The United Methodist Church is trying to organize an amicable break-up over the status of LGBTQ members.
The UMC’s General Conference 2020, to be held in May in Minneapolis, will consider the structure of what church leaders hope can be an amicable, and orderly, breakup of a worldwide church that is the second largest Protestant denomination in the United States. The various plans come in response to a vote earlier this year by the church’s decision-making body to strengthen language barring LGBTQ United Methodists from ordination and marriage.
That decision came in February at a special session of the General Conference that approved the conservative Traditional Plan, which centrists and progressives in the church have rejected and adamantly resisted. The resulting chaos has led some churches to withhold money from the denomination or to call for schism.
What a lot of pointless heartbreak and expense. When scientific research has established dispositively that individual sexuality is the culmination of both genes and environment, this kind of turmoil has to be counted a direct consequence of the resolute ignorance, and character failure, of faith. Faith is not a virtue; it is a grave moral error.