Assuming that you’ve read “About this Blog,” and mindful that narrative is important to Methodists,[1] allow me to say a bit about how I came to care about preserving unity in The United Methodist Church.  It is not simply that the decades-long debate over human sexuality has exhausted me, and it is not simply that (as I’ve said elsewhere) The United Methodist Church is “in my gene pool,” or that I have long served as legal counsel to United Methodist institutions, which has easily been my most gratifying work as a lawyer. No. There is something else, something more personal, that I have valued about being a Methodist—the very living within communities whose members are dedicated to sustaining one another, with abiding love, notwithstanding our inevitable and manifold differences. Here are a few concrete examples:

• Profound Christian fellowship was modeled for me in the late 1960s by my father’s steadfast friendship with a chain-smoking FBI Agent—a “law-and-order” Republican to the core, who nevertheless deeply loved his left-leaning Democrat pastor. Sterling Donahoe loved my dad, and my dad loved Sterling, because . . . well, because they had no doubt that they “spoke the same language” in their hearts, where faith resides, and neither was embarrassed to invoke that language when the other needed courage or consoling.
• In the early 1970s, the same church hired two young seminarians to be “Youth Ministers” to a motley group of teenagers, including me. We were middle-class and white, but otherwise not all that homogenous. Some of us were jocks (or wished we were). Some were “greasers” (or wished we had the guts to be). Some were “good looking,” and others were “going through an awkward phase.” Some were “brainy,” while others struggled academically. Some had been raised by JFK/LBJ/HHH/RFK/McCarthy Democrats (a diverse lot in itself), others by stalwart “Nixonian” (or Goldwater or Rockefeller) Republicans. And in all such camps, some loved and respected their parents, while others loathed theirs (along with anyone else over thirty). In short, we were teenagers, and so our differences were defining, or so it seemed to us at any rate. But those two seminarians changed us. Shortly after arriving one fall, they brought us together for an overnight “lock-in,” and introduced us to the concept of “sharing,” and before long (and notwithstanding how awkward it seemed at first) our growing honesty with one another transformed a disconnected gathering of indifferent adolescents into a community.

I have come to believe it is no accident that these formative experiences unfolded in a United Methodist congregation. That my father and Sterling Donahoe found themselves together in the same church (let alone became dear friends)—when they held opposing views on virtually every significant “social” issue of the time, including the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and school desegregation—is partly a testament to the episcopal, itinerant polity of The United Methodist Church. Under that system of church governance, it simply was not within my father’s range of options to seek out a congregation that seemed to suit his increasingly “liberal” sensibilities in the mid-1960s. Rather, Dad was sent to St. Matthew’s church by his bishop (the aptly named John Wesley Lord) and, simply put, that was that. Similarly, I am dead certain that it never dawned on Sterling Donahoe, having been raised a Methodist in Richmond, Virginia, that he might simply change churches if Bishop Lord sent St. Matthew’s a pastor Sterling didn’t fancy. So Sterling and Dad were stuck with each other, as it were, and that, for each of them, turned out to be one of life’s greatest blessings.

But beyond that, I am increasingly persuaded that my father and Mr. Donahoe became bound to one another, and the previously disconnected teenagers of the same congregation did likewise, because all of us were enveloped over time by a distinctively Wesleyan principle—a principle preached from our pulpits, infused in our liturgy and singing, and lived out in our conferencing.  In all these ways, I now think, it was virtually inevitable we could come to absorb and understand what John and Charles Wesley taught at the outset: that a truly Methodist “society is no other than a company of men having the form and seeking the power of godliness, united in order to pray together, to receive the word of exhortation, and to watch over one another in love, that they may help each other to work out their salvation.”[4]

Coming from this perspective, I was particularly struck to read a piece by Professor L. Harold DeWolf, writing shortly after the denomination’s 1939 unification, following its rupture over slavery nearly a century earlier.  DeWolf concludes that this decidedly Wesleyan “conception of fellowship”–as expressed in our General Rules–stands above “all other ideas of the church,”[5] and includes “especially . . . valuable principles for the uniting of divergent views”[6] and “transcend[ing] conflicts.”[7] Naturally, “the idea of Christian fellowship” should be basic for all Christians, not just Methodists,[8] but Professor DeWolf is clear that John Wesley’s “emphasis on intimate ties of spiritual brotherhood” was not only “inescapable,” but supplied “the central motive of life” and represents the “most important secret of the power and joy in early Methodism.”[9]

And speaking directly about the genesis of Methodism in America, John Wesley himself similarly credited the movement’s rapid growth in the colonies to the introduction of an organizational model that fostered connectional devotion among the faithful.[10] Wesley recalled that many who had heard George Whitefield’s early preaching “did repent and believe the gospel,” and “for a time ran well, but afterwards ‘drew back unto perdition.’”[11] The problem, Wesley concluded, was not inadequate doctrinal instruction, for Whitefield’s preaching was as sound as it came. The problem was that the fledging Methodists in America had not yet been “formed into . . . societies.”[12] As Wesley explained: “They had no Christian connexion with each other, nor were ever taught to watch over each other’s souls.”[13] And just so, change came, and Methodism began to flourish in America, only after “[s]ocieties were formed.”[14] With that, what “was wanting before was now supplied: Those who were desirous to save their souls were no longer a rope of sand, but clave to one another, and began to watch over each other in love.”[15]

Now, after more than 40 years of debate, many in our church family are asking if we can stay connected in the face of a genuine and seemingly intractable disagreement over whether the “practice of homosexuality” is or is not “incompatible with Christian teaching.” My thesis, however, is not only that we can remain united, but that true fidelity to core Wesleyan principles demands that we do so, and that it can be done without requiring any Methodist to renounce or submerge his or her doctrinal beliefs. To get there, however, we must (1) lay aside the fundamentally anti-Methodist notion that differing doctrinal perspectives are properly presented to the General Conference for resolution, and (2) recover our faith in John Wesley’s historic clergy-qualification and examination process, a process that Francis Asbury deemed to be among the most rigorous “when considered in all its parts,” and one which needs no elaborate, quadrennial re-tinkering by General Conference delegates.

[1] See Thomas Edward Frank, Polity, Practice, and the Mission of The United Methodist Church (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002) 141-42 (developing the point that “United Methodists and their predecessors in Wesleyan tradition have always had a predilection for narrative—explaining themselves historically more than doctrinally”).

[2] The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church (1992), ¶ 112.

[3] The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church (2016), ¶ 125 (emphasis added).

[4] John Wesley & Charles Wesley, “The Nature, Design and General Rules of the United Societies,” in Discipline, ¶ 104 at 78 (emphasis added).

[5] L. Harold DeWolf, “The Doctrine of the Church,” in Methodism: A Summary of Basic Information Concerning The Methodist Church, ed. William K. Anderson (Cincinnati: Methodist Pub. House, 1947), 221.

[6] DeWolf at 218.

[7] Id. at 220.

[8] Id. at 221.

[9] Id. at 224.

[10] The same theme has been expressed over time by our bishops. In the Episcopal Address delivered to the General Conference in 1936, the Bishops of The Methodist Episcopal Church stated, “We cannot too often insist that it has been one of the fundamental aims of Methodism to make all her organizational features instrumental for the development of spiritual life.” The Doctrines and Discipline of The Methodist Episcopal Church  (1936) (“Discipline 1936”) at 5 (emphasis added). Substantially similar language was retained in the Discipline following the denomination’s reunification in 1939. See, e.g., The Doctrines and Discipline of The Methodist Church (1940) (“Discipline 1940”) at 2 (“We reverently insist that a fundamental aim of Methodism is to make her organization an instrument for the development of spiritual life.”) (emphasis added).

[11] John Wesley, “Sermon 131: Some Account of The Late Work Of God In North-America” (1778), in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. VII, Third Edition (London: John Mason, 1829), 411.

[12] Id.

[13] Id. Historically, such “soul work” took place primarily in “class meetings.” Id. Widely regarded as “one of the most distinctive feature of Methodist polity,” the class meeting “did not begin as an instrument for spiritual guidance,” but rather “for the collection of funds to be used for the material needs of the Societies.” Discipline 1936 at 1. In short order, however, the class meeting  “revealed in experience its fitness for religious nurture and forthwith took that nurture as its chief aim.” Id.

[14] Sermon 131.

[15] Id. (emphasis added).