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Are mainline denominations anti-Semitic?
By Rob Moll

The Institute on Religion and Democracy has released a report that all but accuses mainline churches of being anti-Semitic. The argument is this: Of all the human rights criticisms given by mainline churches and groups such as the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Episcopal Church, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), along with the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches, only 31 percent of 197 statements were directed at countries other than the United States or Israel. Criticism of Israel amounted to 37 percent while statements leveled at the United States totaled 31 percent.

In addition, only 19 percent of criticisms were directed at nations considered to be "not free" according to Freedom House. IRD says, "Many of the countries rated lowest by Freedom House-such as China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia-were not criticized even once. Of the fifteen worst human rights abusers listed by Freedom House, only five received any criticism during the four years studied."

In a statement about the report, IRD President Diane Knippers said, "An extreme focus on Israel, while ignoring major human rights violators, seriously distorts the churches' message on universal human rights. We cannot find a rational explanation for the imbalance. We are forced to ask: Is there an anti-Jewish animus, conscious or unconscious, that drives this drumbeat of criticism against the world's only Jewish state?"

Most recently, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted "to start a process of a phased and selective divestment" from companies doing business in Israel and the occupied territories, such as Caterpillar. Church leaders are currently meeting with Jewish leaders to discuss the resolution. Another PCUSA resolution called for Israel to halt construction on its West Bank security wall.

According to The New York Times, "Jewish leaders say they were stunned by what they saw as the one-sided language and focus of the resolutions, particularly the fact that only Israel was singled out for economic sanctions. 'Our people were deeply appalled by the message,'" said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism. Yoffie said he did not think the amount divested would be significant.

The Times continues, "Interfaith dialogue between Jews and American Protestants has waned over the last few years, in great part because of tension over Israel's policies, said Dr. Antonios Kireopoulos, assistant general secretary for international affairs at the National Council of Churches."

It is more than tension over policies driving mainline Protestant criticism of Israel, says IRD, which accuses mainline churches of pushing a Leftist secular agenda and works to reform those churches. "That excessive criticism, paired with the fact that none of the churches or groups that we studied criticized human rights violations by the Palestinian Authority or other neighboring governments, certainly raises concerns about a prejudiced double standard," said Erik Nelson, an IRD staffer who was the primary researcher for the report.

In response, the NCC says the IRD report is "fatally flawed." In a press release not yet available on their website, the NCC says, "The report assumes that all that the National Council of Churches USA does or says about human rights gets reported out in resolutions and news releases. It ignores the NCC's sound, comprehensive policy base on human rights."

The NCC also accuses the IRD report of bias. "The ideologically conservative IRD cannot claim to have produced an objective report, having among other things used another ideologically conservative group, Freedom House, as its barometer on human rights."

Freedom House's table of freedom ratings, however are not ideologically driven. Countries such as China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, which IRD reports are not criticized by mainline churches, are widely regarded as human rights violators and are mentioned by other human rights groups such as Amnesty International. Calling the report "fatally flawed" because Freedom House is used as a standard does not address the fact that these countries are known for human rights violations and have received no formal NCC criticism.

The NCC statement is most condemning of IRD's accusations of anti-Semitism: "The most unfortunate part of the IRD's report is its apparent attempt to hurt Jewish-Christian relations by quite blatantly planting seeds of suspicion that the mainline churches are anti-Semitic. The IRD wrongly and dangerously equates any criticism of the government of Israel and its policies with anti-Semitism.

"The NCC seeks justice for all people in the Middle East. It is working for justice in the land where our Savior walked and where our Christian brothers and sisters, along with Jews and Muslims, are crying out for justice. The NCC grieves all loss of life, including Palestinians and Israelis, and has said so."

Yet, the statement doesn't respond to IRD's main critique, "Given the dramatic unwillingness of the mainline churches to criticize states around Israel for their human rights abuses-not only the connections to worldwide terrorism, but also the oppression and brutality toward their own people-it is not unreasonable to ask whether anti-Jewish animus may play some role in the churches' skewed human rights advocacy."

IRD's report suggests one way to understand the mainline rationale. Comparing mainline reaction to Cold War era Communist human rights abuses, the report cites former World Council of Churches president Konrad Raiser. He regretted that the WCC did not act more forthrightly regarding human rights violations in Communist countries. "In place of prophetic protest, the ecumenical movement concentrated on bridge-building and cooperation," he said.

Now that militant Islam is the new communism, IRD suggests the "bridge-building and cooperation" approach to addressing human rights abuses should not be repeated.

Rob Moll is the online assistant editor at Christianity Today. Reprinted by permission of Christianity Today.

Court rules Fresno church
may keep its property

The 5th District Court of Appeal in Fresno, California, has ruled that St. Luke's United Methodist Church is not the property of the denomination.

The decision, the latest in a four-year battle between the church and the denomination, was issued August 13.

St. Luke's severed its affiliation with the United Methodist Church in 2000, but continues to meet on the disputed property.

A centuries-old clause in the United Methodist Book of Discipline, the denomination's lawbook, states that all local church property is held in trust for the denomination. A Superior Court judge ruled in 2002 that the local church could not revoke the trust clause.

In a statement released by the California-Nevada Annual Conference, Bishop Beverly J. Shamana reiterated that the responsibility of the local United Methodist Church is to hold in trust church property "that enables us to be a United Methodist presence in the community. We are living in stress-filled times and the United Methodist Church, with its unique message of Open Hearts, Open Minds, and Open Doors, is a spiritual presence we want to see maintained in the Fresno community."

Robert M. Shannon, trial attorney for the California-Nevada Conference said, "We believe the trial court [in June 2002] made the right decision after hearing all the evidence in the case and we strongly disagree with the contrary ruling by the Court of Appeal."

A split between members of St. Luke's and the denomination led to a court battle over who owns the property. The conference and members of St. Luke's have been struggling with each other for four years, ever since the congregation withheld apportionments in protest of the conference's decision not to discipline pastors for participating in a same-sex union service.

"I love the United Methodist Church," says the Rev. Kevin Smith, pastor of St. Luke's. "But they can't just pick and choose which parts of the Discipline they want to adhere to. This has never been just about homosexuality."

In the 2002 ruling, the judge said the state Corporations Code supported the denomination's Book of Discipline. The latest ruling however, agrees with St. Luke's contention "that it could and in fact did revoke the trust which had existed in favor of the United Methodist Church."

Smith said California's corporate laws have always been on the side of the congregation."California corporate law allows us, as owners of the property, to change terms of the trust in which we hold the property."

Editor's note: As we go to press, the California/Nevada Annual Conference has filed for a petition of hearing before the Supreme Court of California. That Court may or may not agree to a hearing. If it says yes, things are put on hold until it gets heard, which could take 1-3 years. If it says no, the matter stands and St. Luke's keeps the property.

The court could decline to hear it and "depublish" the ruling, which would mean it stands but it is only for St. Luke's and cannot become a precedent. A ruling is expected by December 22 of this year.

United Methodist News Service

God and man at Harvard:
Dinner with Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis

By Steve Beard

Who would you most like to sit between at a fantasy dinner party? Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant? Martin Luther and Pope John Paul II? Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill? Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate?

If you were to ask Harvard professor of psychiatry Armand Nicholi for his choice, he probably would say Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis-the most eloquent spokesmen of the competing secular and spiritual worldviews. "I think they would have a great deal to discuss," he says. "It would be the most exciting discussion that one could possibly have between two human beings."

Nicholi's enthusiasm is understandable. The administrators at Harvard recruited him 30 years ago to teach a course on Freud, the world-renowned father of psychoanalysis. While the course was centered on Freud's medical and scientific worldview, the students complained about the course's unbalance. "It was one sustained attack on the spiritual worldview," they told him.

Stemming from the testimony of his students, Nicholi knew that Freud needed an interlocutor to spar over ideas of great consequence. He began to search for a countervailing voice that would defend and define the spiritual worldview and juxtapose Freud's relentless atheism. While knowing that he needed someone with Freud's intellectual credibility, Nicholi was reminded of The Problem of Pain, a book by Oxford professor C.S. Lewis that he had read during his surgical internship in medical school. The book had a profound effect upon Nicholi as he came face to face with so much suffering-particularly young children with fatal illnesses.

As he reacquainted himself with Lewis' work, he was struck by the parallelism in their writing. It was as if Lewis was attempting to answer Freud's questions one by one. "I was startled by this," Nicholi says. "I realized that Freud was the father of the new literary criticism that was sweeping the universities of Europe at that time. Freud gave the literary critics new tools for understanding human behavior, as described in the great literature. So Lewis knew Freud's writings very well and after he changed his worldview from secular to spiritual, and began to define it and defend it, whose arguments did he answer but those of Freud." After all, these were the very arguments that Lewis himself had used to defend his atheism prior to his conversion.

Two years ago, Nicholi explored these points and counterpoints in his book, The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life (Free Press). PBS aired a 4-hour documentary in September by the same title that allowed the men to wrestle over questions such as: What does it mean to be happy? If God exists, then why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? What is the source of our morality? Is death our only destiny?

"It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and admit all the purely human origins of precepts and regulations of civilization," an actor portraying Freud says in the film.

The C.S. Lewis portrayal counters, "God created things that have free will. This means creatures who can go either wrong or right. But a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made. And God insists on our putting them right again."

You get a sense of the documentary's rhythm and the way in which these two men grapple with the big questions as if they were debating in a lecture hall. And how would the discussion go between the two men over dinner?

"They would talk a great deal about the great literature," Nicholi responded. "Freud thought the greatest piece of literature was Milton's Paradise Lost. It was one of the greatest books he ever read. And Lewis was an authority on Paradise Lost. He wrote a preface to Paradise Lost that I think is still used wherever courses on Milton are taught."

The two intellects had much in common. Both of them were bright in school and brought up in the religions of their families-Judaism for Freud, Protestantism for Lewis. As children, both of them embraced a nominal kind of faith until they both became atheists.

Freud and Lewis would have much to discuss in regard to pain, suffering, and the devastation of war. "Freud was deeply affected by the First World War," says Nicholi. "He had two sons that were in it. He looked deeply at human nature, trying to understand it, and why human beings would spend so much time destroying one another. And he came up with his theory of the 'death instinct.' That there's not only the libido, the desire to build and to procreate, but also a destructive instinct that was part of human nature."

Lewis would have most certainly understood Freud's perspective, but he ultimately comes at it from a different position. "Of course, Lewis agreed that there was something very destructive, and sinful about human nature," says Nicholi. "He agreed with Freud that people need alteration. Freud thought they could be changed by psychoanalysis, by introspection, and so forth. And Lewis, of course, thought that the only way people could be dramatically changed was through redemption and atonement. People needed a spiritual rebirth."

In the midst of the plumes of smoke (both men loved their tobacco), it would not be long before their dinner conversation would turn to God. "They would have wonderful arguments about the existence of God," says Nicholi. "Freud seemed to be obsessed with that question. I mean, you read the first letters that we have when he was in college, and they're filled with arguments for the existence of God. And he, at that time, wrote that science seems to demand the existence of God."

Despite his resolute atheism, Freud could not escape his God-hauntedness. "The last book that he writes at the end of his life is on Moses and monotheism," Nicholi points out. "He can't leave the subject alone. I think that they would be off on that topic in two minutes flat."

Steve Beard is the editor of Good News magazine.

Bishop orders new hearing in lesbian case

A new hearing has been ordered in the case of a Philadelphia pastor facing a church trial after publicly declaring she lives in a committed lesbian relationship. United Methodist church law bars the ordination of "self-avowed, practicing homosexuals."

Retired Bishop Joseph H. Yeakel, named earlier this month to oversee the case of the Rev. Irene Elizabeth "Beth" Stroud, said he ordered the new hearing after reviewing the transcript of the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference's Committee on Investigation's deliberation of the case.

In a September 9 letter to the committee's chairperson, the Rev. Kent E. Kroehler of Lancaster, Yeakel said the committee's 5-3 vote on July 23 to file a charge against Stroud did not meet requirements of both church law and rulings of the denomination's top court, the Judicial Council.

Yeakel said the committee erred by considering laypeople as voting members of the committee. "Two of those members were laypersons who were counted in the quorum," the bishop wrote. He noted the Judicial Council ruled in May 2000 that laypeople "do not have the voting rights and parity with clergy members." The result was the committee lacked an official quorum in which to take action. Church law contained in the denomination's Book of Discipline says seven people constitute a quorum.

The bishop also declared the committee "was not properly constituted to adopt either the charge or specifications" in the case against Stroud, who serves as associate pastor of First United Methodist Church of Germantown. Yeakel said a statement from members of the committee, supporting the specification in the case, but against bringing a charge, is contrary to an October 2003 Judicial Council decision stemming from a Washington state case.

In the statement, three clergy members of the committee indicated, "We do not believe that a self-avowed, practicing homosexual clergyperson in a monogamous, committed relationship engages in practices incompatible with Christian teachings." Yeakel told Kroehler that the Judicial Council ruling requires members "unwilling to uphold the Discipline for reasons of conscience.to step aside."

The bishop asked Kroehler to "inventory the present members of the committee on investigation on their willingness to serve, meeting the requirements of the Discipline in conformance with the Judicial Council's ruling." If that inventory reduces the number of members below what is necessary for a quorum, then additional members should be appointed, Yeakel wrote.

Reached for comment, Stroud had no direct response to the latest development. "I'm in good spirits and just trying to be faithful as a pastor and a Christian," she told UMNS. "Nobody ever said it would be easy."

The committee on investigation received the complaint against Stroud from Bishop Peter D. Weaver, who presided over the annual conference until August 31. He is now bishop in Boston. Bishop Marcus Matthews leads the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference as part of the Philadelphia Area.

United Methodist News Service

Texas church ropes in cowboys at Arena church
By David Frey

When Curtis House was pastor of Happy (Texas) United Methodist Church, he wanted to reach the cowboys of the massive cattle yards surrounding his north Texas Panhandle town. If he couldn't get them to church, he figured, he'd create a congregation where they might feel more comfortable.

With two prayer partners, both devout United Methodists and cowboys like him, House launched the Arena Church in a community center next to the rodeo grounds of this rural town of about 600. It's a sort of cowboy church like others that have caught on in Texas and throughout the country, where cowhands find a less formal service in a familiar setting and churchgoers don't mind if they show up fresh from the feedlots.

"We've had cowboys show up in boots and spurs," House says.

Some cowboy churches are traditional, some charismatic. Some are nondenominational. Some, like the Arena Church, are affiliated with an organized denomination. What they share is an informal approach meant to welcome farm workers, ranch hands, and rural residents who might otherwise shun organized religion.

Four huge feedlots surround Happy, where cowboys spend long hours working in the mud and manure six days a week. Most of the cowboys didn't want to come to church in dirty boots and sweaty shirts. A lot of them were suspicious of organized religion. Many worked Sundays, anyway.

So House, with prayer partners Mike Kuhlman and Steve Friskup, opened the Arena Church in 1999, kicking it off with a Labor Day calf roping that also roped in interested congregation members. The church held services on weekday evenings when cowboys were able to attend.

Organizers put out flyers at nearby feedlots, cattle auctions, and stores like Wal-Mart. House even saddled up and rode among cowboys on the feedlots, spreading both the Gospel and word about the church.

"With me being right beside them on horseback, it makes a difference," says House, a roper himself who grew up on a nearby farm.

The Arena Church has since moved into Happy United Methodist Church, freeing up the fees the congregation was paying to use the community center to give back to churchgoers in need. Several who started out going to the Arena Church are attending regular Sunday services.

"It brought some people into the church that, for whatever reason, were never giving the church a chance," says the Rev. Tom Stribling, Happy's pastor, who replaced House after he was reassigned. "They believed in God, but they didn't like religion or denominations. That was their excuse not to attend."

Starting the Arena Church, he says, "took their excuses away."

"It ministers to a group that a lot of the time we can't reach other ways," Stribling says. "They aren't real open and won't go to a church inside a church building, but they'll come to this Arena Church because of what it is. It's an outreach that really opens some doors up that otherwise we wouldn't be able to walk through."

Like a more traditional church, the Arena Church includes singing, prayers, and sharing. But the songs are more contemporary, played by a praise band that originally formed for the congregation's cowboy services, but now plays on Sundays, too. Participants get up and share, but there may be no minister, and the lesson may not resemble a sermon.

"In most cases, it's like giving your testimony, sharing something in your life as an individual," Stribling says.

Instead of passing an offering plate, the church places a cowboy hat at the entrance, and churchgoers are asked to drop in whatever they can afford. If they need money, they're asked to take it out. The church has given congregation members money to get into drug rehabilitation and to get caught up on pickup truck payments.

These days, Kuhlman, a local farmer, heads up the weekly service. Although it started as a cowboy church, cowboys aren't the only ones who show up, he says. Others like the lively, nontraditional services, too. Sometimes, as many as 50 people turn out.

David Frey is a freelance writer in Carbondale, Colorado. This article was produced by UMC.org, the official website of the UM Church.



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