The New Holy Clubs: Testing Church-to-Sect Propositions

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2001 by Roger Finke, Rodney Stark

TENSION AND ORGANIZATIONAL GROWTH

The California-Nevada Conference offers an opportunity to identify pastors pressing for less tension with the secular society and those who are seeking more. Long before the same-sex wedding in Sacramento was held, each side organized for battle. The stage was set back in 1996 when the United Methodist Church's top legislative body added a statement to their Social Principles stating: "Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches." In September of 1997, Methodist pastor Jimmy Creech performed a union for two women in Omaha, Nebraska and was narrowly acquitted by the church on March 13, 1998. Then on October 17, 1998, two prominent lay leaders from the California-Nevada Conference announced that they would be married at St. Mark's Methodist Church. The two women, along with their many supporters, offered this as an opportunity to celebrate their union and to challenge the existing policies of the United Methodist Church. They in vited United Methodist pastors to show support for gay and lesbian marriages by serving as co-officiants at the wedding, whether in person or in absentia. [2]

The Confessing Movement and the Good News Movement were equally clear in their opposition to this union. A series of statements were released, but the most attention was given to a press conference held the day before the wedding by the Evangelical Renewal Fellowship (ERF), an informal fellowship of evangelical pastors and laity loosely aligned with the Confessing Movement. The president of the ERF described the couple as his friends, and asked fellow evangelicals not to disrupt the ceremony, but he was unequivocal in his opposition to the wedding, calling the relationship a sin and citing the Bible and the United Methodist's Book of Discipline as the foundations for his opposition.

These series of events placed the conference pastors into two distinct camps: pastors siding with the Evangelical Renewal Fellowship and seeking more tension, and pastors supporting same-sex marriages and seeking less tension -- a large additional group includes those who did not commit to either side. Obtaining lists for each side of the battle was relatively easy. Following the marriage ceremony, Affirmation, an organization of United Methodists for gay, lesbian and bisexual concerns, used their web site to post the names of the 167 clergy serving as co-officiants at the wedding (www.umaffirm.org). Of this list, 92 clergy were from the California-Nevada Conference. As for the evangelical clergy, the Confessing Movement gave us a list of 109 California-Nevada Conference clergy who were members of the Evangelical Renewal Fellowship. There was no overlap between the two lists.

We then turned to the General Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the United Methodist Church, an annual publication reporting on every church and pastor in the denomination, to identify each pastor's appointment. Because the lists were from 1999, and the most recently published General Minutes was from 1997, a few of the clergy were located in different conferences or were not in the 1997 Minutes. [3] We only selected the pastors who were listed in the California-Nevada conference in the 1997 Minutes. In the end, we were able to locate 88 of the 109 evangelical pastors and 84 of the 92 officiant pastors from the local conference. The vast majority of the conference pastors, 589, were not identified with either side.