Tooley holds out hope for UMC

A United Methodist minister in Kansas has been placed on involuntary leave of absence for violating sexual behavioral practices outlined in the denomination's Book of Discipline.

During her first sermon of 2016, Cynthia Meyer, minister of Edgerton United Methodist Church in a small, rural town near Kansas City, announced that she was a lesbian. Two days later, Meyer's district superintendent filed a complaint against her for violating the Book of Discipline, which states that "the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching" (paragraph 304.3).

Following some meetings with denominational leaders that failed to resolve the dispute, it was agreed earlier this month that Meyer take a leave until the next General Conference in 2020, during which the issue of homosexuality is expected to be addressed.

Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy, tells OneNewsNow that while some liberals in the UMC are practicing and advocating open defiance of church standards, the denomination as a whole has not caved in.

"Many people in our current culture assume that everyone and their grandmother is going to bend down and yield to same-sex marriage and the collapse of Christian sexual morality," he says.

"But the vast majority of organized Christianity around the world, and even in the U.S., is officially holding firm to historic teachings about sexuality and marriage. So I think that should be encouraging to traditional Christians."

Tooley says the big question is will liberals leave the UMC or stay and "subsist in their own sub-culture.'"

In July the denomination elected its first openly homosexual bishop. Tooley told OneNewsNow in reaction that the United Methodist Church was seeing the fruit of more than a century of "liberalism and denial of scriptural authority and of Christian orthodoxy" that has dominated the denomination's seminaries and "upper reaches."