Professor Rex Matthews on Decision 1032

Scrambies has received a paper by Candler School of Theology [Visiting} Professor Rex Matthews titled "Why [United Methodist] Judicial Council Decision 1032 Must Be Reversed or Overturned" (PDF). (Candler is affiliated with Emory University in Atlanta.) Decision 1032, issued last Monday, was responsible for reinstating a UM pastor who had been suspended for denying membership to an openly gay parishioner. The decision declares that “the pastor in charge of a United Methodist church or charge is solely responsible for making the determination of a person’s readiness to receive the vows of membership,” a notion that Matthews contests and argues is inconsistent with the UM Book of Discipline. Matthews writes:

Paragraph 217 [of the Discipline] specifies the vows that anyone desiring to become a professing member of The United Methodist Church must publicly affirm. . . . The language of the introductory statement leading up to the vows clearly focuses on the persons who are making those vows: they profess their faith, they make known their desire to live as disciples, they enter into covenant to keep the vows that they are making. And with whom do they enter into covenant? “They covenant together with God and with the members of the local church.” The pastor acts as an agent in the making of this covenant, but is not a party to it. The covenant is made by the individual with God and the church, under the conditions specified by the church. Nothing in the language of 217 suggests that a person entering into this covenant relationship with God and the church must previously have satisfied the pastor in charge of their “readiness” to do so.