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Commentary
COMMENTARY: Seven things I hate about U(MC) Ted Campbell, Jul 16, 2009
Ted Campbell
By Ted A. Campbell Special Contributor
I promise not to complain about things like Cowboy Church when there are no real cowboys. That’s their business, not something our church requires.
And I am not going to criticize clergy who do not keep their promises to preach our doctrines or maintain our liturgy and discipline. At least not right now.
Let me complain about some stuff that our church actually does, like the following.
Too many words. Add up the Book of Discipline, the United Methodist Hymnal, the Book of Worship, and the ever-expanding Book of Resolutions, and I’d guess that we have more text than the Bible itself.
Add annual conference journals and minutes and committee reports, and we can demonstrate our success in grinding out lots and lots and lots of words with little real consensus.
Trust me: No one needs to read all that stuff. Go read the Bible and say your prayers and then try to help somebody instead.
The early Methodist disciplines included the ritual, and even so, they were slim volumes on which there was strong consensus. Today’s endless volumes of words with very little consensus hurts us, because it’s hard to see the important words for all the unimportant ones.
What if we print only stuff that 85 percent of United Methodists agree on? Better yet, stuff that 85 percent of United Methodists agree on consistently over a period of 36 years. That would be pretty slim and trim—and maybe even fit.
The good thing about cutting out stuff is that it leaves many decisions to local bodies.
The procedure for organizing a new congregation. Read this section of the Discipline carefully and then see if you could design a more efficient means of stifling creativity and entrepreneurship and evangelism in the church. This centralized, bureaucratic, Big-Brother-Knows-What’s-Best-For-You approach was invented in 1956, and is perfectly designed to protect dying congregations from the horrendous threat that someone might start a new and thriving congregation on their doorstep.
Take a valium, place your right hand on the trust clause and just let people—clergy and laity alike—go out and start new congregations, as Methodists did very regularly prior to 1956. No, they can’t take your precious property with them.
And if the UMC doesn’t like any of these new congregations, they can join my new denomination that I will organize as soon as I finish writing this, but don’t hold your breath.
The anti-Catholic material in the Articles of Religion. I have made a solemn public pledge to “preach and maintain” the doctrines of my church. Yes, I know we renew a doctrinal resolution every eight years that says we don’t really mean what we say in the anti-Catholic articles—or more technically, that what the anti-Catholic articles say is directed against late medieval Catholic teachings and practices that probably have little relevance to what Catholics teach and practice today.
But to renew such a resolution for decades on end means basically that we know this stuff is wrong. Especially after we have signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. Let’s be honest and cut it out.
The Welch Rubric. What would you think about a denomination that solemnly requires all its members to eat styrofoam in place of bread in the Lord’s Supper? How about styrofoam that has been painted to look like bread? Or styrofoam painted to look like bread with chocolate flavoring injected in it? I mean bread is just so old-fashioned.
Think about it: What could be more plainly unscriptural than the requirement that “the pure, unfermented juice of the grape shall be used” in the Lord’s Supper, instead of what Jesus Christ explicitly asked us to use? The Welch Rubric is very, very wrong. We can provide that grape juice has to be available as an alternative, but please don’t forbid United Methodists from literal obedience to the words of Jesus Christ. Stop it. Now.
Half-way authorizing half-way laypersons to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Sure, if a strategically placed terrorist bomb wiped out all the ordained elders on the face of the earth, the remaining laity would have good reason to designate some persons to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, and they might as well call them elders.
All of the predecessor denominations of the UMC and almost every Methodist church worldwide ordains those authorized to celebrate the Lord’s Supper as elders or presbyters. In 1996, we hastily abandoned this principle and placed “commissioned ministers” in the awkward position of being asked to celebrate without the authorization that ordination confers.
We need to give the ones who celebrate the Lord’s Supper the full recognition that they are elders in the church.
Annual Conferences. If we’re not really going to confer about anything, there’s no point in holding a conference. We can approve committee reports by e-mail. And no, I do not intend to read them: see “Too Many Words” above.
What’s the cost/benefit ratio for holding these conferences every year, especially where people must sleep in hotels, eat meals in restaurants and drive 150 miles each way? Is this helping us? Would the life of local congregations come to a grinding halt if we didn’t hold the annual conference every year? What are we accomplishing?
The capital letter “T” in “The United Methodist Church.” In the first place, it looks like a mistake, except of course when it comes at the beginning of a sentence where “T” would be capitalized anyway. You can be creative with style, like the name of my heavy metal group, DëthBlød, but it helps if this creative use of style is a little more obvious.
In the second place, it’s just arrogant. We are not any old united Methodist church, we want you to know; we are “The United Methodist Church.” How about “THE United Methodist Church”—equally stylistically incorrect but it would hype the arrogance just a bit.
Actually, there was a denomination called the United Methodist Church in Britain in the early 20th century, so we’re not even the only United Methodist Church that ever was. Let’s make it simpler.
Come to think of it, let’s make the whole church simpler.
Dr. Campbell is an elder of the Texas Conference and an associate professor of church history at Perkins School of Theology, SMU.
Ted Campbell
