He has told you, O people, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice,
and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
Micah 6:8
Bishop C. Dale White passed away yesterday, March 29, 2019, at the age of 94.
For many of us the loss is personal, but it is also a loss for our denomination and for the larger church. In remembering Dale, we remember the way we used to be and we remember what we have lost.
In his lifetime he embodied the best of United Methodism. He was a faithful and effective witness for social justice, and a fearless advocate for the core values of the Gospel. He had deep faith and uncompromising integrity. He always spoke the truth, even when the truth was hard to hear, and he always spoke the truth in love, with genuine caring for those who did not see things as clearly as he did.
Dale was my first District Superintendent. He called me to go to my first appointment, in Mansfield, Massachusetts. And I called him for advice more times than I have called all of the District Superintendents since then. And he was always patient and helpful. Just before he left for the Jurisdictional Conference at which he was elected Bishop, he called and asked me to go to Mathewson Street in Providence to work with Bill Ziegler.
In an article in UMNews, Linda Bloom reports that Jaydee Hanson, a longtime friend and former staff member of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, described Dale as having a “gentle fearlessness” that engaged people. “Dale had an abundance of vision but offered it in a way that people could adopt it,” he told United Methodist News Service.
Dale was genuinely pained by the way that the causes he advocated so relentlessly were unsettling and disorienting to those who were stuck in old paradigms. He knew the cost of doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly in the ways of God.
After his retirement as a Bishop he preached at our Annual Conference about the role of the pastor in the life of a congregation. One of the most difficult aspects of our calling, he said, is the responsibility to always be ahead of the curve on issues of social justice. If we are faithful we will always be in the lonely position of advocating for causes that have barely entered the consciousness of many of the people we serve.
Retired Bishop William Boyd Grove, a friend and colleague of Dale’s, spoke of his interest in interfaith relations, international affairs and the lives of people everywhere which landed him in some unusual places. In the early months of the Iran hostage crisis, Grove recounted, Dale was part of a seven-member U.S. delegation that traveled to Iran in hopes of helping the situation by “reaffirming and restoring friendship between the American and Iranian peoples.”
Grove observed that one of Dale’s most significant contributions was the 1986 public statement of the United Methodist Council of Bishops called "In Defense of Creation: The Nuclear Crisis and a Just Peace."
More than any other bishop, said Grove, Dale was responsible for that pastoral letter and study guide. “It was Dale’s idea and he chaired the task force, and it was really his baby.” And it had a profound impact on the church and beyond the church, by moving the nuclear arms debate beyond politics and foreign policy.
In 1996 Dale joined with fourteen other United Methodist Bishops who chose to break their silence and speak out in opposition to the prohibition of LGBTQ persons serving in ordained ministry.
Not surprisingly, Bishop White was not just the embodiment of everything that the church has traditionally stood for, he was also the incarnation of everything the right-wing groups have opposed.
If you knew Dale, you knew him to be a person of deep faith. But for those who equate faith with right-wing politics and quasi-fundamentalist theology, they could not believe that he was a “real Christian.” He was frequently asked if he was “born again.” He would smile and say, “Yes, just this morning.” Faith was, for him, a constant process of renewal and rebirth. We are continually being made new.
Finally, or maybe we should say, “firstly,” there was his marriage to Gwen. Gwendolyn Ruth Horton and Clarence Dale White were married on August 25, 1946. They were married for more than 70 years before Gwen’s death in 2017. They shared the same deep faith and the same openness to the spiritual journey. Together they raised six children and left a legacy of shared love and discipleship.
The way they were is the way the church ought to be.
And to the angel in the church of Laodicea write: “I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”
Revelation 3:14a, 15-16
Long ago and far away, when I was in seminary, we were sure of almost everything and one of the things about which we were most certain was that the principle problem with the church was that it was lukewarm.
And nothing could be worse than lukewarm.
The Laodiceans lacked commitment. They were middle-of-the-road moderates. They were the ancient equivalent of modern cultural Christians, observing the forms of Christianity without the content. They had no passion.
Today I take a more tolerant view of that church.
And sometimes when I consider our current impasse over the issues of LGBTQ inclusion or exclusion, I think that in the United Methodist Church we could use a little more of Laodicea.
When the first talk of schism began in earnest a few years ago, I believed that it would not happen. Not because I expected that we would have a sudden epiphany, but because I thought our lukewarm bureaucratic polity would move so slowly that the issue would be settled long before we ever got to schism.
That now appears unlikely.
One of the things I have loved about the United Methodist Church is that historically we have always had a big tent. We could accommodate George Bush and Hillary Clinton, George McGovern and Dick Cheney. At our best we worked together toward common goals. Sometimes we worked both sides of the same issue and at other times we focused on very different concerns. But in all of that we respected each person’s commitment.
Some of us wanted to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” and others wanted “Once to Every Man and Nation,” but we agreed on “Jesus Loves Me.”
In our current conflict there is a sense in which the very visible issue of LGBTQ exclusion or inclusion serves as a proxy for a conflict that is really about doctrine and biblical interpretation. The Wesleyan Covenant Association, Good News, and the Confessing movement all want to take a much more literal approach to the Bible and to the ancient creeds.
And they want everyone to agree with them.
More than two decades ago I mentored a young man in our church who wanted to be a United Methodist Pastor. When he was turned down at one point in the process, I wrote to the Board of Ministry and pressed hard for his inclusion, arguing that we needed diverse theological positions and that this was an essential part of who we were as United Methodists.
A colleague applauded my efforts and then added a cautionary addendum: “You know, Bill, that’s great that you want Tom to be included. But you need to understand that if they get the majority they will want to have you thrown out.”
And that’s basically where we are.
I’m not sure whether the traditionalists are hot or cold in the sense we see in Laodicea, but they present a faith that is brittle and narrow. And they want me to see it all the same way that they do.
For more that forty years we United Methodists have been doing harm to the LGBTQ folks in our midst, and we have contributed to the broader “Christian” cultural condemnation that surrounds them. We need to stop harming folks. But beyond that we should not expect everyone to conform to the same point of view.
The traditionalists fret about the church “condoning sin” when we elect a gay bishop, ordain LGBTQ clergy, or marry same sex couples.
But what traditionalists experience today is certainly no worse than what progressives went through fifty years ago when we saw churches and clergy within our denomination perpetrating the sins of racism, segregation, and voter suppression, contrary to positions we took as a church in our Book of Discipline. Today in our Social Principles we support a living wage, gun control, collective bargaining, universal health insurance, immigration reform, and we support programs to combat global warming, but we tolerate opposition by churches and clergy and we do not sanction those who advocate antithetical positions.
Adam Hamilton and Mike Slaughter proposed an amendment at the 2012 General Conference that ultimately failed, but it described our choice this way:
“We can divide, or we can commit to disagree with compassion, grace, and love, while continuing to seek to understand the concerns of the other. Given these options, schism or respectful co-existence, we choose the latter.”
And then they concluded:
“We commit to disagree with respect and love, we commit to love all persons and above all, we pledge to seek God’s will. With regard to homosexuality, as with so many other issues, United Methodists adopt the attitude of John Wesley who once said, ‘Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion? Without all doubt, we may.’”
I know that many United Methodists reject the possibility of “respectful co-existence” as no better than that lukewarm church in Laodicea, but I see it as an affirmation that we are held together by something more than the Book of Discipline.
Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish.
