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THE HUBRIS OF INCLUSION: Thoughts on the Future of the United Methodist Church

The United Methodist Church was born in a specific time and place, in the mid-twentieth century in the United States of America. Protestant denominations were ascendant, and with them a brand of "ecumenism" that would only decades later be recognized by those who championed it as culturally bound to the white "mainline." Mergers were all the buzz, including the one that created the UMC in 1968, and Methodists embraced their new denomination as partial fulfillment of a dream of "Christian unity." As the historian Robert Handy noted in his wonderful little 1971 book,  A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities , leaders of the new denomination thought of it as "a kind of unofficial national church." Because they sat at the midpoint of mainline American Protestantism in so many respects -- ecclesial, theological, liturgical -- it was easy for them to assume that as all churches became one, pretty much everyone else would eventua...
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Methodism's Many Pasts and Futures

From the time the brothers John and Charles Wesley first convened a "holy club" of friends at Oxford University in 1729, Methodists have declared theirs a pursuit of “holiness” or “Christian perfection.”  For early Methodists, the pursuit of Christian perfection led inevitably to disagreements about what it meant to live a holy life.   As early as  1741 the Wesleys distanced themselves from their closest collaborator, George Whitefield, over his Calvinist teachings.  And while Wesley proclaimed himself to possess "a catholic spirit," his practices - not least, his own refusal to conform to the conventions of Anglican parish ministry - were widely perceived by his contemporaries to be divisive or even "schismatic." Methodism on the other side of the Atlantic retained this same spirit, which should come as little surprise since it was born in an act of separation - in 1784,  Wesley consecrated Thomas Coke as Superintendent, setting in motion the cre...
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On the 40th Anniversary of Friendship Park

Imagine the First Lady of the United States punching a hole in the fence on the U.S.-Mexico border.   Imagine her publicly lamenting that there was a border fence at all. In fact this scenario doesn’t need to be imagined … because it happened forty years ago right here in San Diego County.   The date was August 18, 1971 and the location was “Friendship Park,” the small cement plaza on the U.S.-Mexico border, at the southwest-most corner of the continental United States. The First Lady was Pat Nixon, who had been a prominent champion of our state’s public parks when her husband Richard Nixon was Governor of California, before being elected President of the United States.    She came to Friendship Park to inaugurate the surrounding area as California’s Border Field State Park.    After planting a tree as part of the inauguration ceremony, Mrs. Nixon approached the large stone monument which sits at the heart of Friendship Park.   The monument commemo...
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