Two Signposts, Opposite Directions
/By Tom Lee
The banner went up during Holy Week on the side of my United Methodist church in Nashville. Color-coded in bright hues, it proclaimed our welcome to persons of all “genders, races, sexual orientations, economic or family status, mental or physical ability.”
It was beautiful.
Our church has another banner, smaller and etched into an old stone tucked into the church's cloister garden. It commemorates the founding of the congregation.
“West End, M.E. Church South, 1887.”
It is from another building, another time. “M.E. Church South” is code echoes across the chasm of time. The Methodist Episcopal Church South was born when America’s largest Protestant denomination split in 1844 over slavery — or, to be more accurate, over whether one could own people and still claim to be Christian. Some Methodists, including some of my forebears, said yes. They divided over a chattel war rather than challenge the powers and principalities of this world.
Forty-three years later — undaunted by Appomattox, the 13th Amendment, the repudiation of history, and the staggering cost the South had paid and would yet pay for its intransigence — the separate-but-equal M.E. Church South still stood. Into that, my church was born.
Schism is not news in the South. All of us live in its shadow, one way or another. For some, schism is welcome news. I think of plantation slaves in Georgia hearing the hoofbeats of Sherman’s approaching army, so vividly depicted in E.L. Doctorow’s The March. For some, schism means tragedy. For others, deliverance.
But if we tend to think of schism as a 19th-century thing, we are wrong. Schism is back. We can feel it everywhere, tugging at our national politics, half of us certain one direction leads to tragedy and half of us equally certain it leads to deliverance.
And it is back in the United Methodist Church, my church. The particulars are different — same-gender marriages and the ordination of openly LGBTQ ministers are the questions of our day — but our 19th-century forebears would recognize the broad strokes.
I would like to put some distance between me and those days, those struggles, those powers and principalities. But our “M.E. Church South” cornerstone is only about 70 feet from the rainbow banner. They both still stand at my church. They both still stand for something, and for someone.
What is it, I wonder? And, more importantly, who is it?
As a journalist, then a lawyer, and then a lobbyist for the past 38 years, I am a practitioner of narrative. I am intrigued by the way in which the stories we tell — and the credit we give them — shapes our understanding of who we are and what is true.
As I have been shaped by this experience, so too has my faith. I have come to believe no idea, sacred or secular, is credible without a story against which to test it. Whether Holy Writ, judicial precedent, or public policymaking, the test is the same.
We all need a foundation, a frame of reference. For me, scripture is the principal means against which I test the validity of our own experience, collective tradition, and reason.
Its frames, though, can be tricky. As Abraham Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural, just one month before the Confederate surrender in Virginia: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God — and each invokes his aid against the other.”
In the South, this is more important and difficult than anywhere else. Because we tend to fuzzy up the lines. Telling stories in the South requires a knowledge of — and facility with — the barely perceptible difference between church and society. Flannery O’Connor got it right when she wrote, “While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”
Here, the line between the sacred and the profane is awfully thin.
~~~
When I reached sixth grade, my family lived in Columbus, Mississippi. Across a shallow creek from my backyard was a country Presbyterian church with 60 families and an apprentice minister who a couple years earlier had been flying Army helicopters in Vietnam. The weekend of the Paris Peace Accords, he sang “Let There Be Peace on Earth” at the end of his sermon. He wept as he sang.
I was 11. It is the first church service of which I have a specific memory, and because of it, I think, Calvinism never got its hooks in me — nor, I suspect, him. So, when my parents relocated to Tennessee in 1973, we joined a United Methodist Church. There, grace upon grace, I found a home.
In 1973, the word “United” before the word “Methodist” was still new. The Northern-Southern split had ended in 1939, and the Methodist union with the Evangelical United Brethren in 1968 had just created the at-long-last United Methodist Church.
In those days, I needed something united. I was attending my fourth school in two years. Out of place in school and neighborhood, our United Methodist Church became at once a source of shelter and challenge. The church’s promise that God’s grace was at work on everyone, even before they knew it, appealed to me. So, too, did the church’s insistence on a social gospel, calling us to model that grace to others, at scale. In retrospect, my professional interest in public affairs comes as much from that tradition as any other.
Also, and this is not nothing, United Methodism convinced me I could sing.
When our church started an early Sunday service and the grumpy adult choir refused two shows a day, a parent in the church said the youth choir could support the early service. That we did not have a youth choir was only a temporal inconvenience. Soon, 60 teenagers were waking at 7 a.m. on Sundays to go to church, because that same presumptuous parent convinced us we were born that way, too.
And sing we did. In 1978, performing for a patient and gracious home-church audience, we performed a musical called “Celebrate Life,” a retelling of the ministry of Jesus Christ with 1970s style-music. Imagine St. Matthew set to music by the Hollies. It was like that.
The emotional center of the show, “In Remembrance of Me,” mirrored the emotional center of the Gospels, the unlikely event when the Lord of the Universe gathers those who, before morning comes, will betray, deny, and desert him — and serves them anyway.
In remembrance of me heal the sick
In remembrance of me feed the poor
In remembrance of me open the door
And let your brother in, let him in.
The show closed by throwing it back 250 years or so with a song that took its text from the poetry of a leader of the original Methodist movement, Charles Wesley:
Love’s redeeming work is done.
Fought the fight, the battle won.
Death in vain forbids Him rise
Christ hath opened paradise.
Forty years on, in the context of our pre-schismatic moment in the United Methodist Church, we are considering anew whether “love’s redeeming work” is actually done.
My progressive friends in the church claim our battle is about the freedom to marry in United Methodist sanctuaries and to claim God’s call on one’s life, without regard to gender identity or sexual orientation. My conservative friends claim the struggle is over Biblical interpretation — specifically, whether a particular way of reading the Bible holds the keys to the kingdom.
The latter claim is not new. I had seen it 30 years before.
~~~
As a journalist, in April 1990, I traveled to Wichita Falls, Texas, to meet Morris Chapman. Chapman then was the pastor at the First Baptist Church, smooth and persuasive as a game-show host and United States senator rolled into one. He was a rising star in Southern Baptist circles, and I had gone to meet him ahead of the Southern Baptist Convention, at which he would be elected president.
It may be difficult for a non-Baptist to imagine, and harder to recall through the mists of time, but many folks in the pews of Southern Baptist churches in the late Reagan era thought their church had gone liberal. Shaken by a world in which the mullahs and ayatollahs had replaced the statist villains of the 20th century, Baptists took shelter in big-pulpit, media-savvy preachers with deep, honeyed voices like Charles Stanley of Atlanta and Adrian Rogers of Memphis, who preached the sweet comfort of inerrancy — the assurance that the Bible is historically, scientifically, chronologically, and every other way 100 percent true.
If the Bible said 40 days of rain flooded the world and that every beast in creation managed to walk, fly, or swim to the Palestinian desert to get on the ark, that was literal truth. If the Bible said God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, you could set your watch by it. Talking donkeys, priest-mauling she-bears, a planet only 6,000 years old begun in a garden in which two naked people were corrupted by a snake? Yes, yes, and yes.
“The Bible is not multiple choice,” Chapman told me then. “It is either all true, or none of it is.”
But inerrancy encompasses more than historiography. It means there’s only one way to understand the Bible, as well. Only one way to interpret the mysteries of the vision texts, one way to read the puzzles of Jesus’ parables, one way to fix church doctrine. Never mind the ancient Baptist concept of the priesthood of the believer, the inerrantists proclaimed the application of spirit-inspired interpretation to one’s own context a heresy. Down that road, they believe, lie relativism, uncertainty, doubt, and disaster.
And who was spreading what the inerrancy people believed was heresy? Other Baptists, particularly the ones employed by Baptist institutions and Baptist seminaries. As the online history of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary puts it still: “The majority of Southern Baptists could not in good conscience continue to pay the salaries of professors who undermined students’ confidence in the Bible and its teachings. Southern Baptists therefore undertook a campaign to replace denominational leaders and seminary faculties with those who held to the inerrancy of the Scriptures.”
And campaign they did. The Southern Baptist Convention annual meetings in 1985 and ’86 each drew more than 40,000 “messengers,” many of them enduring long rides in sweltering church buses to Dallas and Atlanta under the banner of inerrancy. Part revival, part national political convention, part media circus, and byproducts of one of the greatest get-out-the-vote operations of all time, the mid-’80s meetings launched a ritual purification of the SBC. Stanley and Rogers were elected presidents.
By the time I got to my first SBC convention, it was 1990, and though the meeting had returned to Atlanta, the circus had left town. Only 23,000 messengers attended. It was the last time SBC annual meeting attendance would crack 20,000.
It wasn’t that folks had lost interest. It was that the work had shifted to unglamorous board rooms in Richmond, Louisville, and Nashville. In these meeting places, home to Baptist agencies and seminaries, newly constituted agency boards comprised of inerrantist directors went through the employee rosters until, inch by inch, they squeezed out each heretical faculty member, administrator, and manager.
I saw two of these purges in person. First at a sweaty 1991 meeting of the trustees of Southern Seminary in Louisville, and later that year inside the headquarters of the Baptist Sunday School Board in Nashville, both times meeting behind doors locked to anxious employees, faculty, and students, inerrantist boards purged the last disloyal administrators. Each time, those excluded from the deliberations made prayer circles and sang hymns (“It Is Well With My Soul” became one of my favorites in those days from hearing it so often), but there weren’t any contrary voices to speak of. These were Southern Baptists — who among them had ever imagined there were divisions?
As Bill Leonard, a professor of church history, told me: “Half of us believe in order to live out our faith we have to hit people over the head with it. The other half of us believe in order to live out our faith, we have to take the beating. And so we’re perfect for each other.”
Until, that was, the doors swung open and the announcements were made.
Morris Chapman was right. There was no more multiple choice. All that the inerrantists believed, or at least all they wanted, was theirs, for there wasn’t any alternative truth left in the room.
And, like that, with no one left to endure them, the beatings ended.
Thirty years on, I ask: Is that the future of my church?
~~~
A photo of an old, storefront Pentecostal church in northwest Atlanta by Southern artist John Baeder hangs in our home. It proclaims the long-ago ministry of “pastor and overseer” C. Davis. I never met Rev. Davis or visited his Pure Church of Jesus Christ. But I sure resonate with his church motto, painted boldly across the front window:
“Love Is What It Does.”
I would like to know what that meant to Pastor Davis in his context. I know what it means in ours.
Love does what it has always done. It resists.
Not long ago, I engaged unwisely in a social-media conversation with a young Methodist pastor. He asked if I supported the “gay agenda.”
“My agenda,” I wrote, "is my daughter’s: She would like me to walk her down the aisle of our United Methodist Church someday at her wedding. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, that’s impossible. My prayer is you can see some heartbreak in that, and that we might yet be reconciled around that heartbreak. And that’s my agenda.”
The pastor responded, “Perhaps the decision of integrity for all gays and lesbians who wish to be married in the sight of God, as painful as it may be, is to move on to one of our neighbor denominations.”
And there it finally was: the invitation to leave.
The United Methodist Church may be on the clock. Longer term, we may or may not figure this out. We have important meetings coming up in 2020, the church’s General Conference in May and elections of new bishops in the summer. We may yet schism once more. Until we beat our theological swords into plowshares, it is hard to expect otherwise.
But perhaps that is not the idea. I began writing this as an attempt to process schism across multiple experiences as a journalist, a Christian, and an advocate in the shadow of the struggling church in which I have invested my life. That makes for good diary work. But, while writing, I remembered the history of resistance in the South. I remembered that resistance is not merely in the DNA of our people, it is in the DNA of my church. It is why, this summer, I ran — and won — to serve as a delegate to those conferences next year, when all these issues will be on the table again. Love’s redeeming work may well be done, but resistance in the name of love is not.
What if that could be rediscovered, in our secular and ecclesiastical lives? What if we could, as Lincoln encouraged us, disenthrall ourselves so that we might save ourselves? What if the South — and the United Methodist Church — could embrace the future even half as hard as we hug the past?
Might we yet find a future, a real way forward?
We try to read the signs of our lives the way they’re meant to be read, to follow the roads to which the signs actually point. At my church, there are two.
One, carved in stone, commemorates the past and leads toward the resistance of this world to God. The other, flimsily tacked to the church wall, leads toward the resistance of God against this world. They point in opposite directions, as at a crossroads.
They’re similar. They’re on the same signpost. But they’re not the same.