#GC2019 Day Three Summary

"It is better to be divided in truth than united in error."

That was a sentence spoken on the floor of General Conference today, and pretty much summarizes how things went.

There is a faction in the United Methodist Church, a faction that I am certain is a minority of the denominational membership but happens to be a majority of the General Conference delegates, that considers their own belief to be truth, with no room of for disagreement. And to this faction, it is more important to claim that your own interpretation is "truth" and stick to that, even if it inflicts pain and harm on others, than it is to compromise.

The votes were consistent throughout the day, each one a litmus test for the larger question. about 53-55% to about 45-47%, give or take. The larger question, of course being "Should the United Methodist Church include gay people fully in the life of the church or not?"

The faction that currently controls General Conference does not control the future of the church, of that I am quite certain. The future is inevitably bending toward justice. It is only a question of when.

With that said, I am no longer going to try to convince people to stay. The policies of the United Methodist Church are harmful, and if you have to leave, I have nothing but respect for that decision.

I am going to stay. This is my grandfather's church, and I am going to be a part of making it better, making it right, more just. I am going to help to renew the church in a way that would make him proud, focused on Jesus and grounded in the beautiful theology of John Wesley.

I am going to stay. This is my father's church, who devoted his entire career to speaking up for those who are oppressed. I feel like I am just getting started, already thinking about what to do in 2020 to advocate for the big tent diversity that so many of us consider a core principle of Methodism.

I am going to stay. This is my church, and I'm not going to give it away to people who cannot see how their interpretations of Scripture are causing such harm to so many people, my friends, my family. People unwilling to even entertain the notion that they may actually be wrong.

I am going to stay. This is my children's church, and by the time they are my age this won't even be a question any more, thank God. And so I want to make sure there's still something of a church left for them once we get to that point. No matter what happens, I want to be able to tell them that I did my best.

And I tried today. I had my name in the pool to speak for a long time, but never got called. There were a LOT of people in the line to speak in favor of the One Church Plan when the chair decided to allow a motion to call the question. A lot, and I was one of them.

For people who value diversity, today was awful, like getting the wind knocked out of you over and over again. Tomorrow promises to be the same. We are working against a deeply entrenched 53-55% of the delegates who are unwilling to yield, unwilling to say that their opinion may be wrong, unwilling to see things from anyone else's point of view.

We are working against a faction who believes that it is better to be divided in "truth," even when what they think is "truth" is not universally accepted as "truth," than it is to be together in "error," even when what they think is "error" is really just "disagreement."

Even so, I am going to stay. Not all of you will stay with me, and that's okay. Go if you have to; I understand. I get it. But I'm going to stay.

More tomorrow ... onward!