UMC Critic Claims Renewal Advocates Demonize Leftist Believers

by Jim Brown
February 5, 2004

(AgapePress) - An article in a liberal United Methodist magazine claims a Protestant renewal group is out to "vilify and ridicule" the denomination's officials, organizations, and programs.

The article in Zion's Herald magazine accuses the Institute on Religion and Democracy of being an outside organization manipulated by conservative interest groups that want to steer the denomination in an illegitimate direction.

One of the article's authors, Dr. Andrew Weaver, is upset that IRD efforts are being funded by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife as well as members of the Christian Reconstructionist movement. "Secular money that has nothing to do with Church is being used by a group to attach churches," Weaver says, "and that seems wrong. I don't care if it was done by the left or the right."

Weaver says the IRD threatens the soul of the Church when it criticizes liberal bishops who advocate homosexuality, abortion, and pacifism. "Our behavior towards one another should not be vilifying and ridiculing people you disagree with," he says, adding, "God loves all of us the same, whether we know God or not, and we have an obligation not to demonize one another."

But the IRD's Mark Tooley says his group is merely trying to remind the United Methodist hierarchy that the denomination officially still stands for the biblical doctrines that Methodist founder John Wesley upheld.

The Protestant renewal advocate believes Weaver and others are frustrated by the declining influence of liberal theology in the United Methodist denomination.

"Those on the left side of the Church realize that their future is not bright in terms of where the Church is going," Tooley says, "and they're concerned and worried and have begun lashing out with even more vehemence than has been typical on conservative renewal groups, of which we are one."