Is it too much to ask?

Yesterday I observed that local churches sometimes receive members who come from outside their tradition because an individual has become disenchanted with their former congregation.  This can happen for some good reasons.  But frequently it is a form of pouting.  “I don’t have to put up with this, I’ll just leave” is not the greatest rationale for leaving one fellowship and uniting with another.

There is a kindred malady, and it is wreaking havoc in The United Methodist Church.  I am talking about the practice of wholesale receiving already-credentialed clergy from other denominations.  I want to go on record as affirming many of my sisters and brothers who, as they matured in their spirits, theology and ecclesiology turned to The United Methodist Church for the carrying out of their ministerial call.  I know a great number of clergy whose journey has carried them not away from something, but to something they valued in the UMC.

But there is another bunch.  And they are driving me crazy.  They come from denominations that will not countenance divorce among clergy for whatever reason.  The clergyperson doesn’t have to be flaming practitioner of adultery for their denomination to excuse them. They can be pillars of the community, but if their spouse leaves them for any reason at all, their denomination disqualifies them from the practice of ministry.  The UMC has no such prohibition.  Consequently, people who never change their denominational spots seek credentialing as Methodists because divorced clergy have a place in our structure. Some of these folks come in, receive church appointments, and then rail at our practices.  But we’ll give them a paycheck, and so here we are.  And they’re killing us.

These preachers have some kinfolk in a class of people who may bounce around church-to-church in their congregational denominations for years.  In such settings a local church can arbitrarily and immediately dismiss a pastor just because they do not like the cut of the preacher’s jib.  These clergy can wake up one morning not knowing if they are going to have a position by nightfall.  In The United Methodist Church, we have a practice of assuring pastors a “guaranteed appointment.”  That means that a minister in good standing will always have a place of assignment.  If a congregation becomes disenchanted with its clergy, s/he may be moved down the road, and the location might not be the most desirable in the mind of the pastor, but there is a place to go, a check to be collected and a roof over their head.  As you can imagine, that has an enormous appeal to some folks.  And, as was the case with their cousins above, once in the system they pretty much have the freedom to be as un-Methodist as they like.  And they’re killing us.

A separate but equally calamitous set of circumstances concerns the retirement arrangements for Methodist clergy.  Ministers are, for Social Security purposes, self-employed.  So, Methodist pastors pay around 13.5% of their earnings off the top to Social Security.  But they also make private contributions to a denominational retirement fund.  The local congregation where the individual ministers makes an in-kind contribution to the pension fund.  Over the course of a lifetime of pastoring the amount is not exorbitant, but it is superior to the plans in which many other denominations participate.  Especially as a clergyperson gets older, this looks pretty good.  As is the case with the aforementioned imports, once in, clergy who formerly ministered in another fellowship can practice a lot of theological – and therefore, hermeneutical – latitude.  And they’re killing us.

I may sound bitter.  That is not my aim.  But our great church is in crisis, not only in the area that the General Conference of 2019 addressed, but in almost every sphere of church theology and practice.  I don’t know how to fix it.  But I don’t think that it is too much to ask Methodist clergy to act like Methodists.

Otherwise, you have the hodge-podge that faces us now. 

And they’re killing us.