist congregations in Kentucky recently voted to split from their parent denomination, the United Methodist Church.
Members of the UMC’s Kentucky Annual Conference passed the measure June 4 in Owensboro, Kentucky.
The UMC is the country’s — and Kentucky’s — second-largest Protestant denomination.
The loss of these churches will shrink the number of its congregations in the Commonwealth by nearly half.
The division results from a continuing disagreement within Methodism over homosexuality and other social and theological issues.
This is sad news to me. I hate to see Christian groups, whether large or small, break up.
But they do. Regularly. It seems fitting to put this development into some historical perspective.
Church splits aren’t the exception; they’re the rule. The history of Christianity sometimes seems to be one division after another, endlessly, each split as agonizing for those involved as the previous ones were for earlier generations.
American Methodism already divided in the 1840s, over slavery. The Methodist Episcopal Church, as it was then named, was the nation’s largest denomination. But slavery cleaved it into separate northern and southern denominations — the latter of which was, by the way, formed in Louisville.
The separation lasted until 1939, when the northern and southern Methodist Episcopal churches and the Methodist Protestant Church merged, says a UMC website.
Church divisions go back to the beginning of the Christian faith.
In the first century, St. Paul mentioned that members of a congregation at Corinth couldn’t get along with one another — and suggested that disagreements were inevitable.
“For there must in fact be divisions among you, so that those of you who are approved may be evident,” he said.
Of course, although Paul didn’t say so, all the factions ever formed have thought they were the ones God-approved.
In practice, the God-approved don’t generally become evident until much later.
We’d all agree today the northern Methodists in the 1840s genuinely had God’s ear (or God had their ear) on slavery. The southern Christians were dead wrong. But that seems to have been less clear to many thousands of Methodists at the time.
If you think you’re more discerning than those old muttonheads 180 years ago, you might be deluding yourself. None of us knows which path we might have chosen had we lived in their day, been raised on their culture’s popular prejudices and been limited to whatever facts they did or didn’t possess.
Anyway, church splits have continued unabated — sometimes bloodily — since the days of the New Testament.
There were disputes over gnosticism in the first century.
There was the Great Schism between Rome and Constantinople that began in 1054. Christianity writ large broke in two.
There was the Reformation, when protestors such as Martin Luther rejected Rome’s authority.
Since the Reformation, there have been largely 500 years of Protestants splitting into factions, which then split again, and again, and again — world without end.
Someone once asked me where my own congregation came from.
“Well,” I said, “we hail from the grand tradition in which a group of people from a church up the road got mad and left. They came down here a couple of miles and started their own church to show everybody how real Christians worship.”
That’s only a small exaggeration.
The underlying problem is that God has assigned Christians a pretty much impossible task. We’re eternal beings, commanded to preach transcendent and unchangeable truths. We’re warned not to shift our beliefs with every flutter of popular opinion.
But simultaneously, we’re also flawed and ephemeral humans. We’re stuck in our own heads, held prisoner by our own egos. We’re products of our own culture and times.
This is the problem St. Paul described when he said we humans house eternal treasures in earthen vessels. There’s dissonance baked into our native condition.
It’s easy for us to think we’re upholding God’s transcendent laws when in fact we’re only parroting the biases of contemporary pundits, politicians and pastors.
It’s hard to know whether we’re defending ancient truths because they’re really true or just because they’re ancient. It could be that we’re just too stubborn to admit God wants to move us forward to something new and better.
We appeal to the Bible — “It’s right there in the Word of God!” — but we all read the Bible selectively. We have our favorite Scriptures that prove our point (what my dad used to call our “sugar sticks”).
But those opposing us do as well. They’re as convinced of their rightness as we are of ours. We know we’re speaking for God, but they know they’re speaking for God, too, and yet we’re saying opposite things.
Maybe we’re both wrong. Maybe we’re both right. Only God can say for certain. But we find it hard to hear him amid all the hubbub.
Only time will tell.
Until then, it’s wise to approach all church disagreements with a recognition of our personal fallibility. And with grace. And with forgiveness. And with longsuffering.
After all, no matter how convinced we are of our unassailable rightness, in a generation or two we might end up looking to our grandchildren like danged fools.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.