The United Methodist Schism And Anglicanorum coetibus

The United Methodist Church is belatedly coming to the same crisis of division that most mainline Protestant denominations have already met, the question of same-sex marriage and ordaining actively and avowedly same-sex-attracted clergy, although this has never been the exclusive issue dividing any of the denominations. In recent weeks, legacy media have begun to notice, and The Week, for example, explains,

United Methodists have been more-or-less civilly disagreeing about gay rights since the 1970s, but the issue came to a head in 2019. At a UMC General Conference that year, the theologically conservative camp, aided by socially conservative United Methodists from Africa, outflanked the moderates and liberals and pushed through a resolution affirming existing UMC bans on same-sex weddings and the ordination of "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" as clergy.

The UMC conservatives appear to have drawn lessons from the experience of Episcopalians in particular, recognizing that disagreements will likely manifest themselves in parishes attempting to disaffiliate as bodies and take their property, which results in lengthy and unpredictable legal action.

The General Conference also approved a new church law, Paragraph 2553 of the Book of Discipline, offering UMC churches a path out of the United Methodist Church with their church buildings and property — if they get approval from two-thirds of their congregation, sign-off from their regional governing body, and pay their fair share of clergy pension liabilities and two years of "apportionments" for the larger denomination. That temporary exit strategy expires at the end of 2023.

This YouTube presentation outlines the strategy of the liberals, who want to retain a majority in the next General Conference by claiming that the currently scheduled 2024 conference is actually just the one postponed due to COVID in 2020, and the representatives to the 2024 meeting will remain those who'd been designated to attend in 2020 -- this despite the thousands of parishes that had disaffiliated from the UMC since 2019.

As someone who's lived through and studied the recombinant schisms within Episcopalianism and Anglicanism since the 1970s, I can empathize. But as someone who, in response to my own experience with those schisms, was at first optimistic about Pope Benedict's constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, I have questions. The Methodists are going to have to work out their own destiny, but if only as a footnote, it's worth pointing out that Methodists are included in the definition of Anglican for the purposes of Anglicanorum coetibus. Wikipedia cites an archived entry on the US ordinariate website:

A person is eligible for membership if they, their spouse, or any member of their family is or ever has been Anglican, Episcopalian, Methodist, or AME. This applies even if the person or their spouse has already become a Roman Catholic.

Although the current leadership of the ordinariate has effectively dropped the original intent of Anglicanorum coetibus to receive whole parishes from former Anglican denominations with their clergy in a body, that original intent certainly would have included Methodist parishes as well. However, as might be predicted, of the thousands of Methodist parishes currently disaffiliating from UMC, the overwhelming majority are simply moving to newly constituted but nominal Methodist denominations. As far as I'm aware, no UMC parish has proposed joining the ordinariate as a body with its property and clergy, although the mechanisms are in place, both within the UMC Paragraph 2553 and within the ordinariate, for them to do this.

In fact, the number of priests or laity who've entered the North American ordinariate from the UMC approaches zero. Fr Robert Kirk, who had been pastor of a UMC parish in the San Francisco Bay area, was ordained a Catholic priest in the ordinariate and now works as an associate at two ordinariate parishes in the Baltimore area. Mr Paul Roland, a layman who by his account at the link was raised Methodist but became Roman Catholic outside the ordinariate out of frustration with UMC policy on gays, joined the ordinariate looking for a congenial environment even though, in Oklahoma, he has no ordinariate community nearby.

As he put it, "Thanks primarily to Word on Fire and then Fr. (now Bishop) Robert Barron, I began to accept Catholic theology as sound and consistent." Now we're coming to the point here, I think. Almost no Methodists, and indeed, very few Anglicans of any sort, have been drawn to the Church by Anglicanorum coetibus. But by Bp Barron's own account, many thousands have come in via Word on Fire and related ministries like Ascension Presents.

In fact, Mr Roland's story of his path to the ordinariate is oddly equivocal:

However, I was not particularly drawn to Catholicism in such a way that I felt like I had to leave the UMC and my local community.

. . . The reality was that I struggled with Catholicism and all that I felt forced to leave behind. I left a small community for a large parish, left behind Sunday School and fellowship, good music that spoke to me, biblical literacy, and traditional language like that of the King James Version. I had to leave behind more than that too, but it was all enough to leave me still feeling homeless in the Catholic Church. I made escapes to my family’s Pentecostal church, to Methodist churches, and to Catholic Charismatic Renewal services to try to get my fix of something missing.

My experience of leaving mainline Protestantism and becoming Catholic has been in many ways the opposite. In a "continuing Anglican" parish that proposed to follow the prescribed path into the ordinariate, I saw that path disintegrate amid broken promises from both the Anglican denomination and the ordinariate. Forced to fall back on Plan B and enter via diocesan RCIA, amid fears that I'd be forced to make do with beige Catholicism, wishy-washy liturgy, and bad music, I discovered the opposite, a large, prosperous, spiritually vibrant, welcoming diocesan parish that I continue to find with some astonishment does a better job at being Episcopalian than any Episcopal parish I ever attended.

I'm still ruminating on why my experience has been near opposite Mr Roland's. But one factor may well be that he left the UMC in disagreement over its policy on gays, when let's face it, gay policy is just a couple of paragraphs in the CCC -- being Catholic involves a lifetime of formation in a much, much broader set of criteria. A strategy of Catholic evangelization that seeks to present Catholicism as UMC-without-the-gays won't work. The Anglicanism-without-the-gays doesn't seem to be working, either. I don't have answers, but I'm wondering if the idea of evangelizing Protestants by offering them a just-without-the-gays alternative isn't the way to go.