This Proves Methodists are More Practical Than Baptists

But non-denominational churches that avoid LBGTQ+ issues are the most practical of all

When my husband joined a Baptist Samaritan’s Purse team to clean tornado debris from people’s yards, he had to sign a statement of faith saying he believed in Jesus.

When he joined a Methodist Disaster Response team to muck out houses hit by Hurricane Ian, he had to sign a statement promising not to loot.

“Too bad. There go your looting plans,” I said.

But joking aside, the Samaritan’s Purse statement would have been harder than the Methodist one for him to sign a few decades ago. Back then, he was an honest, upright atheist who argued against the existence of God but would never in a million years loot a house.

Baptists don’t believe atheists can be honest and upright, and that’s where they go wrong. A practical Methodist knows atheists can be honest and Christians can loot, even if they say they’re good Christians.

This is probably why I was drawn to the Methodists when my husband and I moved to Atlanta and started church hunting. Methodists are practical. They know people arrive with a lot of baggage and beliefs, so they promote “Open minds. Open hearts. Open doors.”

By the time we moved to Atlanta, my husband had become a Christian. He wanted to visit a big, popular Baptist church in the middle of town because he said if he was going to sit through church, he didn’t want the preacher to be boring.

The preacher wasn’t boring, but I knew we couldn’t join the Baptists. They hold the very impractical belief that women shouldn’t speak in church.

“I like this church,” my husband said as we listened to the riveting sermon of a preacher on fire for the Lord.

But I had an ace up my sleeve. Maybe this is why Baptists don’t want women talking. They know, as the Apostle Paul suspected, that women can be troublemakers. Allow us to talk, and we stir things up.

I pulled out my ace. “If we join the Baptist Church, you’ll need to get baptized.”

“My parents had me baptized when I was an infant,” my husband protested. His parents had never approved of his outspoken agnosticism.

“That doesn’t count to the Baptists. A real baptism means you’ll need to be submerged in that baptismal pool beside the pulpit.”

My husband, suddenly noticing the pool, said, “What about you? You aren’t a Baptist, either.”

“My mother saw to it that I was fully submerged,” I gloated. “I won’t need to be baptized again.”

My husband looked stunned and several people glared at me for speaking in church, but my tactics were successful. We fled the Baptist Church like a house on fire, and our next stop was the Methodist Church around the corner, which had a woman pastor.

My Ecumenical Background

To give you some background, I wasn’t lying about the baptism. My mother is the reason I was submerged in a baptismal pool. She is also the reason I am completely ecumenical. In other words, I don’t much care what kind of church I go to, as long as they allow women to speak.

My father was Episcopalian and my mother disliked his church, so she started a church of her own.

Whose mother does that?

But I didn’t think anything about it at the time. I didn’t realize it was highly unusual for a mother to start her own church when there are several perfectly good churches in town and her husband attends one of them.

My mother, being a wife of the fifties, paid lip service to the patriarchy even if her actions proved otherwise, so she did not leave my father completely out of our church upbringing. Every other Sunday, she sent me and my siblings to church with him.

In the Episcopal Church, we were allowed to sip real communion wine from the same chalice everybody else drank from, which is totally gross when I think back on it, although we survived with no lasting health issues.

On the Sundays she took us to her church, we didn’t have real wine, because that would have been a sin. Her church was a Church of Christ, and they drank grape juice served in separate, thimble-sized glasses.

They didn’t have a baptismal pool, either. My mother had somehow persuaded her tiny group of church goers to meet in a deserted, pre-civil war house that didn’t even have a bathtub.

When I turned 13, the lack of a baptismal pool became a dilemma. It was time for us kids to be baptized, and my mother wanted it done the proper way. She did what any mother would do, and convinced the Episcopal priest at my father’s church to meet us at the Baptist church, which was the only church in town with a baptismal pool, after persuading the Baptist preacher to let her use it.

Did I mention that my mother was practical? And headstrong?

In later years, the church she founded moved out of town and became a predominantly Black church. This is how my mother, a small-town southern woman, came to attend a Black church and to have a Black preacher officiating at her funeral.

You can see from this checkered background how my religious upbringing was all over the map, which is why I don’t affiliate strongly with one denomination or the other.

Methodist Church Controversy

But that word, affiliate, opens up a whole new can of worms. There are unpleasant things going on in the Methodist Church right now, because churches are disaffiliating. This means they are separating, like children claiming their independence, from the parent church.

A retired Methodist minister friend of mine from Texas emailed me asking if our church had voted on disaffiliation yet.

“We haven’t voted on anything. Are we supposed to?” I emailed back.

But I started paying more attention, and I noticed a lot of Methodist churches were disaffiliating, mostly over LGBTQ+ people getting married and being ordained.

My church minister, who is as practical as a Methodist minister should be, sent out a notice that our church wasn’t currently voting on anything. “No conference-wide decisions have been made to change our Book of Discipline,” he wrote. “There is no need for a vote.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. No need to vote yet! I wrote to my Texas minister friend, “We aren’t supposed to vote yet!”

The Book of Discipline, for those of you who aren’t Methodist, contains the law and doctrine of the United Methodist Church. It’s voted on whenever there’s a General Conference.

But being practical, Methodist bishops have used the Covid-19 pandemic to kick that can down the road. General Conference has been postponed twice, and is now scheduled for 2024.

I can’t help wanting the Methodists to keep kicking the can down the road. I hate controversy, I love our practical, service-oriented church, and my married gay friends who are members would be devastated if the church voted to disaffiliate.

I truly don’t know how the vote would go. I think, like Democrats and Republicans, our church would be almost evenly divided. We might be reduced to recounts, runoffs, and cries of a fixed election.

I just want to keep attending church, worshiping, serving, and seeing my friends.

The Practical Approach

Maybe non-denominational churches are the practical ones. Some of them avoid a lot of controversy by not doing weddings. Want to get married in a non-denominational church? “Sorry, find another venue. We don’t do weddings.”

They also avoid controversy by not having a church hierarchy that makes the rules. As far as they’re concerned, beliefs are grounded in biblical principles but not in religious dogma. They appear to be more locally led. Sometimes their blue-jean clad preachers who turn a blind eye to LBGTQ+ and other doctrinal controversies are accused by more traditional churches of being the anti-Christ, but I think that’s a stretch.

I don’t know how this Methodist Church thing is going to shake out, but I continue to believe a good Christian professes faith in Jesus and doesn’t loot. That leaves some leeway for a lot of other stuff.

Maybe if we could agree on a few basics like this, we could forget all about disaffiliation and get on with the business of worshiping God and doing good in the world.

That, to me, would be practical.