In this blog’s very first entry, I sought to outline a principled rationale for “The United Methodist Church to remain … well …  united, … notwithstanding its members’ continuing disagreement over whether or not “the practice of homosexuality” is “incompatible with Christian teaching,” as our Book of Discipline’s Social Principles first declared in 1972.  I did not advocate that one “side” or the other should relinquish or even soften its views on the relative merits of that (or any other) doctrinal issue. Nor did I suggest that our disagreements concerning human sexuality are trivial, for they are not. What I argued instead was that rediscovering and re-embracing two bedrock principles of Methodist polity held out the promise of allowing The United Methodist Church  to remain united “without requiring any United Methodists to renounce or submerge their sincerely held doctrinal beliefs.”

I wrote that entry in October 2017, before the Commission on a Way Forward provided the Council of Bishops (in November 2017) with “sketches” of three “models” for addressing the denomination’s discord on human sexuality issues. By the time its work was finished, Commission members had fully fleshed out two of those models with proposed implementing legislation, and this past May the Council of Bishops announced that it had “voted by an overwhelming majority” to recommend the adoption of one such model — known as the “One Church Plan” — during the “called” Special Session of the General Conference scheduled for February 2019 in St. Louis.

As it happens — and happily, from my perspective — the core aspects of the “One Church Plan” rest squarely on the longstanding principles of Methodist polity that were the focus of my original post. So I repeat it here, virtually verbatim, but adding what amounts to an epilogue to account for the more recent developments in the Way Forward process. The main point of doing so now, is to demonstrate that the One Church Plan is no “newfangled” thing, but is instead well-grounded in our Wesleyan heritage.