Is There a Way Forward for Methodists?

As The United Methodist Church continues its struggles over issues related to homosexuality, perhaps we would do well to recall other such times in church history. All of our creeds, for example, the historic Apostles and Nicaean Creeds, were wrought by hard comprise. The sides were so bitterly divided that some condemned others to hell, while some simply murdered and maimed their adversaries. The creeds themselves totally satisfied no one, but all memory of conflict has slid into oblivion. In fact when we recite one creed or another during worship, the vast majority of the congregation neither knows nor cares how the words came to be; they just are. Only church historians remember that new words were coined to accommodate the reality of the Trinity, which is itself a non-biblical word. We too must find a way to comprise, even if we have to invent new words.