“O never give me over to my own heart’s desires, nor let me follow my own imaginations!”– John Wesley
There are many reasons for the modern church’s loss of its prophetic voice, politics being just one of them. As in ancient times, trying to embrace what the rest of the world is doing has diminished the power of the church to address what used to be called “sinful behavior.”
The latest, but surely not the last example, is what the United Methodist Church did last week at their convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Delegates voted 523 to 161 to replace the definition of marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman and will now allow gay Methodist ministers to be ordained and perform same- sex marriages. They dropped language that said homosexual practice “is incompatible with Christian teaching.” African delegates voted against…
