You Can Always Count on the Methodists . . .

. . . to be weenies!

I was baptized in the United Methodist Church, so I have a little bit of a right to chastise this so-called Christian church. Thankfully, soon after joining the UMC, I found the Calvary Chapel churches, to which I have gone ever since. Talk about going from a dead faith to an alive one . . .

Okay, so I'm reading the awesome compendium of libertarian history, The Triumph of Liberty by Jim Powell, from which I got the incredibly stirring quote by William Lloyd Garrison that I am using this week, and I read this:

"In 1836, the General Conference of the Methodist Church ordered its members not to participate in anti-slavery agitation."

Now, too many Christian churches had ministers that personally refused to bring the travesty of slavery into the pulpit. It is a shame that Christians too often stand for the status quo and against the human liberty that should result from "faith in God and His works" (Bastiat, The Law). The message of Jesus can be distilled into this statement: "In the light of God's overwhelming love, you are free indeed." Slavery never, ever should have been in those places that are, through God's grace, Christendom. As a believer, I cannot fathom how this institution survived so long in societies that dared to speak aloud the name of Jesus.

But, it was the Methodists who took this de facto pro-slavery stance to the next reprehensible level in actually building it into church doctrine that members could not agitate to end this evil, vile practice. Oy! Why did I ever join this church?

Now, the UMC is one of those squishy, yicky churches that likes to straddle the fence on the issue of abortion. Ooh, we don't like abortion but ooh it's so tough to say when life really begins and ooh women's health and ooh much prayer and meditation and ooh it's up to the woman and ooh please don't think that we are saying abortion is a good thing but ooh don't think we are saying that abortion is wrong either and ooh it's up to a woman's personal conscience ooh ooh ooh. . . I could just barf! I hold to this statement: You cannot be a Christian and believe that the decision to end a baby's life should simply be left to a woman's conscience. If you believe in God, and you believe that He is the Creator, then you cannot say that matters of life and death should be in the hands of humans - imperfect, sinful creations without eternal perspective. God never says: Go forth and multiply and be fruitful, but, hey, it is okay to destroy your fruit if you please, so long as you've prayed (to Molech) and meditated upon it. I mean, can you imagine Jesus ever counseling a woman to have an abortion? Can you? Jesus asks us for a bit more faith in Him than that.

I hate the moral relativism that can be found in so-called churches like the UMC. God's not a moral relativist, but Satan wants us to be. God calls us out from darkness, into light and out from sinfulness, into holiness. I'm not even talking here about the UMC's attitudes toward homosexuals and women in the clergy. Those two items can be debated within that church at their leisure. What I am talking about are those issues that have no grey area.

Should people be kidnapped from their native land, bound hand and foot, placed on boats like inantimate cargo, shipped hundreds and hundreds of miles, then (if they survive that) placed on an auction block like cows, separated from their families, sold as chattel, held in bondage for the rest of their lives, kept from the sweet gift of liberty that is mankind's birthright from the days of Eden? No! Not those precious souls for whom my Lord shed His sinless blood!

Should a tiny little human person, complete with his own DNA blueprint, handcrafted in his Creator's love and image, the most innocent being imaginable, be ripped by a scalpel from his womb home, or have his wee heart stopped by a poisonous injection of saline, his only crime being that he was inconvenient to another person and unseen by an apathetic world? No! Not that precious soul for whom my Lord suffered on the cross at Calvary!

The very fact that these churches dare to act in the Name of the Most High is the reason that they fall so heavily under my censure. How dare they sanction abortion in their wishy-washy, namby-pamby way, as if it were something that God would ever condone? God is the Creator, and Satan the Great Destroyer. You tell me in whose name abortion should be done.

And then there are those churches, I don't want to call them liberal - the church should be liberal in love and acceptance, considering we're all (at best) a group of regenerate sinners, completely dependent upon His grace - so I'll call them materialistic or faithless, that take some sort of self-righteous stance concerning abortion (especially abortion services in the Third World - too many little, brown children being born nowadays, and, since we can't capture them as slaves anymore, we might as well destroy them in the womb), because of the fear of over-population. Why are these churches so earth-bound? Why do they not have faith that all children are precious to Him who created them - to Him who knew them before He knit them together in their mothers' wombs and counted all of their days when, as yet, there were not any? I love that quote from Mother Teresa of Calcutta: How can you say there are too many children? That is like saying that there are too many flowers. Do these churches really believe that the God who created the heavens and the earth, who vanquished Satan's plan by His sacrifice, who daily rescues sinners in the flash of His grace, would not provide for a world that at least tries to be in His will? Stop putting God into a box - He will not be contained or defined by your human perceptions!

It is fascinating to me that the very groups that were so against the abolition of slavery are today the ones most hysterical (I like that word, and all the feminine irrationality it encapsulates) about ensuring that every path to murdering her unborn baby be left open to a woman. Once your mindset is willing to put human people into groups of personhood versus non-personhood, it becomes very easy to justify things like slavery and infanticide. I grieve for you, UMC, that your hearts have remained as hard as they were in the bad, old days of American slavery. Please, please return to the loving heart and boundless faith of Jesus Christ, who wants us to pray much and meditate often, but never to ask for or presume we've received His validation when we want to destroy life or liberty.