Praying for Unity in a Fragmented Church

Some Rambling Thoughts after a Big Week in Methodism

It was a big week in the world of United Methodism. The General Conference in Charlotte, NC made major changes to the UMC Book of Discipline regarding acceptance of same-sex marriage, ordination of LGBT people, other social principles, and church structure, changes which have been helpfully summarized here by Chris Ritter.¹ I’m not sure what to say about the whole affair—it was a strange, unsettling thing to see this denomination that for 32 years was my faith home, acting in ways that seem unrecognizable to me (and unrecognizable to most of the people who mentored me in the faith).

I have had several conversations over the past few days with traditionalist Christian friends I know still in UMC churches, who feel that they were misled about what their options were about disaffiliation, and now feel stuck and discouraged, unsure if they can remain where they are, but equally unsure as to where to go or what to do. It’s heartbreaking when we feel we have to leave our church, and for serious Christians, it is never a decision made lightly. If you are someone figuring out what to do today, know that I am in deep prayer that God would give you wisdom and courage about what to do.

The Messy, Yet Glorious Branches of the Church’s Story

But all of it got me thinking. About the dream of unity in the church, the dream of Jesus when he prayed to his Father for all of us before his death, that we might be one as he is one with the Father.² What a dream, what a prayer, what a loss that we the Church are shattered and in pieces, instead of one, dividing endlessly into various camps and traditions, and it’s just such a mess. It makes you wonder how the pieces could ever be put together again and where we go from here.

And I thought about the first great fights of orthodoxy over the nature of the Trinity, and the nature of Christ, and the lists of heresies and heretics, representing very real and live choices for the Church, choices the Church firmly rejected and resisted;

and I thought about the first great schism of 1054, when the East split with the West, over political control, creedal and eucharistic theology, and geographical reality;

and I thought about the first monks in the early Middle Ages, running to the desert from a church in disarray to form new intentional communities of faith, dispirited by the corruption of their spiritual betters;

and I thought of Luther nailing his theses to the wall, and by his hammer splitting all of Western Christendom in two, and how we are still reeling from the blow;

and I thought of the brave Mennonites and Baptists, being persecuted by the Protestants and the Catholics alike for their pacifism or their insistence on believer’s baptism;

and I thought about the drama and farce and glory in the birth of the Church of England, how a rogue like King Henry VIII could be paired with such a mind and soul as Thomas Cranmer, and how God could use such strange circumstances for something new and yes, even good;

and I thought about the Puritans and the Quakers, and how their piety was married to their bravery, to resist the calling to conform to this world, a calling that led them to journey over the ocean to a new world;

and I thought about the Wesleys, never wanting to split from their mother church, Charles especially so, and yet seeing their Methodist movement in America being tossed to and fro by the geopolitical realities of their day, forced into separation by the Revolutionary War;

and I thought about the brave black Methodists in America like Richard Allen who walked out of their church to start their own, rather than be treated with indignity by their fellow white Christians;

and I thought about the Civil War and how the spiritual violence and separation preceded and anticipated and perhaps even made possible the war itself;

and I thought about the fight between the modernists and the fundamentalists in the early twentieth century, the great struggle the Western church had from the shockwaves of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, and how we are still riding those waves;

and I thought about the World Wars and all that’s happened since, the failure of German Christians to resist Nazism, the failure of Russian Christians to resist communism, the failure of American Christians to resist materialism, the failure of European Christians to resist nihilism, the failure of the Roman Catholic Christians to resist corruption, the failure of evangelical Christians to resist political idolatry, the failure of progressive Christians to resist cultural accommodation;

and in contrast I thought about the wild success of world Christianities across the global South, the house churches of China, the wildfire of Christian faith in Africa, the charismatic revolution in South America, and how much of this growth is the fruit of the little Asuza street revival in Los Angeles that led to the largest Christian movement this world has yet seen (Pentecostalism), a movement that will certainly be the defining one for the future of Christianity;

and I thought about my own family history of faith, my great-grandfather, a Methodist preacher in Kentucky, and my grandparents, founding members of a Methodist church in Louisville, and how the generations before me all attempted, in their way and in their time, to follow Jesus…

The Church’s Story Should Humble Us and Inspire Us

And in the midst of all this thinking, all this glorious and at times tragic history, I find myself just overwhelmed. In so much of church history we see people getting it wrong, choosing the wrong path, making the selfish, impatient decision instead of the faithful one. And there is also such courage, when the saints said, Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, so help me God! And I find myself hoping that I am able to simply be faithful in my time and in my place, in the middle of the mess, hoping that my contribution to the Church, my life, by God’s grace, is one that pleases God, and that if somehow I am in error, that God would forgive me.

Isn’t that all, in the end, that we can really hope for?

I pray that this new movement I am now apart of, Global Methodism, would be a force for greater unity in the worldwide Church, not a false, institutional unity, but a greater living, spiritual unity. A unity in the Church of obedience to God, a unity of a shared life dedicated to him—and though that unity of the worldwide Church seems so far away and so impossible, it is very Wesleyan to pursue it anyways, to pursue the perfection that Jesus calls us to as the Church, a perfection in which unity and holiness are one and the same. We must pray for it and pursue it in with confidence, for certainly Jesus will not allow his bride to be broken forever.

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An Invitation to Pray for Unity

Wherever you find yourself today in the Church, in whatever branch of the tree, I hope that you would pray with me that the way things are now is not the way they will always be.

Let’s respond to Jesus’ prayer with a prayer of our own:

Lord Jesus, you who are one with the Father,
direct our steps, in this world of fragments,
in the shards of your church, the disconnected parts of your body.
We long to be one with each other, but we don’t know how.
We long to be holy, your holy bride, but we don’t know how.
We long to be bold, like the ancient martyrs, but we aren’t sure how.
Only your Spirit can make us one;
Only your Truth can make us holy;
Only you can bring us together again.
Come Lord Jesus!
As it is in heaven, make your church one on earth.
Amen!

1. Christ Ritter’s blog, peopleneedjesus.net, is the best place to keep up with what people are writing and saying the Wesleyan world, if you are like me and want to keep up.

2. “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:20-23)