DavidPersons

• "Any person who seeks to associate or take membership with the UMC, or any organization for that fact, must first understand its doctrine and FULLY accept it as it stands before agreeing to make a declaration as such."

Ms. Merritt, while I agree with you about SMU hosting the Bush Presidential Library being somewhat akin to the Holocaust Museum hosting a Klan fund raiser, I have to seriously disagree with what you said above about the necessity, or even the value, of blind conformity.

Let me quote Mr. Wesley himself in arguing that we do not have to agree with, not accept, everything that our Church says or does. One of the things that makes the United Methodist Church, and the Methodist movement throughout its history, so strong and such a powerful witness and influence is its ability to host many different views and opinions while still standing for Christ in a meaningful and powerful way. Wesley was right profoundly correct, and prophetic, in saying that our strength lies in understanding that we must have "in the essentials unity, in the non-essentials diversity, and in all things love". That pretty much says it all. While it is an important discussion regarding whether or not President Bush's library ultimately winds up at SMU, or for that matter at the Junior College of Guam, is simply not an essential. How we decide about the issue is an essential, for it is in our connectional process that our strength, and our future, lies. It is how we discover God's will and plan for our Connection, it is how we empower our many ministries and the work we do, and it is how we will face the future together as Christians called by God to transform the world. That future is ours, unless we lose our way by worrying more about whose library goes where, or who chooses to fall in love with whom, or who "wins" and who "loses". If God wins we all do. God wins by our focusing on the essentials, and accepting the diversity of the rest - the rest that God also created, and loves.

The United Methodist Church, of which I am a proudly serving pastor, needs to begin to realize that the message of Jesus Christ was not to be politically correct, or even politically victorious - it was to transform and the lives of every one of its people, so that they may transform the lives of all that they encounter. Even Mr. Kelly. People and love for them is the essential - policies are not.