Exclusive Interview with Bishop G. Lindsey Davis
John Lomperis
During the semiannual meeting of the United Methodist Council of Bishops in early November 2007, Bishop G. Lindsey Davis sat down with UMAction’s John Lomperis for an interview. Bishop Davis has led our denomination’s North Georgia Conference since his election to the episcopacy in 1996.
Lomperis: Thank you for joining me. As you’re well aware, Bishop, The United Methodist Church in the United States has been declining in membership and attendance for a number of years, although the notable exception has been the North Georgia Annual Conference under your leadership. To ask a broad question, why do you think that is?
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| United Methodist Bishop G. Lindsey Davis (Photo courtesy UMNS) |
Davis: I think there are lots of factors. Whenever you have a growth trend in an Annual Conference there are many variables involved. The first is that we’ve had tremendous population growth in Atlanta, and so we certainly have had ample opportunity to reach new people for Christ.
The key for us started back in the 1980s when the conference, under the leadership of [Bishop] Ernest Fitzgerald, began a very—at least for United Methodists—aggressive church-planting program, and over the years we’ve planted a lot of new congregations in the area. We’ve planted over a hundred since I’ve been there, and those new churches have accounted for much of the growth. One of the things that we know about new churches is that they tend to reach more people, more unchurched people, more younger people, and more diverse populations. And all of those are areas where The United Methodist Church has not excelled very much in recent decades. So that’s been part of the key to our success.
I would also say though, that in spite of having grown every year for over 30 years now, we still have lost what in business you would call market share. Over the past 40 years the percentage of persons in Georgia who are United Methodists has declined, although it’s a little over 5 percent of the population now, which is better than it would be for almost any other state in the Union.
I would give credit to our church-planting initiatives. We’ve put a lot of our resources financially [into them], and we do a lot of intentional training of young clergy to plant new churches. And you know there’s something—I’m giving a long answer to a short question—but when you plant a new church it’s almost intuitive for that church to know that they have to reach out to the community.
There’s also, within North Georgia, a theological framework among many of our pastors that says having an intimate relationship with Christ does transform individuals and it does transform communities. And there’s a sense of urgency about sharing Christ with the unchurched. And that kind of theological perspective may be a little stronger within North Georgia than in other places.
We are in the Bible Belt. I encounter a lot of people who move into Georgia from other states, and they readily admit sometimes, “Yeah, we went to church occasionally in—and they’ll name whatever state it is—but it wasn’t all that important to us. But when we came to Georgia, it seemed to be important to our neighbors, and churches were very hospitable and they reached out to us.” And they experience maybe a different church climate in Georgia than perhaps they experienced in the states where they and their family lived [previously].
L: Practically speaking, how do you think the sorts of things you just discussed that have worked for North Georgia, at least relatively speaking—in terms of growing the church, making more disciples of Jesus Christ, bringing people into a saving relationship with Him—how do you think that could, in practical terms, be implemented more widely across our denomination in the United States?
D: I work with the initiative of the Council of Bishops called Path One, which is a church development national strategy. What we’re trying to do is to take the best knowledge, information, and best practices for developing new congregations—wherever that happens in the United States—and begin to raise up a new generation of church planters in the United States. We’ve been planting, generally, between 80 and 100 new churches in the United States every year, throughout all the Annual Conferences in the United States. And we need to be planting in the neighborhood of 350 congregations a year in order to reach the populations that we now have, in order to, in some cases, replace the churches that are dying, but especially to reach new, more diverse populations.
The United Methodist Church has not done a good job in the last 50 years in particular of reaching the poor, reaching new immigrants, reaching the working poor. In some ways, we kind of abandoned those populations, and yet those are the very people we need to be reaching. And I think the only way we’re going to do that—or it may not be the only way, but the most effective way to do that—is to plant new congregations. So I’m hoping that we can take the good things that have happened—not only in North Georgia, but also in North Carolina, in Arkansas, and in lots of other places throughout the country—and begin to do kind of a culture and climate change in The United Methodist Church that reemphasizes the planting of new congregations, that reemphasizes evangelism. Some people have a hard time with the word “evangelism”; I don’t. I think it’s a perfectly fine word. But I’m hoping that we can begin to realize that we can’t just sit and be satisfied with tending to the people who are in our little church and doing maintenance ministry, that we’re really called to reach the world. And we’ve become very timid about reaching the world, I think.
L: How do you hope that our church might finally move beyond the perennial challenges to our church’s historic and democratically confirmed teaching on homosexuality and to the drain of time and energy associated with those challenges?
D: That’s interesting. I support our church’s position on homosexuality, I happen to think it’s biblical and also that it’s compassionate. I realize a lot of people disagree with me on that, but I happen to think that where we are is where we ought to be. I do get a little weary of the conversation sometimes, in part because I don’t ever hear anything new. It seems like the different perspectives are never changed and there’s not much new information being shared. It’s like, “Well, we’re going to get together again, it’s been four years, so let’s get together again, and say the same old things to one another.”
I do think that our position, frankly, in The United Methodist Church is consistent with Christendom throughout the world. If you somehow could quantify it, I would think that 95 percent of Christians throughout the world would agree with our position. One of the reasons that I would be opposed to any change is that I think it would fracture our relationships with most Christian faith communities around the world.
L: What principles would you as a bishop say should guide our church’s response to the issue of transgenderism, particularly as it applies to ordination standards?
D: Well you know, the transgender issue—I don’t think the founders of Methodism ever contemplated a time when that would be an issue. Of course, it’s not really something that the Discipline has every really anticipated. I suspect that there will be not only legislation but lots of conversation about it at General Conference. For me the key issue has to do with one’s not only spiritual, but emotional stability and maturity to serve as a clergyperson in the United Methodist Church. I’m not personally comfortable with appointing a transgendered person at this time, in the church, but there’s nothing that prohibits that, so I understand the Judicial Council’s ruling. But I think that issue will be certainly addressed at General Conference.
I think the key issue has to do with whether or not a person who struggles to that level in their own sexual identity, whether that person is spiritually and emotionally mature and stable enough, to serve in a United Methodist church. And then I think the other issue has to do, frankly, with the practicality of appointability. Is it fair to ask bishops and cabinets to be in the position of appointing transgendered persons to congregations? I think that’s a very practical issue which ought to be part of the discussion.
L: The Episcopal Greetings for the 2004 Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church describes the volume as “the most current statement of how United Methodists agree to live their lives together.” Yet we at UMAction and a number of others have documented a number of cases in which the clear letter and spirit of the Discipline appears to be set aside when people simply did not personally agree with certain provisions of the Discipline. So how do you believe our denominational culture can move to a point where our Discipline is more consistently respected and upheld?
D: I don’t know what particular situations you’re referring to, so I won’t try to speculate. But I do think that, at least in my practice of ministry in the episcopacy that I do try to uphold not only the letter but the spirit of the Discipline, and I think we’ve done that.
I do think that we’ve gotten into a trend in recent years of becoming more and more legislative and even judicial in our responses to issues and certain situations. I’m not sure that that’s helpful to the church. For example, in clergy misconduct cases, every four years our procedures and policies become more lengthy, complex, and bishops sometimes feel we should have gone to law school instead of seminary in order to understand and implement all of it. I’m not sure that serves the church well. We do a lot of this kind of regulation because, frankly, we don’t trust one another. We don’t trust one another to make prudent, Christian, judgments about some of the issues, and I guess we’ll continue to struggle with that. But it’s been interesting to many of us that the more our church has declined in size, the larger the Discipline has become.
I just don’t think we can legislate our way through some of the issues that we have. I think we’re going to have to find another way, a way more consistent with who we are as a church, and maybe more consistent even with some of the biblical guidance that we have about how you resolve conflict. Conflict’s always been part of the Church; all you have to do is read St. Paul. The church has struggled with difficult issues and complex issues from the very beginning; the church has not always agreed on those things.
For a bishop in particular, I think accountability and faithfulness to both the letter and the spirit of the Discipline, is necessary. If we don’t do it, then we have no right to expect anyone else to.
L: In terms of the Discipline’s standards for clergy misconduct, I think especially of the controversy that erupted in 2004 over Karen Damman, a self-avowed, practicing homosexual who was basically acquitted of not committing any chargeable offense. [At the time, Bishop Davis along with South Georgia Bishop Michael Watson decried that acquittal as “a clear sign of rebellion.”] So the General Conference response was to make additions to the Discipline to close some of the loopholes that the previous version of our Discipline had allegedly had. When such loopholes keep being sought out and found, is there any alternative to adding to the Book of Discipline that you would see?
D: We’ve also utilized the Judicial Council in ways to resolve those issues. Take the United States: the laws within the United States vary somewhat from state to state, and certainly the application of laws varies from state to state. All you have to do is look at something like capital punishment to see that that is true. And so it may be too much to expect the Discipline to be applied in exactly the same way in every location. But I think our covenant with one another requires us to really strive to handle similar situations in similar ways regardless of what annual conference you might be in.
But you can never nail that down exactly. And you have to trust the system that’s set up where the annual conference is the basic unit of the church. And annual conferences will choose from time to time to respond to a wide variety of issues differently than might be the case someplace else.
And I guess the question for us as United Methodists is: is that something we can live with or is that something that will fragment us as a church? So far, in spite of tensions and frustration and disappointments, we’ve managed to stay together, in spite of those issues. I hope we can continue to do so. That would be my prayer.
L: In response to something you said at the last part of the earlier question, in terms of a bishop and the accountability to the letter and the spirit [of the Discipline], what are some of your thoughts on what this body, the Council of Bishops, should be doing, or perhaps is doing, to promote a culture of accountability within our denomination?
D: Well we’re having a good bit more conversation about that now. When I first came into the Council in 1996, there wasn’t much conversation about it at all. So this is a recent change. We’re trying to figure out how you do that. We are a body of peers; no bishop is able to overrule another one. That’s the way our polity is established. Yet we spend a lot of time in collaborative conversation. In fact, I was in conversation today with another bishop about a problem I’m experiencing, and how would he approach that, and what am I missing, and what did he think I might do better than what I’ve already done. That kind of informal conversation goes on all the time among the Council.
L: More so than before?
D: Well, I think that that kind of conversation always took place, but I think it has increased in recent years because I do believe that our job has become more difficult, and we’re all dealing with issues that we never thought we’d deal with. So we are as a group more open to consultation with our peers on these issues than maybe previous generations were.
I think that the Council of Bishops has to stand accountable for lots of things. One of the main things we ought to be accountable for is either the strengthening of our church or the weakening of our church, and if our church continues to decline, as you decline you lose the ability to influence the culture around you. We are the ones that need to stand accountable for that.
And there are others who should as well. General Conference has to be accountable for some of that. So should the Judicial Council. So should annual conferences, and pastors, and lay leaders, and all who are in any leadership position have to give an accounting for the ministry that we have, and what’s happening in our geographical area.
I’m responsible for what happens in North Georgia. I’m not always the one who does or has direct control over everything that happens in North Georgia, but ultimately I’m the one who has to be responsible for it. And if there’s a problem that needs to be corrected, I’m the one that has to take the lead in correcting it. So I accept 100 percent responsibility for what happens there, and I think most of the other bishops do as well for what happens in their areas.
L: What are your thoughts on our denomination’s support for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), which opposes any perceived restriction on or moral disapproval of abortion?
D: I would not personally support them, and don’t.
Again, we’re a big umbrella. We have people in our denomination that do support them and their agenda, but there are many of us that do not. Again, can we live in a church culture where we have pretty sharp differences on those issues? And that’s a challenge for us now and always will be.
You know, I wouldn’t want one nickel of my money going to that group.
L: As you’re probably aware, in addition to UMAction’s work on similar theological concerns to those addressed by Good News and the Confessing Movement, our ministry is also concerned with certain political actions and pronouncements by official church bodies when we believe that such actions or statements lack a clear scriptural mandate. The two-part question is: Are there any political issues that you might agree amount to differing prudential judgments about the best means to achieve commonly sought ends? And if so, should the church refrain from taking a position on some of these sorts of issues, and instead encourage individual members to come to their own conclusions about these issues while respecting their brothers and sisters in the next pew who might have a different opinion?
D: That’s a complicated question. I think that it is important for the church to speak out on issues of the day. I think that it’s important for church members to speak their mind clearly. I thinks it’s fine for clergy and even bishops to do that. But you have to be very careful to help people understand that you are speaking as an individual and we’re not trying to represent the church at large.
The reality that I live with is that if I make a political statement about some issue in Atlanta, yes, it’s coming from Lindsey Davis—I didn’t ask the Annual Conference to vote on it, I didn’t seek the support of the Council of Bishops or certainly the General Conference—I have made a statement. But because I’m the bishop of North Georgia, that colors the comment. It always does. I can’t separate who I am as an individual from the role I play in the life of the church. And so I’m very careful to comment on issues that I think are clearly important in our culture.
One example is that I’ve tried to clearly speak out on behalf of children and healthcare for children in the state of Georgia. I’ve tried to clearly speak out on issues related to immigration. I realize that not everybody in my church will agree with me on those issues. But I’ve tried to do it from a biblical perspective. And I’ve done it as an individual. I realize that because of my office, that’s always going to reflect on The United Methodist Church. I’ve tried to be real clear about not being partisan in that arena. I do not openly support any political candidates for that reason, and I have tried not to get into the political arena in terms of supporting individuals or parties.
But on the issues, we should be quite free to speak our mind. And you’d get quite a variety of opinions from the Council of Bishops on almost any topic. Especially since we have quite a few members from outside the U.S., whose perspective is not Western at all, and is not essentially American. And so that’s one of the things that makes our meetings kind of interesting; we have people from all over the world that often look at these issues quite differently.
L: What recommendations, if any, would you offer to UMAction and like-minded unofficial United Methodist caucus groups about how we go about promoting our perspective within the church?
D: I think it’s absolutely okay to have a strong opinion about an issue and to advocate for that opinion. I would say the same thing to any caucus group, no matter whether it’s on what we call the Left or the Right—doesn’t matter to me. I would say to any of them: advocate for your position, you have every right to try to convince people that you’re right and that they ought to change their mind, that’s okay, but follow Wesley’s admonition to do no harm. There’s a way to do that without being harsh or vindictive or to do it in a way that tries to destroy persons. And I have seen people within the life of our church on all sides of questions do that. And I have been a party to it at times. I think it is clear to try to “Do no harm, do as much good as you can,” and understand that even those people who are vehemently opposed to you, they still love God. They may express it in ways that are confounding to you, but give them the benefit of the doubt, that they are persons of deep faith and conscience who just happen to disagree with us, or with you or me, on an issue.
L: You actually answered my next question as well. It was going to be: what would you say to “progressive” [United Methodist caucus] groups?
D: I think the message is the same for everybody. In my Annual Conference for example, I have not wanted any of my churches to identify themselves as “Reconciling” congregations or “Confessing” congregations because I think that fragments our church, and I don’t believe it’s necessary to do that. I realize that nobody’s perfectly fair in the way they conduct their work, we all make mistakes, but I try to say, “Here’s the standard, and it’s the same for everybody, for me, for you, no matter whether you come from a liberal perspective or a conservative perspective.”
L: Which is what the Judicial Council ruled, that congregations cannot do that, although many still do.
D: I think that that’s unwise. I’ll see churches from time to time that will self-identify as “Reconciling” or “Confessing,” and that’s really unfortunate, because I think it does fragment the church in ways that are unnecessary. I don’t mind if folks want to be partied as individuals or in a group; they want to support various caucuses and to be sympathetic to their perspectives. That’s fine, I don’t have any problem with that, I’ve done that myself. But I don’t think that we want to identify our churches that way.
L: In terms of practical enforcement, is it a matter of, “Hey pastor! You got a call from the Bishop telling you to take down that sign that says ‘We’re Reconciling’”?
D: I have done that, and I have done it on both sides. And I have tried to reason with those pastors and their churches, and they have been willing to hear me out and comply. It’s not easy. We’re not a church that seeks to control and police everything that everybody does. I don’t think that I’d want to be a part of a church like that, quite honestly.
L: Thank you very much for your time, Bishop.