The difficulty of United Methodist doctrine

There's much being said about the kerfuffle in the United Methodist Church surrounding the LGBTQWERTY issues. There is a current defense of the denomination's current stand, based on Article 6 of the Articles of Religion, specifically the last phrase.  Of course, this opens a debate about what defines the "commandments which are called moral."

 Unfortunately, it's a legal argument, and only based on the Articles of Religion. Our Doctrinal Standards are those plus – and if we don't spend time processing how Wesley addressed the issue in the Sermons and Notes, I think we continue to wallow in a post-modernist personal deconstruction of what these words mean, since it worked so well in persuading each other in the meaning of the words of Scripture. (Yes, I'm frustrated. At myself, at the Church, at my fellow Christians… )


Of course, the problem with deferring to the Sermons and Notes for direction on this is that Wesley wasn't either exhaustive or organized in expressing himself. Therefore, the Sermons and Notes aren't reference works where we can look up a topic, rather they are best used as a hermeneutic lens whereby we see how to understand scripture. Which means we almost have to look broadly through them to begin to see as Wesley would see. (Which, of course, was the flaw of the Quadrilateral. It could be distilled down to four bullet points, which each of us got to deconstruct and then attach our own authoritative meaning to. Then we just found ten others who came up with roughly the same construct, which convinced us we were right.)


As a start, I think we would need to sit down together and commit to reading, processing, and discussing the following sermons: Sermon On The Mount (Discourse 5) (#25); The Original, Nature, Property, and Use of The Law (#34); and The Law Established Through Faith (both Discourse 1 and 2) (#'s 35 & 36). Along with this, I would suggest “On Preaching Christ”, a letter Wesley wrote in 1751 (found in Volume 11 of Works) and “Thoughts on Gospel Ministers”, an essay found in Volume 10 (Works). But that's just my list. I suspect the group would need to be open to reading other parts of Wesley, as well.


And the sixty-four trillion dollar question is, how would we do that? What size room would we need? How big would the table need to be? How many hours? Days? Would we require everybody to agree on a final consensus statement? As I read “Minutes Of Some Late Conversations” (Volume 8, Works)(No, not what is referred to as The Large Minutes. I'm not sure how others refer to these, but in my head I refer to them as the Doctrinal Minutes) I suspect that this is what we should be doing. This would be Holy Conferencing. But it would take way too much work. And, (here comes the Eeyore in me) it probably wouldn't work anyway. Never mind.