You know the old saying that “diamonds are forever”? In my personal experience, western Kansas is forever.
That isn’t a complaint. I’ve been driving across the Kansas high plains since the early 1980s — with more cause now that I have family in Kansas — and I have grown to love the wide open horizons. This long drive also leads to our family’s old stomping grounds in Colorado, where I’m on vacation this week.
Kansas is a real place. There’s a there, there. I have lots of friends with ties to Kansas and they love its combination of Midwestern values and access to the Wild West.
I bring this up because of a story I read last week in the Topeka Capital-Journal, with this headline: “96 United Methodist churches in Kansas, including one in Topeka, are leaving denomination.” This is another example of newspapers at the local and regional level having to handle developments in a complex, global conflict that has been raging since the early 1980s. That’s when I started covering this story in Colorado — a flashpoint from the start. Here’s the Topeka lede:
The United Methodist Church is seeing the exodus of 96 conservative Kansas congregations over theological matters, including same-sex marriages and ordaining openly LGBTQ clergy.
The words “theological matters” are, of course, disputes about 2,000 years of Christian doctrines on a host of important, even creedal, subjects. But, as always, the only specific given is LGBTQ+ matters.
Later on, the story notes that a key vote in Kansas:
… comes at a time when liberals and conservatives in the United Methodist Church disagree over matters that include whether gay clergy should be allowed and if ministers should officiate same-sex weddings.
Conservatives on May 1 officially launched a new Global Methodist Church, where they plan to maintain and enforce bans on things that include gay ministers and same-sex weddings..
Again, “that include” just isn’t enough information. Readers are left with the impression that this local, regional, national and global conflict is about sex and that is that.
Here’s the journalism problem. When Methodists conservatives site evidence of other doctrinal issues, the UMC establishments cries “Disinformation!” and journalists are accepting that judgement — instead of allowing debates on these topixs.
Like what? OK, let’s imagine that the following — from a United Methodist bishop — was offered in verbatim quotes to people in pews in, let’s say, western Kansas (as opposed to liberal Colorado). This is the top of an “On Religion” column from 2019:
The word "conversion" has been at the heart of Christianity for two millennia, with missionaries and evangelists urging sinners to repent and change their wicked ways.
Jesus also needed to be converted from his "bigotries and prejudices," according to Bishop Karen Oliveto, who leads the United Methodist Church's Mountain Sky region. Consider the New Testament passage in which Jesus seems to rebuke a Canaanite woman who seeks healing for her daughter. The woman persists and, seeing her faith, Jesus performs the miracle.
"Jesus, Jesus, what is up with you? ... Too many folks want to box Jesus in, carve him in stone, create an idol out of him," wrote Oliveto, in a 2017 online essay that was later taken down. "The wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting one, prince of peace, was as human as you and me. ... We might think of him as the Rock of Ages, but he was more like a hunk of clay, forming and reforming himself in relation to God."
What is the theological issue here? It’s called “Christology.”
Jesus needed to repent of his sins and mistakes? Who is Jesus? God and man?
Let’s keep reading. Yes, there is an LGBTQ+ angle here, as well as a creedal question.
In this case, Jesus changed his mind, noted Oliveto, who is the first openly lesbian United Methodist bishop and is married to a deaconess. The global United Methodist Church has repeatedly affirmed its Book of Discipline bans on same-sex marriages and the ordination of "self-avowed practicing" LGBT clergy.
Jesus, she added, "is meant to be a boundary crosser, and in the crossing over, reveals bigotry and oppression for what they are: human constructs that keep all of us from being whole. ... If Jesus can change, if he can give up his bigotries and prejudices, if he can realize that he had made his life too small, and if, in this realization, he grew closer to others and closer to God, then so can we."
This is an on-the-record pronouncement from a bishop — as opposed to “disinformation.” Debates about the very nature and work of Jesus Christ? That’s a pew-level and pulpit-level conflict.
Here’s another example, in this case doctrinal content linked to a drag-queen minister, the Rev. Isaac Simmons, who is better known to the press as “Penny Cost” (as in Pentecost and the emergence of new revelations). But forget that drag angle for a minute. Read the published words about God, in an online “slam poem.”
“God is nothing,” the self-described “dragavangelist” repeats throughout the poem, adding, “the Bible is nothing” and “religion is nothing.” In the end, he concludes God and the Bible are nothing “unless we wield it into something.”
“God must be f***ing nothing,” he says, “if her boundaryless, transubstantiated bodies of color are run down, beaten, and strewn in the streets of America instead of ruling the runways of life.”
He speaks of God not as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but rather as the source of queerness, describing him as “nothing but a drag queen with a microphone of biblical f***ing proportions,” “nothing, but if she were, she would be ‘yes, queen’-ing her way down the runways of Paris and Montreal,” and “nothing, but if she were, she would be a seamstress of divide couture, weaving together string theory and self portraits to form the fiercest gowns of queer existence.”
The LGBTQ+ angle makes headlines, of course. But the more important content here is about the nature of God and, again, Jesus.
In other words, issues at the heart of small-o Christian orthodoxy and the creeds.
Worth covering? Could journalists at the local and regional levels (like Kansas) — even general-assignment reporters — request printed, solid, examples of these statements from activists on one side of the debate and then question leaders on the other side? You know — journalism.
While they are doing that, I would suggest asking the three questions of the “tmatt trio” — my questions I have used for decades to probe divisions inside Christian flocks. Here they are again:
* Are biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this event happen?
* Is salvation found through Jesus, alone? Was Jesus being literal when he said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me"?
* Is sex outside of marriage a sin?
Back in the 1980s, an evangelical United Methodist seminarian told me, on the record, that he had encountered two professors — two — during his UMC seminary studies who believed in the resurrection, as an event in history. Is that a point of doctrine?
Oh, one other journalism point. The Topeka story notes:
Nationwide, 3,933 churches have parted ways with that denomination, according to United Methodist News.
Are there other sources who are following the departure statistics other than the official denominational officials, speaking for the establishment? Why accept the views of one side of a debate, alone?
Try this link for news on the other side. The number may have just hit 5,000.
FIRST IMAGE: Screen shot from this YouTube video of windmills along I-70 in western Kansas.