Posted on 10/21/2023 3:17:43 PM PDT by Republican Wildcat
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, wrote, " What one generation tolerates, the next generation will embrace."
Wesley could have never imagined how much the church he founded would not just be tolerating but embracing in 2023.
Thankfully, some members of the Methodist church have decided to take a stand.
According to the Christian Post, Christ United Methodist Church of Jackson, one of the largest United Methodist Church bodies in Mississippi, voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to disaffiliate from the UMC Mississippi Conference.
The congregation plans to change its name to "Christ United - Jackson" on Jan. 1, 2024. The final vote was a landslide, with 717 (86.39 percent) in favor of disaffiliation and 112 (13.49 percent) opposed.
The decision was made after months of deliberation on whether or not the Jackson church should split from the denomination over the Methodist Church's stance on homosexuality, which has been growing more and more lax when it comes to the blessing of gay marriage and the ordination of homosexual clergy.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
800 voting members is “massive”?
But the practical result of this principle is one on which there is no need of speculating; it works in one unvarying way. When error is admitted into the Church, it will be found that the stages of its progress are always three. It begins by asking toleration. Its friends say to the majority: You need not be afraid of us; we are few and weak; only let us alone; we shall not disturb the faith of others. The Church has her standards of doctrine; of course we shall never interfere with them; we only ask for ourselves to be spared interference with our private opinions.
Indulged in this for a time, error goes on to assert equal rights. Truth and error are two balancing forces. The Church shall do nothing which looks like deciding between them; that would be partiality. It is bigotry to assert any superior right for the truth. We are to agree to differ and any favoring of the truth, because it is truth, is partisanship. What the friends of truth and error hold in common is fundamental. Anything on which they differ is “ipso facto” non-essential. Anybody who makes account of such a thing is a disturber of the peace of the church. Truth and error are two co-ordinate powers, and the great secret of church-statesmanship is to preserve the balance between them.
From this point error soon goes on to its natural end, which is to assert supremacy. Truth started with tolerating; it comes to be merely tolerated and that only for a time. Error claims a preference for its judgments on all disputed points. It puts men into position, not as at first in spite of their departure from the Church’s faith, but in consequence of it. Their recommendation is that they repudiate that faith, and position is given them to teach others to repudiate it, and make them skillful in combating it." (pp. 195-196)
From: “THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMATION AND ITS THEOLOGY as represented in the Augsburg Confession and in the history and literature of the Evangelical Lutheran Church” by Charles P. Krauth, D.D. (1871). [Note date]
Splitters!
Yeah I thought the description of “massive” was a bit exaggerated myself. Though 800 members voting at a single meeting would be a larger than average congregation.
In a Methodist church? Yes. Numbers are plummeting.
>> John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, wrote...
Well said for someone who’s ~275 years old.
The same split is going on in the western Pennsylvania congregations of the United Methodist Church. Forty percent of our congregations in the tri-state area have voted to disaffiliate.
Over 6,000 congregations have left the UMC out of about 30,000.
What did Wesley say in modern English?
” What one generation tolerates, the next generation will embrace.”
In a state of two million with 40% black population 800 is large
This ain’t Houston
Great news.
But in terms of congregants how big is the loss? The UMC near me, thriving into the seventies with Sunday morning and evening services along with Wednesday now has about 30 regular congregants all well over sixty, mostly seventies. They’ve been dipping into reserves to have a ‘full time’ pastor and have precarious finances as a result.
My grandfather-in-law was the pastor of a large Atlanta Methodist church - Druid Hills Methodist. Several thousand members at its height. Enormous physical plant with a church that seats 850 (3 services), four-story Sunday School and office building, expansive grounds, a rector's house, etc.
The membership has collapsed - in 2016 DHUMC merged with Epworth UMC to form "Neighborhood Church", for a grand total of *80* members - and are holding services in Epworth's much smaller building near Candler Park. It's of course radical, aggressive pro-LBGTWXYZ - but that's not surprising in Atlanta-Midtown.
DHUMC is a protected historical building so could not be wrecked out. Minerva Homes bought it and turned it into very pricey intown condos - $600K to $1.1M.
Our neighbor stopped attending the Methodist Church in our town because of this. She told me many others have left for the same reason. (One reason specifically is because of a woman Assistant Pastor.)
The church no longer can support the work via regular tithes and offerings, and relies on the income from their large thrift shop and other small efforts to supplement it. They believe it will close soon.
It used to have a large congregation, and was a stable presence in the area. Gorgeous building. Sorry of pitiful.
Our parish was the training parish for the diocese, so we saw every female minister that was ordained in the 25 years or so we were in that parish.
One was a fairly decent pastor (though far left). The rest had gone into ministry for all the wrong reasons - political mostly. Feminists seeking to prove a point, lesbians ditto, leftist activists seeking a platform . . . preaching the Gospel was way down the list, if it was on the list at all.
My husband's last straw was when the denomination consecrated as bishop a man who left his wife and two daughters to "marry" another man - and run a website for "questioning teens." As he said, "If he'd run off with the church organist they'd have defrocked him . . . "
It's another dying denomination.
Revelation 2:20-21
But I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and leads My bond-servants astray so that they commit acts of immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, and she does not want to repent of her immorality.
All a person needs to know is: I Cor. 14:34
“Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak;”
100% agree. Wise words.
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