Repent, Pray, and Stand for the UMC No matter your position of influence in the United Methodist Church, your hope in Christ is needed now. Today the Wesley Covenant Association's Unashamed conference was held. As the watering hole of the fractured,...

After a long chain of events, ultimately all of us are responsible for this wrenching halt in the work of God’s Kingdom through the UMC. I am responsible for this mess, and I am required to fight at my expense to see God graciously pick up the pieces and make something beautiful, whole, and useful again. Being a disciple of Jesus Christ is inherently a leadership issue. Not many are calling for repentance because we’re not living holy lives ourselves. We must repent for taking actions to protect our interests and let collapse God’s interests in preventing the imminent demise of many people.

The key action to the UMC’s victory is not teaching “our side” better, but prayer and repentance. And the key issue of repentance in this battle in not for what we are as humans, but for leaderlessness of who we are individually and corporately in Christ.

We think that so long as the battles for our own souls are won, we can leave everyone else to God’s hands. But God has called His church to lay down our lives for those who don’t know Him yet. If our lives are truly secure as we say we believe they are, we can give up comforts and even our lives here on Earth so that others can come to God for themselves. That’s love.

We must be mustered. God must accomplish something different in each of us to know there is a war and to be called to enlist. Have you heard from God what is the next act of obedience He needs to finish this process in you?

If the UMC cannot clearly and lovingly put this issue to rest, then we’re not capable of doing anything else by God’s power. This crisis occurring in our own house where we have the most authority is elementary compared to the battles we’re born to win in the kingdom of darkness. Playtime is over. It’s time for Methodists to shout like David, “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?”

Cowardice is as much a sin as homosexuality. Running from battle is as much a sin as murder. “Whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys.” Poor stewardship of our leadership responsibilities is equal to one who intentionally leads others astray.

…I stood up and shared my agreements with the ethos of the WCA, but then asked, “Why is the WCA preparing more for the breakup of the church than for victory?… It seems that our common spiritual enemy would be very pleased to see the noisy few kick out the faithful many. But Jesus Himself said that the gates of hell cannot prevail against His church. So if the United Methodist Church is a church of Jesus Christ, why is no one preparing for victory? Is not the UMC a church of Jesus?”

The Lord and His people will win the war in the end. But the sooner there is open warfare between light and darkness, the better the battle will go for the light.

“Open war is upon you, whether you would risk it or not.” – Aragorn, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

A salvific response to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the crisis of the church in our day demands a verbal declaration of the following principles from all of us leaders at all levels, whether privately with accountability and/or publicly with culpability, as the Spirit leads… [Application of declarations made from 1 and 2 Peter]