It’s barely been four months since the United Methodist Church (UMC) voted to lift its longstanding ban on “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” serving as clergy. This major step of caving to the whims of culture over the timeless truth of scripture came after half a decade of debate on the issue, which sharply divided the denomination.
The day after the denomination voted to allow gays to serve as clergy, I wrote:
Five years of waiting for a decision on the issue of homosexual clergy has divided the Methodists. About a fourth of all U.S. Methodist congregations have left the UMC since 2019, choosing biblical fidelity over worldly culture. The division is more pronounced in the Southeast, where as many as half of the congregations have left the UMC in some regions. An astonishing 81% of churches in Northwest Texas have disaffiliated from the denomination.
Fast forward just a few months and the UMC isn’t just allowing clergy to live openly sinful lifestyles, but it’s also celebrating sin. A friend of mine who is a Methodist (and a conservative) sent me a Facebook post that linked to a press release trumpeting the denomination’s new Center for LGBTQ+ United Methodist Heritage.
“Stories, songs, exhibits, and a special film screening are part of the festivities when the new Center for LGBTQ+ United Methodist Heritage holds its Kickoff Celebration on Wednesday, Oct. 23, at Craig Chapel on the Drew University campus,” the press release crows. “The General Commission on Archives and History (GCAH) will host the event, which is scheduled from 4-8:30 p.m. ET, and open to the public.”
Related: The United Methodist Church Chooses the World Over Truth
The event features Randall Miller, an LGBTQ activist who has long been part of gay rights and other left-wing initiatives as well as Karen Oliveto, the denomination’s first lesbian bishop, while a composer who has written “social justice” hymns “will lead a time of music, singing and dancing.”
The center will show a documentary at the event that tries to claim that homosexuality wasn’t a sin in the Bible until translations added it in 1946. The truth is that ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew didn’t have a word for homosexuality, so the change was a clarification rather than a doctrinal change.
Dr. Steven Willing of the Christian Medical & Dental Association explains that “the filmmakers seem utterly oblivious of historic Christian doctrine on same-sex sexual behavior. Sodomy was explicitly proscribed in the Mosaic law, the moral foundation of first-century Judaism, in which Jesus, His disciples, and all early Christians lived and breathed. It was specifically addressed and denounced by Josephus and Philo, the leading Jewish scholars of first-century Judaism. Had Jesus and His disciples tacked a different direction on sexuality, that would have been huge. There is no evidence whatsoever that such was the case.”
“The important contributions of our LGBTQ+ siblings within The United Methodist Church have been overlooked for too long,” Dr. Ashley Boggan, general secretary of the General Commission on Archives and History, said in the press release. “With the opening of the new center, we will intentionally collect, preserve and share Queer Methodist history. We celebrate that we are finally living into our true identity as people called United Methodists.”
What the UMC is ignoring in doubling down on siding with the world over sound doctrine is that the Bible is clear that homosexuality is a sin and that the only way to free oneself from that sin is through repentance and surrender to Christ. As the Apostle Paul wrote:
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (ESV)
There’s a lot of repentance that needs to happen in the UMC. Pray for the whole denomination.
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