PlainSpoken

Considering Johannesburg, Episode 3. Watch the full episode above. The free discussion guide is here: [GUIDE LINK]. Episode 2, on sex and gender identity, is here: [EP02 LINK].

On the last afternoon of the General Conference in Johannesburg, two women went to the same microphone about a minute apart. The first was Megan Alamo, a pastor from the Great Lakes Conference. The second was Mandy White, a laywoman from West Plains who sat on the committee that wrote the text they were arguing over.

Neither of them thinks abortion is a good thing. Neither of them wants a church that shrugs at it. What they disagreed about was a single clause, and what that clause says, or refuses to say, to women trying to navigate righteousness in modern medicine and family.

That argument got about eleven minutes on the floor. What came out the other end is now the Global Methodist Church’s witness on the unborn and their mothers.

This topic isn’t abstract for a lot of you. Some of you have sat with a daughter in a doctor’s office and heard news nobody wants to hear. Some of you have carried a child you were told would not live. And some of you have had an abortion and you’ve never told your pastor. We live in a world in which there are roughly 73 million induced abortions per year, more than a quarter of all pregnancies. I’m going to be plain about what the church decided and what I believe, and I’m going to call sin what it is. But I’m not going to act as though God’s grace doesn’t apply in these situations. It does.

One Soft Word

Our Social Witness, ¶302, is what Chappell Temple, this year’s committee chair, called fourteen simple statements. They don’t set penalties. They say what we believe God wants of his people, and they say it to the world. The statement right before the abortion paragraph lays the foundation: it is “the particular duty of believers to protect those who may be powerless to protect themselves, including the unborn, those with disabilities or serious illness, and the aged.”

So the question was never whether the church opposes abortion. It was how we say it, and what we say about the hardest cases.

Here is how the 2024 General Conference left ¶302.3:

“The sacredness of all life compels us to resist the practice of abortion except in the cases of tragic conflicts of life against life when the well-being of the mother and the child are at stake. We do not accept abortion as a means of birth control or gender selection, and we call upon all Christians as disciples of the Lord of Life to prayerfully consider how we can support those women facing unintended pregnancies without adequate care, counsel, or resources.”

If that exception sounds familiar, it should. The United Methodist Social Principles spoke of “tragic conflicts of life with life” that may justify abortion. Our 2024 language kept the bones of that inheritance. That’s no scandal. We started from what we had.

But look at one word: “well-being.” It can mean the mother’s life. It can mean her health. Some would stretch it to mean her circumstances. Several petitioners this year said that word opened the door wider than the church meant to.

Seven Petitions, One Direction

Petition 1111 came from one person, Shelley Van Antwerp of Avon Bartlett Chapel in the Great Lakes Conference. She put the mother in the title: “Supplying language to further protect the unborn and the mother.” She struck two words, “except in,” and gave the hard case a different ending: “premature delivery may be necessary with the baby cared for as a separate patient.” In 2024 the answer to the hardest case was, in effect, abortion. In her petition it was: deliver the baby early, and treat that baby as a patient too.

Hers was one of seven. Shreve Community in Allegheny West wanted to say that all human life is “sacred and divinely deserving of equal protection under the law.” That’s an abolitionist assertion that many pro-lifers find untenable. John Lomperis called “well-being” very loaded language and wanted pregnancy clinics affirmed by name. Virginia wanted to name disability; the Upper Midwest, eugenics. Michael Cooper’s petition would have said abortion “is always an immoral act that we oppose in all situations,” and it called the church to support those who chose abortion in the past.

Not one of these petitions asked the church to be softer, and that’s good. They disagreed about how far to go, and about whether we make provision for things like ectopic pregnancy, molar pregnancy, or a couple of other rare conditions in which it might be necessary to remove a baby from the womb prematurely.

What the Committee Built

The Social Witness committee, with four doctors in the room, voted 38 to nothing. It didn’t just pass Van Antwerp’s petition. It rebuilt the paragraph: a new opening sentence borrowed from Shreve Community, minus the equal-protection line. The first sentence now ends at the word “abortion.” Period. No “except.” “Well-being” became “mortality.” The birth control and gender selection sentence was struck. Fathers were named. And “consider how we can support” became “support.”

Then, on Thursday, from the platform, Temple made a correction before anybody had pulled anything: “with the baby and the mother cared for as separate patients.” It’s small, and it may be the most important edit in the whole story. Without it the sentence leaves the mother out. With it, the text names two patients, and a doctor owes care to both.

Eleven Minutes

Megan Alamo pulled the petition off the consent agenda on Thursday, and then it sat until Saturday, when the conference was nearing its end and a good deal of business was still undone.

Here I need to say a brief “I was right.” When I saw the breadth of material before the conference, and knew the priority that would be placed on worship, I knew some topics would get short shrift and that there would be a good deal of interest in shoving things through under omnibus packages. By Saturday afternoon Bishop Jones believed the Social Witness items were finished: “We’re not gonna vote on any more social issues.” It took a question from Isaac Salgado of South Georgia, and another from Chris Gadlage of Great Lakes, to get the petition back in front of the body with about nineteen minutes left. If someone hadn’t done their due diligence in the moment, none of the substantial conversation would have happened. Much more could likely have been done with more time. As we’ll see, care for mothers who have chosen abortion got dropped and forgotten. Rushing things through has a cost.

Alamo offered a substitute that restored the exception, narrowed to “mortality.” She agreed with “the heart and intent” of the petition. Her concern was a gap:

“It does not address what a woman, what a mother who is facing a life threatening medical emergency should do in something like the event of an ectopic pregnancy where a premature birth is impossible.”

Mandy White answered for the committee. The doctors had presented premature delivery as an option, and the committee wanted to say so: “If you leave it vague, then they will come to their own conclusion.” Her objection landed on both of the old phrases. “Except in the cases of” says there are cases where abortion is acceptable. So does “we do not accept abortion as a means of birth control,” because it implies we might accept it as a means of something else. Her summary: “We do not like abortion, except sometimes we do.”

One speech for and one against. The substitute failed on a show of hands. Then the petition itself, by electronic ballot, three-quarters required: 300 to 49. Temple, still standing at the microphone, said, “Now Lord, let thy servant depart in peace.” That’s Simeon in the temple, holding the child.

Here is ¶302.3 now:

“We believe that all human life, regardless of level of development or ability, is sacred. The sacredness of all life compels us to resist the practice of abortion. In the cases of tragic conflict of life against life when the mortality of the mother or the child is at stake, premature delivery may be necessary with the baby and the mother cared for as separate patients. We call upon all Christians, as disciples of the Lord of Life, to prayerfully support mothers and fathers facing unintended or unwanted pregnancies by prayerfully providing them with care, counsel, and resources.”

What It Leaves Open

This paragraph was written to last. Whatever it says or fails to say, we’ll be teaching from it for a long time. So what does it leave open?

First, the ectopic pregnancy, which is the case in between 1% and 2% of all pregnancies. That was Megan Alamo’s question, and nobody answered it on the floor. An embryo implanted in a fallopian tube cannot be carried to delivery, and the mother’s life is at risk. In roughly half of those cases a woman’s body is able to resolve this on its own. What about the other half? Does “premature delivery may be necessary” speak to that case?

Second, birth control and gender selection. I read “all human life, regardless of level of development or ability, is sacred” as covering those cases and more, but the paragraph no longer names them. Will we apply these words powerfully and broadly, or will our lack of specificity leave us ambivalent where we would otherwise be clear?

Third, what does “resist” ask of us? Prayer? Preaching it plainly from the pulpit? Backing the pregnancy center down the road? Speaking to our legislators?

I think abortion is the primary moral issue of our day. When you look at the absolute and relative numbers of children being killed in the womb, it’s hard to see anything else as nearly as important. I find myself increasingly sympathetic to the abolitionist position, although I confess discomfort with Russell Hunter’s recommendations around ectopic pregnancy. The moral standing of a people is based on its care of its most vulnerable, and who is more vulnerable than those in the womb? We have been failing that test for a long time. I would love for Global Methodists to play a large role in waking our nation up to the moral travesty we have overseen relatively quietly.

Fourth, the women who have already had abortions. The paragraph says nothing to them. I’ll come back to that.

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

I’m glad of what the conference did. I believe the child in the womb is a human being made in the image of God. Taking that life on purpose is sin, and the church should say so without a clause or exception that people can take advantage of to justify themselves. The Bible doesn’t have to be a medical textbook in order to tell us how to live in a world that often gives us medical complications. The Scriptures have God’s own testimony about who that child is.

“For You formed my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are Your works, and I know this very well. My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in secret, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all my days were written in Your book and ordained for me before one of them came to be.” —Psalm 139:13–16

“Your eyes saw my unformed body.” Before the psalmist had a shape anyone could recognize, God saw him and was writing in a book about him. That’s what “regardless of level of development” means. The church didn’t invent that conviction in Johannesburg. It’s as old as the Didache, which tells believers flatly not to murder a child by abortion. That’s the sixth commandment applied to the smallest of us: “You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13).

So I’m glad the exception is gone as it was worded. “Well-being” was a soft word in a critical place, and the delegates who disagreed on Saturday agreed on that much. The committee said “mortality.” Alamo’s substitute said “mortality.” Nobody at a microphone defended “well-being.” That gives me some hope that the GMC will not readily fall into soft compromise with a world bent on death.

There’s a difference between acting to end a child’s life and acting to save a mother’s life when you know the child can’t be saved. What is meant by the word “abortion”? If it means intentionally murdering the child in the womb and removing it afterward, then this is all quite clear. If it means removing a baby gently and lovingly, treating him or her with dignity, because the pregnancy cannot continue without killing the mother, then I do not see this as the same thing. We practice medicine in a fallen world, and there’s grief in it, but that isn’t the thing ¶302.3 resists.

Two patients means the doctor may not abandon either one. If one of them expires, you fight for the one who can still live. Both matter; we refuse to pit mother against baby. Even in extreme situations, there is no medical condition that necessitates extinguishing a life while it is in the womb. A gentle and caring extraction can take place, after which a non-viable child can be kept comfortable until he or she dies naturally, while the mother is also tended to. Global Methodist pastors should be able to urge, in no uncertain terms, that all women carrying babies insist on procedures that do not intentionally and violently end the lives of their babies.

The Assignment

Some might think this is an unfair burden for women and doctors. When we are clear that abortion is murder, that also makes clear that medical expediency is not the ultimate value. One doesn’t bless women and doctors by participating in the delusion that abortion is something less than murder. One who follows Christ speaks clearly and kindly, inviting all who have sinned to repentance. This is what Russell Hunter of Abolitionists Rising does well: he highlights the clear sin of abortion while urging repentance and forgiveness. Christians used to be better at this, and it’s part of our heritage that we should reclaim.

And look: the last sentence of the paragraph isn’t a slogan. It’s an assignment. We shouldn’t be leaving mothers on their own. Women and men are tough when they have support. Isn’t that what the church is supposed to be? The Scriptures that close the paragraph are about exactly that assignment.

“You must not mistreat any widow or orphan. If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to Me in distress, I will surely hear their cry.” —Exodus 22:22–23

“Pure and undefiled religion before our God and Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” —James 1:27

A woman facing a pregnancy she didn’t plan, without a husband, without money, maybe without a supportive family, stands very near the widow and the orphan. God says he hears her cry. The question for every Global Methodist congregation is whether she can hear us coming.

Our General Rules begin with “doing no harm” and go straight on to “doing good.” Resisting abortion is the do-no-harm half. Caring for the mother, and the father too, is the do-good half. A church that refuses the second half is failing. So: somebody who’ll drive an expecting mother to an appointment. A crib and a car seat. A family who’ll take her in for a season. A youth group where a pregnant teenager is still welcome. Men who treat a young father as a man with a duty and help him carry it. Families willing to foster and adopt. A consistent resourcing relationship with the local pregnancy resource center; my interview with Joel Webb of the Spero Center shows what those ministries do. Most of our congregations could do more of this tomorrow.

What the Paragraph Didn’t Say

The paragraph says nothing to women who have already had abortions. Cooper’s petition would have, and it was set aside. I think that’s regrettable.

Local churches need to feel responsible for the care of the families in our midst. We don’t help them by only telling them what they can’t do. We have to help them feel rightly about sin, repent of it, and walk in righteousness. That’s true of abortion, which is heinous, and of every other sin. People show up to our churches with hearts calloused from years of pretending and posturing. The church needs to be a place where we appropriately dismantle the defenses of people who need to repent. All people need to repent, especially women whose hearts have been hardened by radical feminism, which has made abortion one of its sacraments. Our society needs to be lovingly exorcised of this demonic disposition, because it is only on the other side of repentance that we find this:

“He has not dealt with us according to our sins or repaid us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His loving devotion for those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.” —Psalm 103:10–12

“And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” —1 Corinthians 6:11

That’s the church. It isn’t a room full of people who never did anything wrong. It’s a room full of people who have repented and been washed. And that isn’t only a promise for the resurrection. The Holy Spirit changes people now. He can take the guilt off you today, and the shame doesn’t get to rule you anymore.

Two Lives in the Room

I’d rather be in a church where two pro-life delegates argue over one clause than in the one many of us left, where the argument was whether to say anything clear at all. We got a clear paragraph. Now we have to live up to it, in emergency rooms and church nurseries, with frightened mothers and fathers who would rather run, and with women who come to us years later carrying something they’ve never set down.

The committee’s best phrase was its smallest correction: “the baby and the mother cared for as separate patients.” That isn’t only good medicine. It’s a good description of the church’s job. There are two lives in that room, and Christ died for both of them. We don’t get to choose between them. We care for both. Satan wants us to create situations in which one life needs to be extinguished for the sake of another. The abundant love of Christ and a right fear of the Lord require all believers to insist that the Lord of Life doesn’t engage in the calculus of death.

May the Lord raise up a new generation of believers in our churches who rejoice in life rather than negotiating with death.

Scripture quotations are from the Berean Standard Bible. A lot of the connective tissue of this series, the overlays, the diagrams and the structure of these segments, is the work of Claude AI under my oversight; it wouldn’t be right to give the impression I did this alone. The discussion guide for this episode has the 2024 and 2026 texts side by side, the other petitions, the arguments from both microphones, and questions for a class or small group: [GUIDE LINK].

For most of this year I have been talking about the 2026 General Conference of the Global Methodist Church from thousands of miles away. I saved 33 hours of plenary livestream. But I haven’t been in the rooms where it happened.

Bill Kyle was. Bill is a member of First Methodist in Yazoo City, where I serve, and he chairs our Staff-Parish Relations Committee, which helped bring me here less than a year ago. He has been a member of this church since the mid-’70s. He had just retired when our conference superintendent, Lauren Porter, asked whether he’d be considered as a lay delegate from the Mississippi West Tennessee Conference. Bill’s answer: “Well, just tell me when and I’ll be there.” Then Lauren mentioned the delegation meetings. “Meetings,” Bill said, “what are you talking about?”

Many of you who watch our live worship asked me to sit down with Bill. This is that conversation.

“You vote the way you feel led to vote”

I asked Bill whether it was as simple as showing up with your Bible and doing what the Bible says. “Well, it was not that simple, Jeffrey.”

Mississippi West Tennessee sent 14 delegates, seven clergy and seven laity, plus alternates. They met about monthly, in person or on Zoom, led by Paul Lawler, who is now Bishop Lawler. They walked through the petitions so everyone understood them. Bill expected to be told how to vote. That never happened:

“It was, here’s the petition. Here’s what this is talking about. And Paul was very frequent to say, you vote the way you feel led to vote. I just want to make sure that you understand what the petition is about.”

That is encouraging to me. Last time around, North Alabama came out with a statement beforehand announcing which side they were on and what they were going to push for. That felt like politics, and I didn’t like it at all. A lot of people in the Global Methodist world have worried we would replicate that. Bill’s delegation didn’t.

The Holy Spirit, or social pressure?

The vote counts from the legislative committees showed a lot of consensus. Many took that to mean the Holy Spirit was making us of one mind. I also worried about social pressure, where nobody wants to be the one sticking out.

Bill served on the Doctrines and Sacraments Committee. It was his second choice; he had wanted Local Church, the part of the Book of Doctrines and Discipline he uses most as SPRC chair. “That’s not where the Lord wanted me,” he said, and he’s glad of it. Before they left, Paul had told the delegation something Bill kept in mind all week: “What we know is we don’t want to be UMC. We know we want to be something different. We might all have different ideas about what that is.”

The committee broke into small working groups that brought recommendations back to the full committee. There was “a lot of agreement, but there was also a lot of disagreement,” Bill said, handled “in a loving manner.”

“I never felt any pressure in that committee to adopt certain words or certain phrases or certain pieces of legislation or kick out certain pieces of legislation... And I do think that the Holy Spirit was moving in the room.”

I asked whether any issue from his committee is likely to come back over the next six years. I brought up the concerns from our Considering Johannesburg panel on the sacraments, including laity and deacons presiding over them. That one, Bill said, drew a lot of discussion: “some very valid reasons” on one side, and “a lot of people that were pretty passionate about not giving that authority to the laity” on the other. “I bet that conversation is going to continue.”

8:15 in the morning to 9:30 at night

The livestream only showed us the plenary floor, so I asked how much free time there was. Not much. Bill skipped the safari some delegates took before it started and slept off the jet lag instead.

A typical day began with worship around 8:15, about an hour and a half of it, ending with Holy Communion every day, passed down the rows with delegates serving one another. From there they went straight into legislative committee or plenary, and most days ran until 9:00 or 9:30 at night. “I kind of thought it would be, you know, eight to five and then we’ll have the nights off,” he said. “Hey, I was wrong about that. There was none of that.”

Even the meals were mostly with the delegation. Wednesday night was the Celebration of Africa: well over a thousand people, local food, and tribes and nations from across Africa sharing their dances and customs.

A church in a storage building

Another night, Lauren arranged at the last minute, with a huge rugby match in town, a dinner for about 40 or 50 people from Mississippi West Tennessee and the Mega-Manila and Covenant conferences from the Philippines, which our conference has partnered with to help them get established. Bill said it was one of the things he enjoyed most.

The man sitting next to him pulled out his phone and showed Bill their worship service. The church was meeting in a storage building.

“It’s one thing for us to write a check and we’re out and we’ve got our deed back and there’s no trust clause or anything like that. A lot of these churches in the Philippines just had to leave their building.”

None of us wants to carry over the United Methodist practice of sending 12% of your money up to a bureaucratic structure that may or may not spend it well abroad. We pay 1% to the general church, and the general church isn’t interested in being a middleman. It’s one thing just to send money at people. It’s another to have a partnership where people know and respect and care for one another, and that is what happened at that dinner. Bill left with new Facebook friends and phone numbers. One man, Ray, may come to Mississippi, and Bill fully intends to go to the Philippines.

Our new bishop

Our new bishop, Luther Oconer, is from the Philippines, and Bill spent time with him during breaks. “He’s on fire,” Bill said. I’ve been in worship services he has facilitated, and he’s a live wire. Talk to him for three minutes and you might not see it, but get him talking about Jesus and you will. Bill thinks that excitement will push us toward “more than just letting the church be a place that we come for service, but more a place where we’re reaching out.” Bishop Oconer also told Bill, “Now I got a reason to come to Yazoo City.” He’s very welcome here.

The Global Methodist Church has, to my mind, a convoluted way of doing bishops, designed to keep bishops from building centers of power and ruling over them. A bishop can’t serve where he already has a power base, and he serves four or five annual conferences at once. That’s why a Filipino bishop is now serving Mississippi.

Plenary, worship, and the last day

On the livestream, the plenary all came through a sound board, so I asked what the room was really like. Bill sat at the end of his delegation’s row, next to two women from Thailand, and over the week they got more conversational despite the language barrier. What he liked best were the preachers, especially a pastor from South America, the first sermon he had ever heard through an interpreter.

Until the last day, the plenary looked from afar like everyone was on the same page. Then petitions on sex and gender, divorce and remarriage, homosexuality, and abortion were pulled off the consent agenda, and the rhetoric changed. Bill said there were moments when he wondered whether it was about to get contentious, but it calmed down quickly. He was surprised those subjects came up at all: “I thought we kind of moved past that already.” There was no celebration when votes passed. When some people clapped, Bishop Jeff Greenway was quick to stop it: “Hey, we’re not applauding votes. That’s not what we’re about.”

The same Jesus

I asked whether, in all those encounters, the sameness or the difference stood out more. “The sameness would have probably outweighed” the difference, Bill said.

One was Jerry Kulah of Liberia, co-lead of the Doctrines and Sacraments Committee and now a bishop: “Man, we live worlds away from each other,” and yet they had a great deal in common. Another was a pastor from Belarus who sang a solo in morning worship. Bill told him, “I don’t know what you were singing in Russian, but it was very, very good.” The pastor let him know very quickly that Russia got its language from Belarus. They talked all week. “Do I think that Jesus is the same in Belarus as he is here? Yeah, absolutely.”

The third example is the one Bill shared in worship here. He sat down with some men speaking another language, partly because he wanted a break from talking. Their conference superintendent, a native English speaker, joined them and translated. They were from one of the most persecuted parts of our church. The Global Methodist Church has designed a whole annual conference for persecuted areas to protect its people from exposure, so I won’t say where they’re from. These men have already been brought to trial, and there have been threats. When we raise money in the U.S., it goes to salaries and upkeep. For them, it goes to reinforcing their homes against night raids.

“Just about the time we have enough money to harden another home, there’s a wave of arrests and we end up having to spend all our money on bail.”

“I’ll never forget that,” Bill said. “I have prayed for them every day. I told them that I would, and I have.” A lot of people don’t know this is going on in the world, and the awful thing is that talking about it can put people at risk. This is one of the areas where the Global Methodist Church is going to teach us how to be in right relationship with persecuted Christians.

Small churches in a global church

Most Global Methodist churches are small and rural, in Thailand, India, and Nigeria as much as in Mississippi. I asked Bill how optimistic he is about churches like ours taking part in a global body.

He feels good about it. Nearly everyone he built relationships with came from smaller churches. What slows things down, he said, is whether people locally want to take that step. Churches that are willing to help advance the kingdom and reach people will flourish. We’re never going to stop caring about the local, but we’re going to care about the non-local as well.

The entire general church staff was there, 19 people, some part-time and some not taking a salary, and what Bill heard over and over was “local church, local church, local church.” In our previous tribe, the bureaucracy started treating the local church as a means to its own ends. There are very few things Global Methodists are unanimous about, but this is one: between the general church and the local church, the local church is the main character. Jesus, of course, is the main character of everything.

59 to 0

I asked what legislation Bill is proudest of. From his committee, it was the Articles of Faith. The whole time, he was remembering conversations from our disaffiliation season about what mattered most. The committee spent more than a day on the articles, and the language on inerrancy was the most discussed part. The committee vote was unanimous, 59 to 0.

“I felt like we ended at a place where it’s not ambiguous wording in my mind and it remains very focused on the Word and focused on truth... without a lot of subject-to-interpretation type things within it.”

On the floor there was one amendment, made by Paul Lawler, which Bill thought got the wording right. The articles passed with one no vote, and Bill agrees with what most people said at the time: that vote was probably a mistake.

No campaigning

There was a lot of concern that bishop elections would slide back into the politicking of the United Methodist Church. Bill felt we maintained our righteousness and that God led us to the people we elected. Lyndol Loyd sat in the row in front of him all week. They talked several times, and Bill never knew he was a candidate for bishop. A young woman Bill talked with during breaks turned out to be his daughter, and she never once mentioned it. Jerry Kulah was the same. “You would have never known that he was up to be elected for bishop.”

What to watch, and how to pray

We won’t gather as a whole church again for six years; until then the Connectional Council will handle what comes up. I asked Bill whether anything concerns him enough to pray about it for six years. He pointed to the petitions on abortion and marriage that were pulled off the consent agenda on the last day. “I think there is at least one conference that might be in a different kind of place than most others,” he said, and we need to be prayerful and keep our eyes on it.

Last, I asked how people watching should pray for our new covenant body:

“I think that the prayer now needs to be that the work’s been done. It’s out there. I think the work is pleasing to God... We need to pray that the churches locally will take this and will really understand it... It’s one thing to say it and it’s one thing to put it together as, yeah, here’s our blueprint. Execution is where we’re either gonna be really successful or we’re gonna be just kind of muddling along.”

The proof is in the pudding. Bill and I are going to be working that out together, on the ground, here in Yazoo City.

We closed in prayer for the Global Methodist Church: for her leadership on the Connectional Council, for the persecuted parts of our church, for those of us in comfortable places, and that our local churches would spread scriptural holiness across the globe.

Thank you, Bill. When he spoke in worship, he said he has a face for radio. I think he’ll feel differently after this. Please pray for the Yazoo City church. Like every church we have our issues, but we have wonderful things going on as well.CHAPTERS0:00 Introduction3:32 Bill's roots at First Methodist Yazoo City5:56 Preparing as a delegation11:54 Legislative committee: the Holy Spirit or social pressure?19:59 Long days in Johannesburg23:18 Building ties with the Philippines28:37 Bishop Luther Oconer31:38 Plenary sessions, worship, and the last day39:40 Same Jesus: Kulah, Belarus, and the persecuted church46:03 Rural churches in a global church51:42 Articles of Faith and electing bishops57:40 Concerns and prayer for the GMCMENTIONED IN THIS CONVERSATIONDelegation Chair Interview - Gabriella Kopas:

Considering Johannesburg - "Our Sacraments" - Panel 4:

Understanding the Philippine Context, Walking in the Spirit - A Conversation with Luther Oconer:

Perspective on the Episcopacy - Bishop Scott Jones:

A Bishop on the Topic of Bishops - A Conversation with Jeff Greenway:

Spiritual Warfare in Liberia - A Conversation with Jerry Kulah:

SUPPORT PLAINSPOKENSubstack: https://plainspokenpod.substack.comSubstack (Jeffrey Rickman): https://jeffreyrickman.substack.comLocals: https://plainspoken.locals.com#GlobalMethodist #GeneralConference #Methodist

The free discussion guide is here: [GUIDE LINK]. If you missed Episode 1, on marriage, divorce and remarriage, it’s here: [EP01 LINK].

Not a Word I Disagree With

On the last day of the 2026 General Conference, Lori Rowe, a lay delegate from Florida, walked to microphone three to speak against an amendment. Her first words were, “There’s not a word that I disagree with in the substitute amendment.”

Her objection wasn’t to anything the amendment in front of her said. It was to what it replaced. And that’s this whole story in a sentence.

Petition 1127 rewrote the Global Methodist Church’s statement on sexual sin and added its first explicit statement on sex and gender identity. On the floor it took about ten minutes, and every argument that mattered was about what gets left out. What must a church say to a girl being told she might really be a boy? To frightened parents? To an adult who transitioned years ago and walks into your church next Sunday? And what must a church never forget to say?

This is a tender subject. Some of you love someone who has wrestled with gender dysphoria, or have wrestled with it yourselves. I’m going to tell you the truth as I understand it, the way Jesus would want it told to someone he loves, because he does love you.

Two Sentences and a Door

Our Social Witness, ¶302, is fourteen short statements, each a sentence or two with Scripture attached. We made it short on purpose, after decades of watching the United Methodist Social Principles grow into what Chappell Temple, this year’s Social Witness chair, called the quadrennial bloodletting. Changing it took a three-quarters vote, and whatever we wrote into ¶302 in Johannesburg will be very difficult to rewrite.

Here is ¶302.8 as the church adopted it in Costa Rica in 2024:

“We are saddened by all expressions of sexual behavior, including pornography, polygamy, and promiscuity, that do not recognize the sacred worth of each individual or that seek to exploit, abuse, objectify, or degrade others, or that represent less than God’s intentional design for his children. While affirming a scriptural view of sexuality and gender, we welcome all to experience the redemptive grace of Jesus and are committed to being a safe place of refuge, hospitality, and healing for any who may have experienced brokenness in their sexual lives.”

Two sentences. The first is a statement of sorrow; the second is a welcome. Twelve of the fourteen statements in ¶302 open with “We believe.” This one opened with “We are saddened,” the only one that tells the world how we feel.

It named three behaviors, a vice list like the ones in Scripture, and gave three tests for everything else. The word “gender” appeared once, undefined. Nothing about two sexes, transition or children. In 2024 that silence may have looked like restraint. By 2026 a good many of our people had decided it looked like somewhat of a negligent gap.

And it ended with the door open: “we welcome all to experience the redemptive grace of Jesus.” As the legislation developed, that language of welcome seemed to go missing.

Call Sin Sin

Five petitions were aimed squarely at ¶302.8, from Springfield Oaks in South Georgia, Jonathan Lee of the Upper Midwest, Stewart Kouba of Trinity and others, most wanting to name specific sins. I wish those had gotten more play; I think particularity is our friend. Of the four I could read, every one kept a statement of welcome.

Then there’s 1127, filed by David Watson of Allegheny West, who really needs no introduction. His rationale was blunt:

“As a church, we are not primarily interested in what makes us sad, but in identifying ethical and unethical forms of behavior. We identify immoral actions as sinful.”

Three aims, plainly stated: call sin sin; say there are two sexes and that sex and gender belong together; and deal with intersex conditions head on, so nobody can use them to argue the categories away. This was all very solid, and I appreciate Watson for it.

His petition changed the verb to “we recognize as sinful,” added sex slavery to the list, affirmed “there are two sexes,” and called intersex conditions “disordered” while valuing the person as the image of God. It called transition “morally wrong” for adults and “physical child abuse” for minors. And it closed with a sharper welcome than 2024’s, naming “those with gender dysphoria and same-sex attraction.”

I filed Petition 1457, a statement under ¶302.9 on biblical anthropology: that all persons are created by God in his image as male and female, and that human identity isn’t defined by fallen desires, inclinations or temptations but by redemption and sanctification in Christ. The committee voted not to approve it, 40–0 with one abstention. So now you know where I stand, and you know I lost.

Thirty-Six to Three

The Social Witness committee supported 1127 as amended, 36–3–0 (Daily Journal, Wed 2 Sep, p. 40). It added adultery and pedophilia to the list. Good. It struck the “physical child abuse” sentence. I think that’s regrettable. And it added a paragraph opposing “practices, policies, or interventions that encourage or assist minors in seeking to alter their God given sex through social, medical, or surgical transition”: narrower, with no word about adults, but wider, reaching social transition and policies.

One thing isn’t marked at all. The petition’s third paragraph, welcome and Scripture references included, simply isn’t there, not struck through, just absent. When Temple presented it on the floor he seemed to indicate it was supposed to be there, but I still found myself confused.

At 92 percent in committee, 1127 went on a consent agenda, to be adopted without debate. On Thursday, Bella Duke of Mid-Texas and ten delegates pulled it off, and it waited two days.

Ten Minutes

Saturday was the last day of legislation. Brad Folsom of South Georgia moved to cut debate to two speeches each way, two minutes apiece, and the body, tired and watching the clock, chose speed. An hour later Temple brought 1127 to the floor, read something close to the missing welcome, and called on Susan Kent of Trinity, who had a substitute “which will simplify this whole petition.” Kent kept “We believe,” the word “sinful,” and the welcome and Scripture references, but left out everything specific: no named behaviors, not even pornography; no marriage; no two sexes; nothing on minors. Her text, she said, “does not define our Christian ethics by a list of prohibited behavior, but roots it in God’s design of humanity.”

To my mind, given the myriad vice lists found in our very Scriptures, Kent’s proposal was decidedly unscriptural.

Lori Rowe’s reply was the mirror image. She agreed with every word of the substitute; her objection was its silence, above all about children. “We have children who are being asked to reject their sex by their peers, by their schools, by people online. This is being done without consent or knowledge of parents.” She asked for “unmistakable condemnation of these practices.” Practices, notice: not children, not parents.

The substitute failed on a show of hands, and I’m very glad for it. No one spoke for or against 1127 itself; the chair went straight to the ballot. The hall screen put up the count: 308 yes, 41 no, about 88 percent, well past the three-quarters it needed.

Then Temple took the microphone: “Many of us have been working on this issue for more than 40 years. … You’ve made my last rodeo my best one.” Anyone who lived through the long Methodist argument over sexuality, from 1972 to the division that gave us the Global Methodist Church, heard relief in that. The church was finally saying out loud what it has always believed.

What the Book Says Now

As printed, the adopted text calls sinful all sexual behavior that exploits, abuses, objectifies or degrades, naming adultery, pedophilia, pornography, polygamy, promiscuity and sex slavery; grounds our ethic in God’s design of us “as males and females” and in marriage between one man and one woman; affirms “there are two sexes”; calls intersex conditions “disordered” while valuing the person “as imago Dei”; and opposes transition for minors. It has no Scripture references and no welcome.

It doesn’t call experiencing gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction a sin; its list of sins is a list of behaviors. It says nothing about adults who have transitioned, and it sets no rule for membership; ¶302 is a witness, not a rulebook.

Which leaves real questions. Will the welcome be in the published 2026 Discipline? (I’m fairly confident it will.) What does “social transition” mean for youth ministers on the front lines with young people caught up in sexual critical theory? We came out of a body obsessed with activism; to what degree will GMC churches engage the public on these “policies,” if at all? How do we receive the adult who has already transitioned? (On that, I’d recommend the Institute on Religion and Democracy’s panel The Church and Gender Ideology with KathyGrace Duncan. And on what’s happening among our young people and in our legislatures, my conversation with January Littlejohn.) And Temple’s own question from Thursday: will it play in Paris, Panama, Kenya and Nepal? Is this crisis really as unique to the West as we think?

Male and Female Created He Them

I believe the heart of what the church adopted is true. God made us male and female, and our bodies are not costumes worn over some truer self hidden inside. The very first thing Scripture tells us about human beings is this:

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27)

When Jesus was asked about marriage, he went straight back to that verse: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4). The Lord of the church treated the two sexes as part of the foundation, not an arrangement we’re free to renegotiate. I don’t think we should apologize for saying it. A church that can’t say what a human being is won’t be able to say much about how a human being is saved.

The Groaning Body

But for a growing number of families this isn’t a theoretical debate. It’s tempting to believe that participating in someone’s delusion might bring them peace, and we do desire peace for people. Gender dysphoria is real. The distress is real. If you’ve ever sat with someone at war with their own body, you know it isn’t something to laugh at. It’s something to weep with.

The Bible isn’t embarrassed by bodies that hurt. Paul, who had his own thorn in the flesh, wrote:

“For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” (Romans 8:22–23)

Christians groan in their bodies, all of us. The Christian hope for a body at war with itself is not a better body of our own making; it’s the redemption of the body God gave us, in the resurrection.

But it isn’t only a future hope. Salvation is a present reality, which is why I wish the General Conference had adopted my legislation. The peace we desire and offer is found not in ourselves but in the person, work and mind of Christ. By the power of the Holy Spirit we can be freed from this confusion and our bent toward sinning. I wish a body so confident about the power of the Holy Ghost had said so plainly. These are hard words to bring to someone in pain, but they aren’t cruel, because they’re true, and they’re the same hope I hold for my own disordered heart.

The Norm and the Exception

The sentence I expect will hurt the most calls intersex conditions “disordered.” In Christian theology that doesn’t mean disgusting, guilty or sinful. It means something isn’t working the way it was made to work, because we live in a fallen world. By that definition my eyes are disordered; I’m wearing contact lenses. My heart is disordered, and so is yours. In the same conversation where Jesus said God made them male and female, he said this:

“For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.” (Matthew 19:12)

He names the norm, and then names people whose bodies don’t fit it, some from birth. The exception doesn’t erase the norm. And God’s word to such people, long before Jesus, was astonishing:

“For thus saith the LORD unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, and choose the things that please me, and take hold of my covenant; Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters.” (Isaiah 56:4–5)

If the Global Methodist Church is going to say “disordered,” we had better say it the way God says it, with a place and a name attached, and knowing it’s true of us too.

The Little Ones

I support what the church said about children. The loving thing is to walk with a distressed child patiently, with good counsel and the parents at the center, not to start a child down a road of drugs and surgery that may not be reversible. That’s no longer a fringe view. England, among others, has pulled back sharply on puberty blockers for minors.

I’m disappointed the committee struck “physical child abuse.” Many parents went down that road because they were terrified, bullied and pressured by “experts” who asked, “Would you rather have a living child of the opposite sex, or a dead child?” To shrink now from calling the travesty of sex transition what it was is a failure of the church to name what has taken place. Parents who gave in need to repent. Comfort without repentance is its own cruelty; it cannot absolve unconfessed guilt.

But I’m glad the new text reaches past medicine to social transition. We aren’t only concerned about bodies but about the mistaken beliefs within them. The Scriptures warn:

“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.” (Deuteronomy 22:5)

Do we have the clarity to explain why? Those words will land in real homes and real youth rooms, and we’ll need a great deal of wisdom about what they ask of a teenager, a parent and a youth pastor. Jesus was stern with anyone who got between him and a child:

“But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:14)

Our first job with a struggling child isn’t to win an argument. It’s to make sure nothing we do keeps that child from Jesus.

And Such Were Some of You

The Scripture this paragraph cited in 2024, First Corinthians 6, doesn’t stop at its hard list of sins in verses 9 and 10. Then Paul writes this:

“And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” (1 Corinthians 6:11)

That verse is the whole gospel in a sentence. It tells the truth about sin and the truth about grace, and the Scriptures don’t let us separate them. Methodists have always known this. Wesley’s societies weren’t clubs for the already holy. The General Rules asked one condition of those who wanted to join: “a desire to flee from the wrath to come, and to be saved from their sins.” That door was the point. So long as people were willing to walk through it and take up their cross every day, they always had a place among us.

This shouldn’t be hard. We preach the truth about sin and repentance, and anyone the Spirit empowers to receive that word and turn has a place in God’s church, however strange by the world’s standards. We’re a peculiar people anyway:

“But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” (1 Peter 2:9)

Chappell Temple called this his last rodeo, and his best. I’m glad for a church that finally says plainly what it believes. Until next time, speak the truth in love, and “grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ” (Ephesians 4:15).

Go deeper

• Watch Episode 2 of Considering Johannesburg:

• Download the free discussion guide (both texts side by side, the Kent substitute, the floor arguments in the delegates’ own words, Scripture, and questions): [GUIDE LINK]

• Primary sources: GC2026 petitions (Petition 1127, Petitions Report p. 70; Petition 1457, p. 72) · Workbook and Daily Journals (Daily Journal, Wed 2 Sep, pp. 40–41) · the GC2026 livestream, Thursday 3 and Saturday 5 September

• The Church and Gender Ideology, Institute on Religion and Democracy, with KathyGrace Duncan

• Trans Ideology, Our Children, & the Church: my conversation with January Littlejohn

Next time: protecting the unborn and the mother, Petition 1111, pulled from the same consent agenda that Thursday morning.

Considering Johannesburg, Episode 1. Watch the full episode here: [VIDEO LINK]. The free discussion guide is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1plegQvXTa_4jY96lgjwTejwcDuOSr5va/view?usp=sharing.

On the last morning of the 2026 General Conference, Rich Hoffman, a lay delegate from Allegheny West, told the Global Methodist Church, “In 345 pages, the words divorce and remarriage do not appear once. If what we leave unsaid shapes our witness, then this silence matters.”

He was right. Our book told the world who could marry. It never said a word about what happens when a marriage breaks. Every pastor reading this knows why that matters: every day we minister to people in the wreckage of divorce.

This is the first installment of Considering Johannesburg, eleven of the biggest changes our General Conference made, each followed from the language we inherited to the final product. Most of us will only ever hear the headline. I want you to see the words, the people, and the votes, and make up your own mind. For Thursday the 3rd and Saturday the 5th there are no published minutes, so the livestream is the only record.

Why it matters

Tim Reaves of North Carolina remembered what Stanley Hauerwas, his teacher at Duke Divinity School, said years ago: “we could not really deal with the issue of homosexuality until we have dealt with the issue of divorce.” Then Reaves added, “Folks, it is all on the same plane.”

That is self-evidently right. The questions about homosexuality that tore the United Methodist Church apart didn’t come from nowhere. They grew out of confusion about marriage, about sexuality, and about embodiment itself. What are these bodies? What is sexuality for? A church that won’t say plainly what marriage is will struggle to say anything clear and compelling about the rest.

The language we inherited

Paragraph 302 holds our Social Witness statements, which Chappell Temple, chair of the Social Witness committee, described as our effort “to corporately express our understanding of the character of God.” Number seven, as adopted in Costa Rica in 2024, reads in full:

“We believe that human sexuality is a gift of God that is to be affirmed as it is exercised within the legal and spiritual covenant of a loving and monogamous marriage between one man and one woman.”

Three citations follow: Exodus 20:14, Ephesians 5, and Matthew 19:3–9. Hold on to that last one. It is the passage where the Pharisees ask Jesus whether a man may put away his wife “for every cause.” The citation was there. The explicit language wasn’t.

That is new for Methodists. The United Methodist Social Principles most of us grew up with called divorce “a regrettable alternative in the midst of brokenness.” The Global Methodist Church wrote briefly, and on purpose. When you are already being slandered as the anti-gay church, a hard line on divorce only makes some people more squeamish.

The petition and the committee

Petition 1020 came from Jonathan Lee of Christ’s Community Church in the Upper Midwest (not the Jonathan Lee elected bishop). Our book, he wrote, “does not clearly state that homosexual practice—like all sexual activity outside biblical marriage—is sin that calls for repentance and transformation through the grace of Jesus Christ.” That is solid biblical language.

His text made the paragraph about marriage itself, “a lifelong covenant” between one man and one woman, added that “sexual intimacy belongs only within the covenant of marriage,” and closed with a sentence former United Methodists will recognize: all other forms of sexuality are “incompatible with the Bible and traditional Christian teachings.” Still nothing about divorce. The Matthew citation even got shorter, stopping at verse 6, just before Jesus is asked about Moses and the writing of divorcement.

The Social Witness committee struck that “therefore” sentence, the one that carried the petitioner’s purpose. The journal doesn’t say why. I think it was a mistake. It then supported the petition 35–1–0 (Daily Journal, Wed 2 Sep, p. 39), which put it on a consent agenda to pass without debate.

Divorce came up in that room. We know only because members said so later on the floor. Daniel Griswold: “there was a lot of resistance to talking about this at all.” Tim Reaves: “We really did struggle.” The committee chose to say nothing.

On Thursday Temple warned that after this conference, changing a Social Witness statement takes three-quarters of General Conference and then three-quarters of the annual conferences worldwide: “we need to get these witness statements right this time … no pressure there.” Hoffman and nine others pulled 1020 off the consent agenda, and it waited for Saturday.

Saturday: the floor

Up to then the conference had been euphoric. Those of us who raised concerns from afar were told we were resisting the Holy Spirit. What came next showed that our unity is not without some dissent.

Hoffman moved to add:

“In addition, we resist divorce and seek reconciliation wherever possible, recognizing divorce and remarriage only as permitted by scripture, while affirming the forgiveness, restoration, and full participation in the life of the church of those who have experienced divorce.”

He restored Matthew 19 through verse 9 and added Mark 10 and 1 Corinthians 7. “Our witness should not merely tell the world who can enter a marriage,” he said. “It should also tell the church what marriage calls us to become.” And: “None of us should ask the church to change, remove, or hide a biblical moral teaching simply because it intersects with our own history.”

Joy Hook of Great Lakes answered with an instinct we know from the mainline: “the book should be full of not what we resist, but what we’re for.” Jeremy Auvil of North Alabama, a child of divorce, said his parents were “more godly people outside of the marriage that they had committed to,” and urged us to “be careful of the things that we disavow.” Daniel Griswold of South Carolina went straight to the text: “Jesus does teach on divorce.” He does:

“He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.” (Matthew 19:8)

It sounded like exactly what it was: mainline Americans flinching at the prospect of recovering a disposition that corrects our culture. And one of the remarkable things about Johannesburg was watching the international delegations gently, but firmly, push the Americans back into our Bibles.

An amendment to the amendment

Matt O’Reilly of North Alabama rewrote Hoffman’s text:

“We recognize that divorce is always deeply grievous and encourage reconciliation as often as possible. We also recognize that scripture allows for divorce under certain circumstances and that reconciliation is not always possible.”

His reason deserves a hearing: “Those passages are incredibly complicated. And I would be hesitant to enshrine in the Book of Doctrines and Discipline anything that looks like a particular interpretation of those passages.” Gone were “only as permitted by scripture,” the word “remarriage,” and the promise of full participation. I preferred Hoffman’s version. O’Reilly’s was still better than silence.

Kathleen Engelman of Great Lakes, whom I have long appreciated as a solid believer, gave some of the most personal testimony of the week: “I was married for nine years, five months and 28 days … I truly am blessed to be divorced.” I thought Hoffman’s language was good, but it is right to consider her and the many people she represents.

Then came the speech I had been praying we’d hear in the GMC. Of twenty delegates who spoke on this petition, only Anbessu Feyissa of the Ethiopia Nazrawiyan Conference rose to say the language should be stronger: “we need stronger and clearer language regarding divorce.” He also spoke for the spouse who is left: “We should not hold the faithful spouse responsible for a decision they did not make and could not control.”

O’Reilly’s amendment passed 308–62. Eddie Bromley of my own Mississippi–West Tennessee Conference changed “as often as possible” to “whenever possible,” 319–37. Over Chris Gadlage’s objection that “We’re making a statement about divorce that I disagree that Scripture makes,” the amended Hoffman amendment passed 269–90.

Six more years?

Daniel Buck of Great Lakes moved to refer the petition to a commission. Reaves asked what that would cost: another six years. “We do not need to wait another six years before dealing with the issue of marriage and divorce,” he said.

The Africans would not have it. John Kalambo of Zambia: “Some of our people where we are coming from, Bishop, are unable to read what we are discussing here. They depend on us to explain to them what will come out of this.” Forbes Matonga of Zimbabwe recalled an old saying: “when you want to kill somebody [a petition], as a Methodist, create a commission.” And: “clarity is one of the things that are attracting people to us as GMC.”

I was greatly encouraged. Many of us feared the Americans would dominate this conference. That morning they didn’t, and because of that faithful witness, I believe, the referral failed.

Todd Chancey of the Mid-South split marriage and divorce into separate paragraphs; O’Reilly argued the divorce language belongs in ¶302.8, among the things we regret, because “saying less is more in this instance.” Jaimie Willis of Heartland tried to soften “always deeply grievous” to “can be deeply grievous,” and the chair ruled it already settled. I love Jaimie, but that felt like one more way to appease a softer Western concern. Then Jay Therrell of Florida moved the previous question, God bless him.

Petition 1020 as amended passed 329–41, 88.9 percent, clearing the three-fourths a Social Witness statement requires.

What the book says now

As best I can reconstruct it from the floor, ¶302.7 now reads:

“We affirm that marriage is God’s holy gift instituted by God in creation, affirmed by our Lord Jesus Christ, and intended as a lifelong covenant of mutual love, fidelity, and support between one man and one woman. Sexual intimacy belongs only within the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman.”

And, stated separately, words the 2024 book never had:

“We recognize that divorce is always deeply grievous and encourage reconciliation whenever possible. We also recognize that scripture allows for divorce under certain circumstances and that reconciliation is not always possible.”

“Legal,” “loving,” “monogamous,” and Hoffman’s promise of full participation are gone. And here is the irony in the title of this piece: the word “remarriage” still isn’t there. Our book says nothing about whether a divorced Christian may marry again. In this we still fall short of a more robust Methodism that once existed.

Which citations stand was raised twice and never settled. Where the divorce sentences sit was left to the secretary. Which “certain circumstances” qualify, the body chose not to say. Before I quote any of this as church law, I want to see it in the published 2026 Discipline, and I’ll update the discussion guide when it’s out.

From the beginning it was not so

Rich Hoffman was right about the silence. A church that tells the world who may marry, and then says nothing to its own people about what to do when a marriage goes wrong, has left its pastors to fend for themselves and its people to guess.

So what did Jesus say?

“The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away? He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.” (Matthew 19:3–9)

They ask him about Moses, and he takes them back behind Moses to Eden. The permission was real, but it was a concession to hard hearts. Griswold and Gadlage read these same verses on the floor and came to different places: two hermeneutics destined to clash again and again.

Jesus’ teaching on remarriage will make many cringe and turn away. The disciples felt it too: “If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry” (Matthew 19:10). When the church’s teaching on marriage makes nobody uncomfortable, we have probably stopped teaching what Jesus taught.

Paul speaks to both people in a broken marriage:

“And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, Let not the wife depart from her husband: But and if she depart, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband: and let not the husband put away his wife.” (1 Corinthians 7:10–11)

“But if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases: but God hath called us to peace.” (1 Corinthians 7:15)

Paul speaks to the one who was left, just as Anbessu Feyissa did. That is pastoral wisdom, and it is biblical.

Grateful and uneasy

So where do I land? Somewhere between grateful and uneasy.

Grateful, because “always deeply grievous” is true. I have never met a divorce that wasn’t. Research comparing children raised by widowed mothers with children raised by divorced mothers found the children of divorce doing worse as adults in education, work, and happiness.[1] It is a deep spiritual wound, and we should stop gaslighting people who describe it that way.

Uneasy, because “scripture allows for divorce under certain circumstances” is true, but it is the kind of true sentence that can carry freight nobody meant to put on it. It opens a big barn door. O’Reilly’s case was that saying less leaves room for pastors to shepherd, and he’s right. But I have been a pastor long enough to know that room can fill up with whatever the culture brings in.

Isn’t this what the United Methodist Church did, a little softening, a little room for local discernment? Part of me shares the worry. But this text doesn’t bless anything. It grieves, it calls for reconciliation, and it points back to Scripture and sends every pastor to go and read it. That is not a loophole.

Why say anything at all, then? Why not just say what we’re for? Because if the church’s witness is limited to what we can affirm, we miss half of the biblical witness, the half meant to pull down strongholds. Most of us came into the Global Methodist Church over its teaching on sexuality. If we hold that line and wink at divorce, the world will notice, and it will be right to.

One Methodist story, because it is ours. John Wesley’s marriage was a very unhappy one, and his wife left him more than once. On 23 January 1771 he wrote in his journal that she had set out for Newcastle “purposing ‘never to return,’” and added in Latin: Non eam reliqui; non dimisi; non revocabo. I did not leave her; I did not send her away; I will not call her back. He grieved. He did not divorce. He kept preaching.

That is what I want for us: a church that tells the truth about marriage, grieves every breaking of it, and fights for reconciliation even when it doesn’t seem realistic or possible. Clarity and grace, as Rich Hoffman said. I think Johannesburg gave us a little more of both.

What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. And where it has been put asunder, may the church be found faithful.

Go deeper

• Watch Episode 1 of Considering Johannesburg: [VIDEO LINK]

• Download the free discussion guide (old and new texts side by side, both sides in the delegates’ own words, Scripture, and questions for groups): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1plegQvXTa_4jY96lgjwTejwcDuOSr5va/view?usp=sharing

• Primary sources: GC2026 petitions (Petition 1020, Petitions Report p. 66) · Workbook and Daily Journals (Daily Journal, Wed 2 Sep, p. 39) · the GC2026 livestream, Thursday 3 and Saturday 5 September

• Wesley’s journal, 23 January 1771: CCEL

Next time: sex and gender identity, Petition 1127, pulled from the same consent agenda that same Thursday morning. After that, protecting the unborn and the mother, and then my own racial theology resolution.

[1] Timothy J. Biblarz and Greg Gottainer, “Family Structure and Children’s Success: A Comparison of Widowed and Divorced Single-Mother Families,” Journal of Marriage and Family 62, no. 2 (2000): 533–548. The authors suggest the families’ different positions in the social structure may account for much of the gap.

A couple of years ago, I did a series called ‘Considering Charlotte,’ which was a series of panels addressing the various developing issues around The United Methodist Church’s last General Conference. It was a good series in which I capitalized upon the insights of Lonnie Brooks, Odell Horne, Simon Mafunda, and Joe Dipaolo, as well as a few others.

With the General Conference of the Global Methodists approaching, I was asked by a few friends to facilitate a ‘Considering Johannesburg’ series (Johannesburg is where they will be meeting next week). Unfortunately, life didn’t afford a lot of time to be proactive in these things. I scheduled several panels for this one week to make up for my unfortunate lack of productivity in previous weeks.

Today’s stream frustratingly did not connect to the servers at Restream. That means it did not go out to YouTube, Facebook, Rumble, X, or Locals. I’m still not quite sure what happened. It only went out to YouTube in a vertical format.

This video is the horizontal format that nobody got to see live. It has the comments left by friends who tuned in.

A few folks have recently contacted me to ask about the podcast. Not much has gone out on Apple Podcasts or Spotify for a while. That is because that audio comes from this Substack, and I don’t upload everything I do here. Rather, if you want to see everything I do, you need to go to YouTube and go to the ‘Live’ tab. I have produced several pieces of content each week for months. I’m sorry I haven’t done a better job of including everyone. I’m always anxious about annoying people.

Anyway, I have several other panels scheduled for this week. Make sure to join in as you’re able!

Methodists aren’t exactly famous for apologetics in the online space. While Reformed and independent voices dominate the conversation, Wesleyans have often stayed quiet. Is that a problem? Should we even try to enter the fray? And if we do, what should it look like?

In this collaborative conversation between Jeffrey Rickman (PlainSpoken) and Ed Rodarmel (Omni Methodist), we sit down with Rev. Todd Christine, author of Apologetics, Calmly Considered, to explore these questions.

Todd doesn’t present apologetics as intellectual combat or online sparring. Instead, he frames it as something that belongs inside discipleship — a practice that forms the apologist as much as it addresses the person on the other side of the conversation. Drawing from 1 Peter 3:15, he insists that any defense of the faith must be rooted in a life already marked by gentleness, reverence, and hope.

We talk about:

* What apologetics actually means (and why the word itself confuses people)

* The difference between apologetics and polemics

* Why the telos (the goal or end) of apologetics matters more than winning the argument

* How Wesleyan theology — with its emphasis on holiness, the means of grace, and prevenient grace — offers a distinctive approach

* Why truth is not merely a set of propositions but a Person

* How early church figures like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian modeled different postures in different contexts

* Why many young people leave the faith in college — and what churches (and parents) can do about it

Todd is especially passionate about the next generation. After discovering the scarcity of Wesleyan resources on the subject, he restructured his church’s entire educational program to include apologetics from first grade through adulthood. He also helped launch a conference summer camp centered on the topic — and the fruit has been striking.

The conversation stays warm, thoughtful, and pastoral rather than combative. If you’ve ever wondered whether Methodists have something unique to offer in the realm of defending and explaining the faith, this episode will give you plenty to chew on.

Where to get the bookApologetics, Calmly Considered is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Westbowpress.com. It includes a small group study guide in the back, making it useful for churches, leadership teams, and parents who want to engage the material together.

Westbow Link - https://www.westbowpress.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/875167-apologetics-calmly-considered

The conversation centers on the theological and moral stakes of abortion, framed primarily through the lens of Joel Webb’s experience as a Free Methodist clergy member working four days a week at Spero Pregnancy Center in Port Huron, Michigan. Webb, a dual Canadian-American citizen who grew up as a theological minority in a politically liberal country, traces his commitment to the pro-life cause back to a foundational conviction: that human life is sacred from conception to natural death, and that every other moral and social question presupposes that someone is alive to ask it. He draws a direct line from Canada’s increasingly permissive approach to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) — now accounting for 5.1% of annual deaths in Canada — back to the same secular materialism that underlies abortion, arguing that a culture which does not value life at its beginning will not value it at its end either.

A substantial portion of the conversation addresses the practical and pastoral dimensions of the issue. Webb pushes back on the idea that abortion is a “women’s issue” from which men should recuse themselves, arguing that a father’s presence and commitment is actually the single greatest factor in whether a woman chooses life — a point illustrated by a client case in which a couple nearly chose abortion simply because each assumed the other wanted it. He also challenges the tendency of churches to avoid the topic out of a desire not to offend, characterizing this as an abdication of pastoral responsibility. At the same time, he insists that preaching against abortion and extending grace to those who have had one must go hand in hand — that abortion is not an unforgivable sin, and that post-abortive men and women carry real grief that the church has a responsibility to address.

The conversation closes with practical direction for listeners: connect with and financially support your local pregnancy resource center, volunteer, and pray. Webb emphasizes that most pregnancy resource centers are entirely donor-funded precisely so they can retain the freedom to share the gospel with clients. He frames these centers not merely as social services but as front-line missionary outposts in communities, meeting people at one of the most consequential decision points of their lives.

Resources

* Spero Pregnancy Center (Port Huron, Michigan) — Joel Webb’s workplace; www.bluewaterbabies.org

* joelvwebb.com — Joel Webb’s personal website where he writes and publishes

* Free Methodist Church in Canada (FMCIC) — produced a five-part video study series called Dying Well, addressing end-of-life care and Medical Assistance in Dying

* Live Action — produces educational videos including the Baby Olivia and Baby Oliver animated fetal development videos, as well as abortion procedure videos narrated by former abortion providers; liveaction.org

* Choice42 — Canadian YouTube channel producing pro-life content, including videos on the dangers of mail-order abortion pills and the link between abortion and vaccine/medical research

* Love Life — ministry operating sidewalk missionaries outside abortion clinics and organizing “houses of refuge” churches to receive and disciple women who choose life; lovelife.org

* Heartbeat International — national/international pregnancy center affiliation providing training, resources, and connection; heartbeatinternational.org

* CareNet — second major national/international pregnancy center affiliation with resources for individuals and churches; care-net.org

On Friday, April 24, I hosted Chris Lohrstorfer, Richie Clark, Tim Prather, and Daniel Rickman for another panel on the recent Articles of Faith document.Unfortunately a storm happened to be rolling through at the same time. Lightning struck early into the panel, and the Internet connection cut out afterwards, ending the live stream. However, the panel continued without me, and I was able to join them again a couple of minutes later through my phone's tethering function. I recorded the rest of the session, which a lot of you are going to find very interesting.

The two primary topics unique to this conversation, which the other panels haven't covered, dealt with sacramental theology around baptism, and the unpardonable sin. Richie Clark led the way mostly, with good thoughts from the other three. Chris made good points dealing with replicating Wesley's emphasis when dealing with the problem of sin. Tim brought us, multiple times, to the primary concern of how we are inculcating the next generation of believers. Daniel did a great job helping us to focus on the function of this document.I hope you enjoy this. It was a worthy time that I hope adds to the richness of the conversation going on right now in the Wesleyan expression of the Christian faith.——————————— If you would like to join my Locals community to help support this ministry, go to plainspoken.locals.com and become a supporter!If you would like to subscribe to my pastoral Substack, where I publish articles on topics pertaining to pastoral ministry and Methodism, you can go to jeffreyrickman.substack.com.If you would like to subscribe to the PlainSpoken Podcast Substack, where I publish articles, video, and audio pertaining to Methodism and the culture war, you can go to plainspokenpod.substack.com.

In the Chiles v. Salazar US Supreme Court case, the First Amendment was put on trial. Can therapists be constrained to only allow one ideology in their sessions? Can they be restricted from articulating the Christian worldview? A recent decision has reasserted the prerogative of therapists to determine how to help their own clients.

But is therapy as helpful as we often think? I'm not so sure. Debra and I spend a while talking about these things for your benefit. Consider her voice as you continue to try to navigate our culture's very strange and often harmful ideologies around sexual orientation and gender identity. She is a mature and capable voice who will continue to help us to grow up.

For the list of questions for higher education, consider her resource: https://resources4redemption.substack.com/p/alignment-questions-for-christian?utm_source=publication-search

For the Stop It skit with Bob Newhart (my recommendation), check out:

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If you would like to join my Locals community to help support this ministry, go to plainspoken.locals.com and become a supporter!

If you would like to subscribe to my pastoral Substack, where I publish articles on topics pertaining to pastoral ministry and Methodism, you can go to jeffreyrickman.substack.com.

If you would like to subscribe to the PlainSpoken Podcast Substack, where I publish articles, video, and audio pertaining to Methodism and the culture war, you can go to plainspokenpod.substack.com.

Timothy Reaves is the head pastor at Pine Valley Methodist Church in Wilmington, North Carolina. He is the Presiding Elder of his district and a delegate to the upcoming General Conference of the Global Methodist Church. He is engaged on the ground floor and in the higher levels of Global Methodist ministry.Tim has had the joy of overseeing an area in which there is a good deal of dynamism and growth. His vantage point gives him an informed perspective on what God is doing with the people called Methodist.In our conversation, we talk about his background in the church, his means of assessing fruitfulness, those practices and beliefs that have borne fruit in his midst, and what he is praying about as General Conference approaches.

To check out Tim's church, go to https://www.pvmc.life/

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If you would like to join my Locals community to help support this ministry, go to plainspoken.locals.com and become a supporter!If you would like to subscribe to my pastoral Substack, where I publish articles on topics pertaining to pastoral ministry and Methodism, you can go to jeffreyrickman.substack.com.If you would like to subscribe to the PlainSpoken Podcast Substack, where I publish articles, video, and audio pertaining to Methodism and the culture war, you can go to plainspokenpod.substack.com.