c. 1996 Religion News Service
DENVER (RNS)-In a speech laced with references to Jesus, John Wesley and her recent book,”It Takes A Village,”Hillary Rodham Clinton Wednesday (April 24) told United Methodists to take their faith out into the world but warned that the world”is complex … and maybe hostile.” The First Lady’s 31-minute speech to the nearly 1,000 delegates and 3,000 visitors attending the denomination’s 10-day General Conference, was interrupted by applause a dozen times. She received standing ovations at both the beginning and end of her talk.”One of the reasons I’m a Methodist is because I believe disagreements are a part of life,”Mrs. Clinton said in an oblique reference to a host of disputes such as homosexuality and the role of the church in the world that have divided the denomination for two decades.
Mrs. Clinton listed a number of social issues the delegates have been dealing with over the past week, including access to health care, smoking, marriage and the needs of children, saying their agenda resembled that of the president.
In a speech that moved back and forth between personal salvation and the need for social action in the world, Mrs. Clinton called on all Americans to exhibit the virtues of humility, forebearance and patience.”We should act on the outside of church the way we try to act on the inside,”she said.
Immediately after her speech, the meeting was scheduled to turn to what has emerged as the most volatile issue confronting the denomination-homosexuality.
Delegates were to debate two contradictory proposals on the issue. One would drop the church’s statement that homosexuality is”incompatible with Christian teaching.”The other would reassert the church’s current ban on the ordination of homosexuals.
In business Tuesday evening, delegates overwhelmingly approved a proposal that could lead to the eventual merger of the predominantly white denomination with three sister Methodist bodies that separated from it largely on issues of race.
By a vote of 767 to 45, delegates agreed to create a Commission on Pan-Methodist Union with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.
The commission, with six members from each of the four denominations, will bring a plan of union to the next general conference of each body. The United Methodists meet again in 2000.
If implemented, the merger would create a denomination of 14 million members in 50,000 congregations.
American Methodism began in the United States in 1784 with the organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the forerunner of the United Methodist Church.
Early on, however, the movement was split over racial issues.
In 1796, dissident black members of a New York congregation, upset over restrictions placed on them in worship and the failure of the denomination to ordain blacks as clergy, left the church and formed the African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination, which now has 1.2 million members.
The African Methodist Episcopal Church, with 3.5 million members, traces its origins to 1787, when black church members withdrew from a congregation after former slave Richard Allen was forced to move to the balcony during a prayer service. The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church began in Tennessee in 1870 in an effort to meet the needs of blacks in post-Civil War America.
Final action on any plan of union, however, is not expected before the year 2002.
Bishop Melvin Talbert, secretary of the United Methodist Council of Bishops, told the meeting that merger is at least a dozen years away.
Bishop Thomas L. Hoyt Jr. of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church said that if the merger is going to work, the predominantly white United Methodist Church must be willing to share power in the church’s hierarchy and incorporate black styles of worship in church life.
JC END RABEY
