Caterpillar upsets some Methodists

One News Now ^ | 1/25/2008 | Chad Groening

[reg45]

Actually, it’s a quote from a play. I just don’t recall which one.

[reg45]

I wonder what John Wesley would think.

[Louis Foxwell]

Our congregation owns its buildings and hires its pastor.

Your buildings are held in trust for the Bishop and your pastor is apointed by the Bishop. Some local Conferences may put on the appearance of a more gentle Ecclesiastical authority.

Do not be misled. When the chips are down the local congregation has no authority, not even over its own budget.

I suggest you read the Book of Discipline on these issues.

[antisocial]

“My duty? It is not “my duty” to bring down the leadership of the Methodist church.”

I didn’t mean yours alone, but all of us should be helping to make it known to all Methodists what has happened to the Church leadership. I’ve pointed this out to many of my family members and most of them just shrug it off. I’ll keep trying though.

[riverdawg]

I know the Book of Discipline well. There has been no interference or even input from the Bishop in our congregation’s decisions over budgets, pastoral (re-)appointment, building renovations, foreign mission expenditures or anything else. Yes, the Bishop “appoints” the pastor, and in the early 70’s I was “appointed” by then-President Nixon to a mid-level job in his administration. I think I still have the appointment letter, signed by auto-pen of course.

To say that the Methodist hierarchy resembles even remotely the centralized, authoritarian bureaucracy of the Roman Catholic Church (which I also know very well from my involvement with our daughter’s Catholic middle school) is to say that Churchill resembled Stalin because they were both men.

[Ciexyz]

Most distressing news.

[Louis Foxwell]

Tell it to the elders in the Baltimore Annual Conference. Autocracy is alive and well on the Council of Bishops.
You do not believe, by your comments, that the Book of Discipline is the mandating authority over the business of the local church.
The historical and ecclesiastical links between RC and UMC are inextricable. A good tyrant allows his minions to have the appearance of freedom without granting the authority of freedom.
Doze on, comrad. You may not live to see the revolution.

[fweingart]

John would probably wish he was a traditional Roman Catholic.

[Wuli]

Actually, when I was very young, all my siblings and I were baptized in a Methodist church - at the same time, and it was there we attended Sunday school - but my parents, although they arranged for the baptism, rarely went to church.

Later,my siblings and I attended a local Methodist church in California, where I later joined the high school youth group and in my college years I taught Sunday school and helped start a college age group - all the while refusing to officially join the church.

I have personally experienced everything from the Catholic catechism to very evangelical, very fundamentalist, main stream, mega and even some “new age” denominations, and read allot of what their best writers have had to offer.

But I have never been a member of any church or denomination. To do so, for me personally, would be to accept their statement of faith as unequivocably pure and anything found in any other as false.

I think only Yeshua, and no man before or since, was truly in the spirit and truly able to communicate from the spirit in the purest fashion. All humans are imperfect and therefor incapable of receiving divine inspiration and communicating their reflections on it without passing it through the imperfect lens of the pre-existing values and confirmed biases they already hold.

But, I believe that the bible was written, most often, by truly inspired people and I believe that in spite of their imperfections - in spite of imperfections in the black and white text, in the human-culture centered letter of the law - that the spirit of the law, obtained by and forwarded to us by the original inspiration - can still BE EXPERIENCED BY ENGAGING IN THE STORY, IN EACH PART, AS IF IT WERE OUR OWN.

That, not history, is was the old testament authors attempted to do (and succeeded) - to get the people to adopt the story as their own and in that to adopt, to make part of their lives, the spiritual and moral lessons in the story.

Therefore, when one denomination seeks to have, singularly, been given, as given to no others, the purity of the spirit of the law then I know that as right as they may be on some things, their claim against others is false.

What I ask people to do is to keep their pure faith in God, even to allowing our own religious thinking to be fatally challenged, because in the end, if you hold to your faith - not religion - God will still be with you. When you hold to your pure faith in God then you know that the fullness of God is a mystery, the understanding of which it is not yours to know, and you have no fear of not knowing, because, until your own path with God delivers that awareness to you your trust in God remains secure in your faith.

For instance, in a small example, I don’t need to know how the mystery of the virgin birth was achieved or even if it is a mystery and not a myth - I am completely agnostic about it. I leave it to God entirely, without diminishing my faith.