An appeals panel of the United Methodist Church has reinstated the Rev. Frank Schaefer, defrocked for having presided over his son’s same-sex wedding. Excerpt:

Mr. Schaefer, who had been the pastor of Zion United Methodist Church of Iona in Lebanon, Pa., was defrocked last year, six years after officiating at the same-sex wedding of his son. An all-clergy church court found him guilty of disobeying the denomination’s order and discipline.

His case has become a test of the denomination’s willingness to enforce its own rules. The church’s Book of Discipline defines marriage as between a man and a woman, declares homosexual practice “incompatible with Christian teaching,” and forbids clergy from performing same-sex weddings; the denomination also says it will not ordain “self-avowed practicing homosexuals.” But there is widespread civil disobedience within the denomination — hundreds of Methodist ministers have signed a statement saying they are willing to officiate at same-sex marriages, and multiple clergy have done so; there are also clergy who have declared themselves to be gay.

I don’t know how the UMC works, or what its internal dynamics are, but on the face of it, I don’t know how the church avoids schism, ultimately. The appeals panel did not say the panel that ruled against the Rev. Schaefer was wrong, only that its punishment was too strict. The initial panel saw what Schaefer did as a crime; the appellate panel saw it as a misdemeanor, at worst, and reduced his sentence to time served.

This is not a church in which the progressives are willing to follow the church’s own rules. How do you have a church when the disagreement on such a profound issue is irreconcilable, and one faction — the progressives — are willing to do what they want to do, and to hell with the rest of the church and its policymaking structure?

Methodist readers, what say you?

UPDATE: I forgot to post this e-mail from a reader the other day. I presume the reader is Methodist, though he did not identify himself as such:

There is virtually no chance the United Methodist Church changes its position on homosexuality at the next General Conference. The liberals’ “A Way Forward” proposal implicitly concedes this: if they saw a way to get the votes to change the position of the entire church, they would do so (as they have attempted to do before).

American evangelicals, mostly but not exclusively from the South, and orthodox international delegates, mostly from Africa, together have a working majority at General Conference. That’s why the liberals previously proposed an American-only version of General Conference, in hopes that they could prevail on these questions if the Africans weren’t allowed to vote (the proposal was rejected).

Most conservative talk about schism has to do with the fact that their gains at General Conference haven’t yet produced comparable inroads within the permanent church bureaucracy or even the Council of Bishops. That limits what their wins at General Conference can accomplish, especially if liberal bishops don’t pay attention to the more conservative things that pass at General Conference. And while demographics heavily favor the conservative majority, many fear how durable orthodoxy can be in the presence of such a large dissenting minority.

Meanwhile, the liberals won’t leave because a.) they still control a lot of the bureaucracy and b.) they believe they are on the right side of history, so things will inevitably turn in their direction. And for all their talk of growing the church and “open hearts, open doors,” I suspect at least a few of them know the church would be much smaller without the conservatives.

“A Way Forward” would definitely increase the number of churches ordaining gay clergy and blessing same-sex unions, but it would also cause all the divisions of General Conference to play out at the individual congregation level, which most Methodist churches have avoided.

UPDATE:

If defrocking of Rev Schaefer emboldened gay rights activists in Methodist Church https://t.co/OofXfOJ7ff what will reinstatement do?

— Laurie Goodstein (@lauriegnyt) June 24, 2014

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

I am a PCUSA pastor, and you wrote something very telling: “This is not a church in which the progressives are willing to follow the church’s own rules.”

This has been the experience in the PCUSA. The progressive wing of the church has pounded away, pounded away, and pounded away at ordination standards in our denomination for decades, and marriage for several years until they finally beat the Evangelicals and traditionalists out of the church in significant enough numbers that they would “win” the debate.

It is not just that they pounded away at the issues, sucking all the air out of the room and crippling real ministry and initiatives that could strengthen rather than weaken the Church, but I know many progressive pastors who simply defied the rules. I know of pastors who were essentially openly living with gay partners and pastoring churches, although it was something that was called sin in our confessions and explicitly disallowed by our Book of Order. I know of pastors who were single and sexually active in defiance of our rules that stated (until 2011) that church officers were to live in fidelity within marriage and chastity in singleness. I have no doubt that there were pastors who officiated at same-sex weddings, even if they didn’t sign the paperwork at the end.

Then, when ecclesiastical charges were brought, there was little or no discipline, so people thought “Why should I be the one to bring charges against someone, torpedo my own ministry, only to have the church turn its back on its own disciplinary rules?” It is a fundamentally broken system.

What has happened is that Presbyterians have become congregationalists in practice. Each congregation does basically whatever the Elders and pastor thinks is best because all ecclesial jurisdiction beyond the local congregation has broken down.

It looks like the Methodists are heading down a similar path. It’s not surprising. My experience of progressives in the Church is that their consciences are their guides, and if the Bible, any confession, or book of agreed-upon church rules that you vowed to uphold at your ordination falls outside your personal beliefs about anything, then you can set it aside because of the sovereignty of the personal conscience and one’s own sense of justice.

Of course they will tell you that they are led by the Holy Spirit, which immediately is supposed to lift someone’s personal opinions and scruples beyond questioning. I suspect that it is basically the same thing going on among United Methodists. In the end, progressive Protestantism is ultimately a form of contemporary Quakerism guided by “inner light” which is assumed to be the same thing as the Holy Spirit revealed in scripture.

Catholic version: “The Spirit of Vatican II!”

Orthodox version: “Economia!”

UPDATE.3: A reader writes:

What makes the United Methodist situation significantly different from that of other mainline denominations is the fact that we are institutionally (i.e. not just theologically) a worldwide church. At the upcoming General Conference, roughly 40% of the delegates will be from outside the U.S. Sometime within the next few General Conferences, if trends continue, the majority of delegates will be from outside the U.S. This is what has forced the hand of the progressives. They have turned to more and more brazen disobedience because it is increasingly obvious that they cannot win the fight in our denomination the way it has been won in American Lutheranism, Episcopalianism, and now Presbyterianism. To my mind, then, conservative calls for schism evidence incredible impatience, because the demographics in the worldwide church are a landslide for the orthodox position. They are retreating from a position of strength and advocating surrender at the very moment that progressives seem to realize their time is passing. They are preferring schism to the hard work of crafting an orthodox governance of the church from the growing orthodox majority in the church.

All that being said, although to American culture warriors all this stuff is really important, the true reckoning in the United Methodist Church is going to come in the next 10-20 years as the tensions between American control of money and bureaucracy and African numerical majority become more and more acute. Whether American Methodists of any stripe will consent to be governed by Africans is an open question (I’m pessimistic). Likewise with how long Africans will continue to operate generally as a block in global church affairs once they, as a group, come into a majority (United Methodists in Africa hail from a number of different countries, with Nigeria and especially Congo having the largest contingents).