JCM 1158

http://archives.umc.org/interior_judicial.asp?mid=263&JDID=1278&JDMOD=VWD&SN=1100&EN=1189

Arkansas and Northern Illinois Conferences sought to get the Council to reconsider on its own Decision 1032, the five year old ruling that has caused so much controversy, namely the right of a pastor to have the discretion about whether or not a person is ready for church membership. And you thought it was about a pastor who turned away a gay constituent from joining the church.

As I understand the facts of that old case, the pastor did not refuse the gay man. In fact, they were on very friendly terms. The man chose not to join a denomination that was so strongly against sexual activity between same sex couples.

The issue was that the bishop wanted that discretion over membership and did not want the pastor to have it.

In all my years of ministry, I always thought I had discretion about an applicant’s readiness for membership and even exercised it once with a confirmand. I never expected to have to do it and, with that one exception, I didn’t.

I could go into a long dissertation about how that weakness of discipline has so mixed our denomination that we are becoming more Southern Baptist than Methodist. But not for this review.

So I agreed with JCD 1032 on the basis of the facts and the traditional role of pastors indicated in Paragarphs 214 and 225.

I disagree with the anti-homosexual portions of the Discipline, strongly! But because I view JCD 1032 differently than the bishops and the church media, no one is paying attention to my opinions.

In this memorandum, the Council says the requests do not rise to the standard of a manifest injustice or clear error of law, and were not brought by a party to the original case. They took no jurisdiction.

The really good stuff, other than ignoring what I think the real issue was in the original decision, is in the three concurring opinions. They add humor, history, and mostly good legal thinking and are well worth reading.