Bishop Connie Mitchell Shelton and ‘Mean Spirited Arrogance’.

As you may be aware, a video is circulating featuring Bishop Connie Mitchell Shelton of the UMC North Carolina Conference. Many UMC and other Christians in general are quite taken aback by the language used to describe them and their faith. For your reference the video is posted below and the diatribe begins around the 8.30 mark.

Here is a transcript in part,

“From general agencies to local churches its time to risks, to take small steps towards God’s vision; instead of holding tightly to to self protection and preservation. I pray that we remove the harmful language around homosexuality from the book of discipline and that covenant love can be celebrated in marriage and our LBQT sisters & brothers called by God who have gifts & grace for ministry will be ordained in church. I long for the day that all who remain UMC and value our diversity will commit to lives of unity gifted by the Holy Spirit. No more Vilification, no more Demonisation, will we trust one another’s convictions? If not, then its time for those with mean spirited arrogance to move on and quit causing chaos in the meantime. When the UMC emerges from the general conference in 2024, may the Holy Spirit overwhelm us with a spirit of generosity…”.

I’d like to focus in on the judgement made on people by Bishop Connie that people who stand for the same Biblical Methodism that John and Charles Wesley founded, are “Mean Spirited and Arrogant”. This is a classic bait and switch technique used to demonise and mock people that disagree with them. Its openly dishonest and completely unacceptable conduct for a Bishop, or anyone on the payroll of the UMC to behave in that manner, its also openly hate speech against Evangelical Christians members of the UMC.

Still.., the 2024 UMC Conference will be an interesting one after the sheer number of UMC members and congregations that have decided to move on, – with their property and buildings transferred out of the UMC with them…

Its reasonable to suggest that the reason for much of the recent panic and hysteria amongst some of the liberal UMC leadership is the fact that they were completely unprepared for the sheer number of congregations who over recent weeks have been voting themselves out of the UMC and into the Global Methodist Church or other groups or gone non denominational.

I suspect they thought it would be a minor number of congregations that would be leaving. It turns out that they could not be more wrong and and that there are more and more meetings now being called across the country to vote on leaving or staying within the UMC. There is also a growing number of cases where the stay vote is won by people who may not even attend the local UMC church, the local UMC church then meets the following Sunday to discover that the percentage of people that voted leave are no longer there and their church is now no longer viable. Many groups of leave voters are being joined by others and new GMC congregations are also beginning across the nation.

The main issue for the liberal leadership of the UMC is that the congregations that are leaving en masse, are not taking the top heavy liberal leadership of the UMC with them. The generous salaries and stipends provided to liberal Bishops and others remain the responsibility of the UMC denomination and the congregations that remain with them. The Global Methodist Church are naturally appointing their own Evangelical members to take up their leadership positions.

People like Bishop Connie Shelton sadly live in their own fishbowl disconnected from reality. They repeat the same left wing politics and theology over and over so often that they become immersed in their own poison. The same people have no recognition of the fact that their Methodism has nothing at all in common with actual Methodism as founded by John and Charles Wesley or as practiced by the original Methodists.

There does however need to be a time of truth telling in the churches that choose to remain in the United Methodist Church. The Truth that needs to be told is that they have moved from being a Christian Church to a Unitarian Church. The theology as preached and practiced by the UMC leadership has far more in common with the Unitarian Universalist Church than the Methodist Church. An appropriate and honest response for the UMC at the 2024 Conference would be to take a vote to Amalgamate and be United with the Unitarian Universalist Church and be called the United Unitarian Church where they can be genuinely United in vision and doctrine with one another as both liberal denominations simply continue to decline to oblivion..