by David W. Scott (from UM-Insight)
September 30, 2019
As I explained in a post last week, the UMC is currently locked in a three-way standoff among US centrists and progressives, US traditionalists, and Africans, in which none of the parties is able to achieve their goals in the church, but none of the parties is willing to walk away. Since a standoff is a deadlocked state, it is not clear how this conflict will be resolved at GC2020 or beyond.
There are perhaps four possibilities for how this conflict will develop:
1. The situation isn’t resolved. The conflict and the deadlock continue, at least for the near-term future. Perhaps in another 4-8 years, the situation will have changed such that the situation will be resolved, but until then, the conflict will simply continue, likely escalating in the meantime.
In many ways, because of the deadlocked nature of a three-way standoff, this is actually the most likely scenario. A standoff will only be resolved if the goals of one party significantly changes, if one party is able to gain a tactical advantage, or if something disrupts the system from outside. In all other scenarios, the standoff simply continues.
Of course, there are costs to continuing the standoff: both US parties lose members and financial support in greater numbers because of the conflict, and the conflict guts the boards and agencies, which Africans would like to preserve. [Read the rest of the possibilities!]