Have You Studied the Doctrines?

As I sat in the clergy executive session at Annual Conference, I heard the bishop ask these questions of those who were to be ordained:

8. Have you studied the doctrines of The United Methodist Church?
9. After full examination, do you believe that our doctrines are in harmony with the Holy Scriptures?
10. Will you preach and maintain them?
(Para 336, 2012 Book of Discipline)

Questions 11, 12, and 13 then repeat these questions about our polity and doctrine. Every person ordained in the United Methodist Church answers these questions affirmatively. All ordained clergy say that they know what the church teaches, that they believe the church’s teaching is Biblically correct, that they will propagate these teachings and that they will live in accordance with them.

What, I wondered, exactly did these ordinands think they were affirming? What do they think the church teaches and preaches?

Different parts of our church appear to be on very different paths. Our diversity is rapidly moving in the direction of disunity.

Not only do we disagree about some very important maters, we don't even agree about how to deal with those differences. How does the Bible function in the church? What role do our historical standards and practices play? How do our institutional structures figure in this problem? Are we a church or a movement? What is essential and what is peripheral? Where is the church's gravitational center and is it strong enough to hold these centrifugal forces in orbit? We are, in the words of the immortal Temptations, a "Ball of Confusion."

We expect that those who accept positions of leadership within our institutions are committed to living in accordance with the institution's values. I used to take that for granted when it came to clergy. Trust, however, is a casualty of our church's internal conflict. I pray that all whom we ordain to lead the church will have at least as much integrity as military officers whose oath includes these words:

I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.

No individual and no institution ever remains the same. What happens when one’s own theology or ecclesiology evolves to a point where it differs significantly from what the church teaches? Or, what happens if the church changes its doctrine so that it no longer teaches what you affirm? How does one live out one's duty to God, one's loyalty to the institution and one's personal integrity in either of those circumstances? Part of the answer, I think, lies in where the church finally comes out in terms of its ecclesiastical identity.

The presence of the historic questions in the bishop's formal inquiry reveals that the issue of clergy integrity is even older than the issues that consume the church today. And their presence implies that there was a time when the meaning of our doctrine was much clearer than it is now. The church expected integrity from those who were ordained. By asking these questions, the church attempted to insure that those who led the church accurately represented the church's beliefs in their teaching and conduct. Making that kind of determination is much more difficult today.

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