The affirming case at its strongest — welcome, love, sacred worth — and the Scripture that answers it.
The Church and the Christian Church • Part Three: The United Methodist Church • By the Virginia Christian Alliance Editorial Board
The Big Three
The United Methodist Church did not vote in a vacuum. It made a case — for welcome, for love, for the sacred worth of every person — and that case deserves its strongest hearing before Scripture answers it.
We grant what is true in it, and there is much: every person bears the image of God, the church’s welcome had grown hollow, and Christ did eat with sinners. But the case leaves one word out — the word Christ never left out.
A gospel that keeps the welcome and cuts the call to repentance is not a wider gospel. It is half a gospel, and half a gospel cannot save.
We have read the receipts, and we have read the redline. We have seen what the United Methodist Church did in 2024, and the exact words it struck to do it. What remains is the deepest question, and the fairest one: why.
Because the church did not believe it was doing evil. It believed it was doing good — righting a wrong, opening a door, loving people it had failed to love. And a watchman who will not hear the strongest form of what he opposes is no watchman; he is only a man shouting.
So before the Word answers, we will let the case be made — not the caricature of it, but the best of it, in the church’s own voice. Then we will lay it beside the one measure that outranks every General Conference that has ever met.
The Case They Made
Here is the argument, at full strength.
For decades the United Methodist Church greeted the world with three words: Open Hearts. Open Minds. Open Doors. And for decades, the affirming side says, those words were a lie the church told on itself — because the doors were not open. The Discipline barred them. A gay believer could hear “open doors” from the banner and read “not to be certified, ordained, or appointed” from the book in the same breath. The 2024 votes, on this telling, did not abandon the church’s word. They finally made it true.
The case rests on love, and it rests on Scripture too. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners. He touched the leper no one would touch. He let the sinful woman wash his feet while the religious men recoiled. The whole shape of his ministry was welcome to the excluded — and the church, for two thousand years, has been slow to follow him there. To keep a class of people from the table and the pulpit, the argument goes, is to side with the Pharisee against the Christ.
And it rests on worth. Every person is made in the image of God, of sacred and equal worth. To tell gay believers that their love made them “incompatible with Christian teaching” was, the affirming side says, to wound image-bearers in the name of God — and the wounds were not abstract. Families were divided. Young people left the faith, and some did not survive the leaving. Love does no wrong to a neighbor, Paul writes (Romans 13:10); and a teaching that harms, they conclude, cannot be the love of God.
That is the case. It is not a stupid case, and it is not made only by cynics. It is made by people who weep, who read their Bibles, who believe they are being kind. We will not pretend otherwise.
Where the Case Is Right
And on several points, it is right. We say so plainly, because truth is not partisan.
The church is right that every human being bears the image of God. Genesis settles it before any other question is asked: “So God created man in his own image… male and female he created him” (Genesis 1:27, ESV). The gay man and the gay woman are not lesser image-bearers. They are of the same infinite, God-stamped worth as the person writing these words and the person reading them. Any teaching that treated them as less than that was wrong, and the church was right to grieve it.
The church is right, too, that a hollow welcome is a real sin. A banner that says “open doors” over a bolted door is hypocrisy, and Christ reserved his hardest words for exactly that. And the church is right that Jesus welcomed sinners — scandalously, deliberately, to the fury of the respectable. He did.
Hold on to all of that, because none of it is what went wrong. What went wrong is a single omission — and it is the same omission every time.
The Word That Was Left Out
Jesus welcomed the woman they threw at his feet. The crowd wanted her stoned; he bent down and wrote in the dust and sent her accusers away one by one, until only he was left — the one man with the right to condemn her, choosing not to. “Neither do I condemn you,” he said. That is the welcome the affirming case remembers, and it is real.
But the sentence does not end there. “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more” (John 8:11, ESV). The welcome and the command are one breath. He did not stone her, and he did not tell her she was fine. He received her, and he called her out of the very thing she was received in.
That is the word the United Methodist Church left out. It kept “neither do I condemn you” and struck “go, and sin no more.” It kept the welcome and cut the summons. And a welcome that never calls anyone out of anything is not what Jesus offered the woman in the dust — it is only the crowd dispersing, with no one changed.
Paul says it without a blush. He lists the sins that keep a person from the kingdom — and homosexual practice is on the list, alongside greed, theft, drunkenness, and adultery, so that no reader can imagine one sin singled out. And then he says the most hopeful thing in the letter: “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified” (1 Corinthians 6:11, ESV). Such were some of you. The gospel does not leave people where it finds them. It washes them. The affirming case offers the washing to everyone except at the one point where it has decided the water is cruelty.
And still the plumb line hangs straight.
Two Loves, One Name
Everything now turns on a single word: love. The church invokes it, and Scripture commands it, so where is the quarrel? Not in whether to love. In what love is.
The Bible’s love is not the modern feeling that wants people comfortable. It is the fierce, self-giving will for another’s true good — and true good is defined by God, not by the one being loved. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:6). A love that will not warn is not a higher love; it is a coward’s love, or an indifferent one. The parent who watches a child walk toward the cliff and says nothing, so as not to upset him, does not love him more than the parent who cries out. He loves him less, or not at all.
This is why the “harm” argument, which is the strongest the affirming side has, finally fails. It is true that careless, loveless condemnation harms people, and the church should repent of every cruel word it ever spoke. But the deepest harm is not to wound a sinner’s feelings. It is to confirm a soul in the very thing that separates it from God, and to do it smiling, in his name. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20). To rename a sin as sacred and hand a person a lifetime in it — and to call that love — is not the absence of harm. It is harm with a liturgy.
And still the plumb line hangs straight.
When Experience Overrules the Word
How did a church that once knew all this come to forget it? Through a quiet reversal of authority.
Methodism has long spoken of four sources for its thinking — Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. But these were never four equal judges. Wesley held Scripture as the final court, and the church’s own doctrinal standards say so as plainly as words allow: “United Methodists share with other Christians the conviction that Scripture is the primary source and criterion for Christian doctrine” (United Methodist Theological Guidelines: Scripture). Primary. Criterion. The other three testify; Scripture rules.
What happened in 2024 was that a witness was promoted to judge. The lived experience of gay believers — real, sincere, often full of evident kindness — was set above the plain sense of the text, until experience was no longer testifying before the Word but overruling it. And the moment experience overrules Scripture, the plumb line has been taken down and the wall itself made the measure of true. A church can do that. But it can no longer claim the line while it does.
The Name They Kept, the Lord They Cut
Which brings us to the hardest thing this article must say, and we say it as warning, not as sentence — for the sentence is Christ’s to give, not ours.
The United Methodist Church did all of this in the name of Jesus. Welcoming, in his name. Including, in his name. Loving, in his name. And that is precisely the situation Christ himself warned could exist — a great deal done in his name by those he does not know. “On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not… do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you'” (Matthew 7:22–23, ESV). The invoking of the name is not the knowing of the Lord. He said so.
A Church of the Culture
Scripture has a name for a faith that keeps the profession and drops the obedience. “They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works” (Titus 1:16, ESV). And another for a religion that keeps the shape and loses the substance: “having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power” (2 Timothy 3:5, ESV). This is the anatomy of a church that has become a church of the culture. It keeps the cross on the building and the name on the sign. It keeps the welcome, the language of grace, the vocabulary of love. What it quietly sets down is the Lordship — the right of Christ to define the very words the church still uses. It will say “Jesus” and mean whatever the age means. That is not knowing him. It is wearing him.
We do not say this to consign anyone to judgment; that door is not ours to shut, and we would not shut it if it were. We say it because a watchman who sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet has the blood on his own hands (Ezekiel 33:6). The trumpet note is simply this: to claim Christ is not to know Christ, and the test he named was never the claim. It was whether we do the will of his Father — which we cannot do while striking his words out of our book.
And still the plumb line hangs straight.
The Door Christ Still Holds
So hear, at the end, the welcome that is real — because there is one, and it is better than the counterfeit.
The true Christ still stands at the true door, and his welcome is wider than the church’s and narrower than the culture’s at the same time. Wider, because there is no sin he will not forgive and no sinner he will turn away — not the greedy, not the proud, not the adulterer, not the practicing homosexual, not the person writing this and not the person reading it. Come as you are; he has never once refused it. And narrower, because he loves you far too much to leave you as you are. Come as you are and go and sin no more are the same sentence in his mouth, and no church has the authority to cut it in half.
No argument on this page can open that door in a single heart. Reason does not raise the dead, and a well-made case has never once saved a soul. Only the Spirit who breathed out the Word can carry it past the ear and into the will. The Board’s task is smaller: to hold the case up honestly, to grant what is true, and to lay the rest beside the line — and then to leave the door of repentance standing open for every Methodist who reads this, and for the church itself, if it will turn.
For it can turn. That is the burden of the last article. We have read the receipts, traced the redline, and heard the case answered by the Word. What remains is the weighing — to set the whole of it on the scales, and to speak, at last, the two words this series has been walking toward from the beginning: repent, and come home.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV). The United Methodist Church’s stated rationale for the 2024 changes is drawn from its own official materials, including “Faith and Inclusion” at umc.org. The affirmation of Scripture as “the primary source and criterion for Christian doctrine” is from the doctrinal standards of The United Methodist Church (Theological Guidelines: Scripture), © The United Methodist Publishing House.
For Further Study
The Receipts Condemn the United Methodist Church — Part One: the dated record of the 2024 votes.
The Words the United Methodist Church Cut From Its Book — Part Two: the redline, old law beside new.
The Bible’s Verdict on Same-Sex Marriage — the same question answered in the Episcopal arc: the third door, the first house.
The Verdict of Scripture in the PCUSA — the affirming case weighed in the Presbyterian arc: the third door, the second house.
The Church and the Christian Church — the series introduction and the plumb line.
Measured and Found Wanting — the full series.
