I’ve really been enjoying Liam Adams’ reporting on the ongoing crisis in the United Methodist Church over at The Tennessean. It’s one of those stories that is very easy to understand in broad strokes — the United Methodist Church is going to split — and more complicated in its nuance. Who will pay for what? How will this or that get funded? What will happen to the universities and seminaries that get money from the United Methodists? How are ministers in the breakaway churches ever going to retire? Even if we’re all pissed at each other, can we still share and enjoy jokes about how long Charles Wesley’s hymns are? The last is probably the most controversial and Adams hasn’t addressed that yet, but everything else he makes clear and easy to understand.
Adams' latest column is on how the split might affect institutes of higher education. A thing I wondered about, which Adams doesn’t address, is how Methodists have handled this in the past. If we have to rank baffling things about the split, No. 2 on the list has to be “Why are United Methodists acting like this is an unprecedented tragedy and not something Methodists do all the time?”
“United” Methodist was always an aspiration — not a reality. The church has split and re-formed and merged multiple times in the past. The Methodists were born in division. It started as a movement within the Anglican church, and then we broke away.
But I also couldn’t find any information about how Methodist institutes of higher learning handled or were affected by the splintering in the 1940s or even the splintering in the 1840s (probably the two biggest periods of splintering). Now, that’s no knock on Adams. Christ, I mean, how would you even begin to determine which financial troubles a college had in the 1940s were attributable to Methodists splitting up and which were due to, oh, you know, World War II?
Still, one suspects that no one is looking back to see what happened in the past, because by and large no one remembers that there is precedence for all this — which, if you’re a member of the breakaway group, might give you pause about the lasting effects of your decision.
But the No. 1 most baffling thing is that the reason the Methodist church has split in the past is that a minority of Methodists want a more conservative church, so they break away to set one up. So if you’re sitting in a United Methodist Church and you feel like it’s gotten too liberal for you, you have many, many conservative Methodist churches you could go to instead. Why wouldn’t you just join one of them?
My favorite book of the Bible is Ecclesiastes, which is the one where the writer, who is traditionally held to be Solomon — who, in some traditions, is held to have been a dude who could command djinn — mopes around being all sad-boi goth. (If you know anything about rich dudes who used to be ceremonial magicians, this checks out.) And this is a pretty well-known book of the Bible. It’s straightforward, lyrical (fun fact: the writer of Ecclesiastes had a No. 1 hit in 1965), and philosophical. It’s one you’d think most Methodists would be familiar with.
Solomon (or whoever) says something in there like: “What has been will be again and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a case where you can say, ‘Look, this is new’? No, it already existed in the past. We don’t remember the people who came before us or what they did, and no one’s going to remember the things people in the future do.”
Shoot, I should have just plagiarized Ecclesiastes for this whole piece. I’m not going to make the point better than the king. But this split in the Methodist church is not new. It’s not a fresh crisis. It’s just Methodists being Methodist, with a dollop of forgetting their own history.
It will pass and be forgotten, as it always does and is.
