The article had a bold-face title: Methodists Keep Up With the Times. My friend had saved it from The Wall Street Journal (May 10) because he knew I would be interested.
Just reading the title, had I not known what the article was about, I would have pronounced a hearty Amen. The Christian gospel is relevant to life everywhere every day. As the primary demonstration plot and communicator of the Gospel, the church must keep up with the times to be relevant.
There is a difference, however, between keeping up with the times in order to be both pastoral and prophetic, and giving sanction to the cultural politics of the day. The latter is what the article said about Methodists.
The Journal did what newspapers often do. In the middle of the four-column article, a well outlined, larger type sentence, got your attention and stated the essence of the article,
The UMC opts for the secular
culture’s take on sex over
traditional Christian orthodox.
The church changed its official teaching on marriage from “a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman,” to “a sacred lifelong covenant that brings two people of faith into a union of one another and into deeper relationship with God.”
Keeping up with the times. Acceptance and tolerance are the driving relational dynamics being popularly called for. Every person should be allowed to make up their own morality and live by their own set of standards of what they think is right and wrong. The result is moral relativism.
In our Christian faith and way, every person is to be loved, valued and respected. That does not mean accommodation to action and attitude without regard to truth. The truth, for orthodox Christianity, is that marriage is a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman. The UMC’s ‘new” position is an affirmation of current middle-class values.
There is a cost for that kind of accommodation.
Of course newspapers will report this action since the United Methodist Church has been one of the largest religious groups in the nation, with more than 5 million members. This church had changed its definition of marriage…no longer restricting it to one man and one woman, now “two adult persons of consenting age.”
Referring to the new description the church had for marriage, the secular newspaper spoke a prophetic word to the church. “The description is nothing more than an aesthetic gloss to conceal the reduction of marriage to an emotional bond rather than the mysterious union of a man and woman that would normatively lead to the most sacred and godlike of events, the creation of life.”
Relativism is simply that every person should be allowed to make up their own morality and live by their own set of standards of what they think is right and wrong.
If we, the Church, keep up with the times by accommodating the latest moral taste and baptizing every expression of liberation we will always fail in our calling to “be in the world but not of the world.”