Methodists look to change church's LGBT policies

  • Thread starter Thread starter RealisticCatholic
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
It’s great news the UMC has remained orthodox but only officially, essentially the status quo. The rules will likely be flouted as before and many of the so-called progressives say they will not take the gracious exit route because they want to battle for changes to the Book of Discipline i.e. remove all rules on sexual conduct again.

I really don’t get that mentality. They get to start their own religion without any financial consequences, no one will force them to move somewhere else and no one will stand in their way of them making up their own doctrines. They’re given the opportunity to be left alone to do whatever they like!
 
Last edited:
As the Orthodox behold the moral collapse the western Churches, they probably breathe a sigh of relief for their ecclesial structure.
 
ATraveller said:
really don’t get that mentality. They get to start their own religion without any financial consequences, no one will force them to move somewhere else and no one will stand in their way of them making up their own doctrines. They’re given the opportunity to be left alone to do whatever they like!
Click to expand...
What they LIKE is to enforce their will on others. In my city there were 12 agencies offering to make gay couples foster parents. Catholic Charities alone did not. So they got Catholic Charities decertified.

The Left agenda isn’t driven by sexual choices, but by (their) power choices.
Why give up a voting position in a denomination with millions of members? They will revisit the issue, again and again, till they win. They only have to win once. Once marriage is redefined, this battle is over.

Then they will use this newly won territory as a foothold to “progress” to the next objective.
 
Last edited:
The word “progressive” often means the opposite of progress. Just as Christians got, “Don’t force your religion on me.” The Left is forcing what it wants on whoever. It appears that power and control is the issue.
 
commenter said:
What they LIKE is to enforce their will on others. In my city there were 12 agencies offering to make gay couples foster parents. Catholic Charities alone did not. So they got Catholic Charities decertified.
Click to expand...
I’m so sorry for that. But I suppose Christians were never promised an easy life in serving the Lord. I pray for that the Church elsewhere will never have to face such vindictiveness.
commenter said:
The Left agenda isn’t driven by sexual choices, but by (their) power choices.
Why give up a voting position in a denomination with millions of members? They will revisit the issue, again and again, till they win. They only have to win once. Once marriage is redefined, this battle is over.
Click to expand...
They create strife and then play victim. I will never understand this mentality.
commenter said:
Then they will use this newly won territory as a foothold to “progress” to the next objective.
Click to expand...
Definitely. It doesn’t stop. People don’t want to accept it but the reality is they aren’t interested in following Jesus. Some “pastors” have now started talking about polyamory and celebrating legislation approving late-term abortions in the denominations that have approved gay “marriage”. It’s downright evil. I’ve been praying for the faithful left in those denominations to persevere and not be misled by false teachings for a while now.
 
Last edited:
“The United Methodist Church failed Tuesday to love LGBTQIA people … and to live out our Gospel mandate to seek justice and pursue peace,” wrote General Secretary Susan Henry-Crowe of the church’s General Board of Church and Society.
Click to expand...
What a hypocrite. They’ve failed to love the Lord with all their mind, heart and soul, rejected Him and embraced the patterns of the world. All they’ve done is create conflict after conflict in numerous denominations, emptied church after church. Sought to hold those who are actually faithful to the Faith hostage over property. How’s that pursuing peace?

What’s appalling is how the secular press paint the perpetrators as victims. No surprise. I laugh every time they claim to be fair and objective.

Why don’t I join a mosque and demand they accept the Divinity of Christ? That’s the equivalent of what they are doing, though I would be condemned by the so-called progressives.
 
Last edited:
There was this from Dr. Jerry P. Kulah, dean of Gbarnga School of Theology, part of the United Methodist University in Liberia:

“We Africans are not afraid of our sisters and brothers who identify as lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgendered, questioning, or queer. We love them and we hope the best for them. But we know of no compelling arguments for forsaking our church’s understanding of Scripture and the teachings of the church universal.”
 
The Left claims to fight for the oppressed and then act as oppressors as well. Human beings need to choose the right thing.
 
ProdglArchitect said:
Historically, the Orthodox churches held the same belief as Catholics, that marriage was indissoluble, and that remarriage was a no-go. Nowadays, divorce and remarriage are permitted once, which stands in direct contradiction to historical teaching.
Click to expand...
This is also an absolute misrepresentation of Orthodox teaching.

Divorce is strictly prohibited.

Pastoral considerations can lead to an exception of a second marriage, but this is a parallel to RC annulment.

Nor is it a change from historical practice (unlike the prevalence of contemporary RC annulment).
 
Vonsalza said:
Evidenced in spades by the catastrophic crash of the mainlines since the 90s. If the episcopal church in my town hadn’t already been paid for years ago, they’d have to demolish it. I bet they have 10 faithfully tithing families, max.
Click to expand...
So, are you saying that it’s only mainline churches that have been struggling? How do you explain articles like this one?
The Archdiocese of Chicago’s financial pressures and its efforts to close or combine struggling parishes mark a difficult period in the church’s history here—but certainly not an unprecedented one.

In January 1990, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin embarked on an 18-month plan that ultimately closed 33 parishes and 18 schools, or 6 percent of the total. The move was a drastic attempt to shore up the finances of the archdiocese, which posted a $28 million deficit in 1989.
Click to expand...
 
Not at all. Everyone is struggling or stagnant in the numbers game except maybe non-denoms.

But the worst losses percentage wise were suffered by the mainlines. Catastrophic.
 
Last edited:
Vonsalza said:
But the worst losses percentage wise were suffered by the mainlines. Catastrophic.
Click to expand...
Exactly. In 2014, Protestants were 46.5 percent of all Americans. Mainline Protestants were only 14.7 percent of all Protestants, compared to evangelicals which accounted for 25.4 percent. Compare those statistics with ones from the 1970s, when Mainline Protestants accounted for 30 percent of all Americans.

Between 2007 and 2014, evangelicals in the US have added between 2 to 5 million. Catholics have probably only lost about a 3 to 1 million members since 2007, but their share of the US population (unlike Protestants) have remained essentially the same.

Mainline Protestants, meanwhile, could have lost anywhere from 5 to as high as 7 million people during that same time period. See the Pew Center’s research.

While evangelical growth has shown a slight slow down in recent years, they are still pretty much holding their own and (probably more importantly) still having children. The Mainline Churches by comparison are experiencing catastrophic membership free fall.
 
Last edited:
There are more recent statistics released last year for 2016 but from a different dataset, the General Social Survey.

(
https://twitter.com/x/status/1085393708663615488
)

But how many actually attend. It doesn’t show a breakdown of different denominations but overall the weekly or more category has seen a very modest decline.

(How Unchurched is the White Working Class? | by Charles Fain Lehman | Medium)

Americans are blessed with amazing datasets. Such datasets and with such detail for every other nation on Earth are impossible to find.
 
ATraveller said:
Americans are blessed with amazing datasets. Such datasets and with such detail for every other nation on Earth are impossible to find.
Click to expand...
If Americans would spend as much time in amazing prayer as with reading statistics, America would be a better place.
 
Yes it would. When people’s lives are reduced to charts and graphs, they become just things. Valuable only for their lifetime earning potential and their vote.
 
It’s true that trends aren’t looking very good for the Methodist church in the US or for most Mainline churches. According to another article:
The [Methodist] church is geographically distributed across the United States, from coastal cities to rural regions. And the church is aging — almost one-third of members are older than 65 and another third are 50 to 64, while 9 percent of members are 18 to 29, Pew found in 2014.
Click to expand...
But trends don’t look very good for the Catholic Church in the US either. According to a study by Gallup from last year:
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Weekly church attendance has declined among U.S. Catholics in the past decade, while it has remained steady among Protestants.

From 2014 to 2017, an average of 39% of Catholics reported attending church in the past seven days. This is down from an average of 45% from 2005 to 2008 and represents a steep decline from 75% in 1955…

Currently, the rate of weekly church attendance among Protestants and Catholics is similar at most age levels. One exception is among those aged 21 to 29, with Protestants (36%) more likely than Catholics (25%) to say they have attended in the past seven days…

[W]hile the Catholic Church has suffered declining attendance in the U.S., the overall percentage of Catholics has held fairly steady – largely because of the growth of the U.S. Hispanic population…

After stabilizing in the mid-2000s, weekly church attendance among U.S. Catholics has resumed its downward trajectory over the past decade. In particular, older Catholics have become less likely to report attending church in the past seven days – so that now, for the first time, a majority of Catholics in no generational group attend weekly. Further, given that young Catholics are even less devout, it appears the decline in church attendance will only continue.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
If a Methodist did not favor the traditionalist perspective, could he or she join another Protestant community that closely resembles the Methodist faith but is also pro-LGBT?

Like, what makes Methodism uniquely different from other Protestant traditions? Could a pro-LGBT Methodist be content leaving the UMC and joining the Episcopal church, for example?
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top