The Gift of Inclusiveness

A typical United Methodist congregation is pretty diverse in political viewpoint, attitude toward public issues, and theological orientation. We relish our diversity; we are strengthened by it. However, there was a time when a church was virtually a segregated institution.

Racial minorities may not have been forbidden entrance to the church, but they were made to feel unwelcome. Prior to the Civil war, persons of African descent (whether slaves or free) were members, but so relegated to isolated seating and secondary status that numbers of them felt constrained to leave the church to found a church of their own.

This story is an encapsulation of the denomination's history. In the beginning, John Wesley, the early Methodists, the early Evangelicals, and Brethren Christians were firmly set against slavery. Wesley himself encouraged and influenced the British struggle against the slave trade, and the earliest Methodist conferences in this country flatly forbade Methodists to own slaves. The church came to tolerate slaveholding in the slave states as more and more slaveholders were attracted to Methodism and more and more Methodists acquired slaves.

Late in the eighteenth century, the principle had become compromised. The denomination became embroiled in the abolitionist controversy, breaking apart in 1844 into Northern and Southern sections, only to reunite in 1939. Even after the Civil War emancipation to the slaves, it was not long before segregation became fixed in law and custom, within as well as beyond the church. Moreover, the church, along with the rest of American society, had to struggle to overcome it, as it still has to struggle to overcome its effects.

Despite the awful aspects of this story, the fact that this history brought people of different races into the church meant that as we struggled to overcome racism and segregation, we found ourselves drawn into the incredible beauty and vitalities of inclusiveness. Racial inclusiveness, out of such a background, could only contribute to inclusiveness of other kinds.

There has never been a time when this denomination and its predecessors did not have both men and women members, but through most of its history it had a fixed principle that women should be subservient to men, and not permitted to become ordained ministers. That barrier was finally broken in Methodism in 1956, after a long struggle. Even after 1956, it was nearly a generation before substantial numbers of women became candidates for ordination. It may be worthy of special note that the United Brethren churches got to this point much earlier (before the end of the nineteenth century) and that conservative Christians often gave the earliest real leadership.

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