Soul Work: Holy Conferencing in Postmodern Context

Now that the United Methodist Church General Conference is over, it seems imperative that the UMC (and other churches) think carefully about what is entailed when the Christian community meets for holy conferencing.

I’ve noted previously that the United Methodist Church has iconic status as the church of the radical middle and of Main Street USA. Following my 2 May posting on that theme last week, Religion News Service reporter Daniel Burke published a 3 May article in the Washington Post, using the Main Street USA metaphor to discuss what happened at General Conference. Burke’s article is entitled “Methodists Struggle to Reflect Diversity” (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/02/AR2008050203416.html).

He notes that the UMC strives to hold together diverse constituencies: it is the church of George Bush and Hilary Rodham Clinton, as well as of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia. Though Burke’s article echoes a right-wing trope I find rather tired—liberal churches of the global North losing members while conservative churches in the global South boom—it also notes that the tensions within the UMC communion require that the church figure out ways to bring everyone together in its international dialogues.

The United Methodist practice of holy conferencing is a valuable tool for churches that seek to engage the public sphere in dialogue. All churches that try to remain faithful to the gospel while seeking to understand the demands of the gospel in new cultural contexts stand to learn from the UMC practice of holy conferencing. All churches that see the interchange between religion and culture as dialogic—an interchange in which the church brings the gospel to bear on contemporary culture, while simultaneously listening for the voice of the Spirit that speaks in culture as well—can benefit from a careful study of Wesleyan holy conferencing.

As I have noted in previous postings, I find the Wesleyan tradition of holy conferencing useful for all churches, because of the following hallmarks:

1. At its best, it tries to bring everyone to the table (and “everyone” is the subject of salvation: God calls and wishes to embrace everyone);
   

2. At its best, it allows everyone a voice in ecclesial decision-making that, after all, affects everyone, both those inside and outside the church;
   

3. In fidelity to Wesley and his spirituality, at its best, it seeks out in particular the least among us, to give that person a privileged place at the table, and a voice in an ecclesial context, whereas cultural contexts always give the voice of the powerful more authority than the voice of the less powerful;
   

4. At its best, it listens carefully for the voice of the Spirit in the whole Christian body, and, in particular, in the witness of the least among us.
   

5. At its best, it constantly tries to keep hearing the voice of the Spirit anew in new cultural contexts, by bringing church, culture, and scripture/tradition into fruitful conversation.

As other churches struggle to engage in similar church-wide (and culture-engaging) dialogues, the Wesleyan way of holy conferencing has something to offer. The United Church of Christ, the church to which Mr. Obama belongs, has just inaugurated a “sacred conversation” about race in American society and churches (www.ucc.org/sacred-conversation). We desperately need such dialogues—provided (an important proviso, the subject of this series of posts) that we can develop discourse rules to make them productive.

We are a culture fractured by interconnected fault lines of race and gender, heterosexism, homophobia, economic privilege and exploitation, militarism, and environmental destruction. We who are believers need to find sane, holy, gospel-centered ways to talk together about these issues (and their interconnections) in a culture in which religious ideas and commitments have tremendous sway in the public sphere.

In the next several days, I want to argue that, as wonderful as the concept of holy conferencing is in theory, as it has currently come to be practiced in Methodism, it leaves much to be desired. In order for the United Methodist Church to offer a useful paradigm to other churches that seek to engage believers and the culture in sacred conversation, the UMC needs to think much more carefully about what is really entailed in holy conferencing.

In my analysis of holy conferencing, I hope to offer some insights from the perspective of someone who is an outsider to the Methodist church, but who has worked in Methodist institutions, and who has experienced at first hand both the strengths and weaknesses of the technique of holy conferencing as it is now practiced in United Methodist institutions.

I am also speaking as a theologian who, throughout his theological career, has had a strong concern to understand the relationship between culture and religion. In particular, I have written and published for several decades now about the relationship between the church and public life.

My research into the origins of the Wesleyan movement and the effect of this movement on British working classes, and then on the social gospel, has convinced me that the relationship between church and culture must always be reciprocal. The church has an obligation to bring its beliefs and values—the gospel—to the public sphere.

At the same time, the church stands to gain when it engages culture in respectful dialogue, keeping in mind that in a world that is God’s parish, the face of God is to be found everywhere, the voice of God to be heard everywhere. Throughout history, the church has sometimes reluctantly ditched its most obdurately cruel beliefs and practices (slavery, subordination of women to men, burning of witches, Jews, and heretics, "holy" wars, etc.) only when secular movements have demonstrated to the church that its commitment to such beliefs and practices utterly contradicts the gospels.

My theological work on these themes has made me particularly concerned to understand what is at stake when various constituencies gather in public dialogue to discuss the connection between religion and the public sphere. As a theologian, I am especially interested in the “discourse rules” that must govern public dialogue, if such dialogue is to be fruitful.

Readers might better understand where I’m coming from here if I point these abstract reflections back to the recent UMC General Conference. General Conference has ended. Delegates have now gone home. I imagine many have done so with light hearts: business completed, the church can carry on as usual for another four years.

I’d like to hope that the holy conferencing of this General Conference will have longer-lasting effects, however. Specifically, I’d like to hope that some delegates are returning home with troubled consciences.

I’d like to hope some have returned carrying in their minds the faces of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, aunts, and uncles. These are the faces that watch from the sidelines as the church holds the line yet again. These are the faces that remain on the outside looking in, while the church puts its foot down one more time.

I’d like to think of some delegates returning home with these faces in their minds, because in my reading of the gospels, Jesus never stands with the middle, but always with those on the margins—as a sign of contradiction seeking to make us in the middle uncomfortable. I can understand and appreciate the attempt of a church to hold many different kinds of people together in the radical middle: that’s catholicity at its best, and is a hallmark of church.

But in my view, the price the church can never pay for holding many kinds of people together, if it seeks to remain faithful to Jesus and the gospels, is affirmation of the middle when the middle stands for cruelty, whether the oblivious cruelty of the unthinking comfortable who can imagine no one other than the familiar, or the overt cruelty of those with a need to turn a targeted group of human beings into demons to be humiliated and expelled.

Unlike many delegates who will now go home relieved to have the fuss behind them—who may imagine that they won’t have to encounter another gay face again for four years, thanks be to God—LGBT folks have to find some way to live with the decisions the church made at this General Conference. This was a General Conference in which delegates gathered for holy conferencing had to hear a delegate from the global South refer to LGBT brothers and sisters as “the spawn of the devil.” LGBT folks now have to decide how to live with a church in which such words can be uttered in holy conferencing, and in which such words continue to ring in the ears of LGBT persons, even if they will soon be forgotten by delegates who go home relieved to be shut of the gay mess for four years.

What does it portend for the United Methodist Church that it is a church in which such declarations are thinkable, doable, in holy conferencing? As we consider this question, it might be worth asking whether any United Methodist anywhere in the world would any longer dream of saying that Africans or African Americans are the spawn of the devil (though Christians made this statement freely in the past). Would any United Methodist anywhere in the world think it permissible to say at General Conference that women are in league with the devil, though Christians for many centuries made that claim without batting an eye?

I think the answer to those two questions is obvious. The fact that it is still thinkable and doable in United Methodist holy conferencing to call LGBT human beings the spawn of the devil—openly, on the floor of General Conference—points to some very serious problems with how Wesleyan holy conferencing has come to be envisaged and practiced in the current United Methodist Church.

In the series of postings that follow, I want to probe those problems and to suggest—totally unsolicited input from a fellow-traveler sympathetic to Wesleyan spirituality—some ways for the UMC to develop a practice of holy conferencing that will help move it beyond the gridlock of this General Conference, in which delegates rejected resolutions right, left, and center. It is clear to me that they did so because the churches of the radical middle do not know what to say, where they stand, and how to speak a coherent word (and a word faithful to the gospel) today, in the face of the repeated request of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered human beings to be treated humanely by the churches.