There are times when things get published that are just unintentionally humorous whiloe being nevertheless very sad. The always homosexual and transgender supporting Philadelphia Inquirer had this one Friday morning:

My husband had to quit his Methodist ministry for being gay. The new rules on LGBTQ clergy are long overdue.

I only wish Michael Collins were alive today to see his dream for an inclusive Methodist church finally come true.

by Huntly Collins | Friday, April 10, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

We had just gotten settled into the second-floor apartment of a house in the Rockhill neighborhood of Kansas City, Mo., when my husband burst through the door with disturbing news. A psychological test given to the entering class at St. Paul’s School of Theology, a Methodist seminary, indicated he was gay. If that were true, he might not be able to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a Methodist minister. Tears filled his eyes as he explained the test results to me. “But you’re not gay!” I insisted. “We know that!”

The incident, in the fall of 1969, was unsettling, but we soon moved past it. We loved each other very much.

Three years later, after he graduated from seminary and was ordained, the Rev. Michael L. Collins took his first church assignment as pastor of a congregation in a white, working-class neighborhood of Portland, Ore., our hometown. We lived across the street in a three-story, four-bedroom parsonage, which came with the job. I had never lived in such a large and beautiful place.

As Mike preached the social justice message of the Gospel, I became the dutiful minister’s wife, inviting church lay leaders over to the parsonage for Sunday pot-roast dinner. I began teaching Sunday school.

Then comes the kicker:

Late one summer afternoon in 1974, Mike summoned me from the parsonage to his office in the church. He paced the floor in front of me. When he spoke, there was a sense of urgency in his voice. “I’ve just tested positive for an STD, and you will have to be tested,” he told me. Pause. “I got it from a man.”

In other words, the psychological test given to the entering class at the seminary which “indicated” that he was homosexual got it right!

When Mike came out, he faced an impossible choice: Because the United Methodist Church forbade LGBTQ Methodists from being ordained and serving as parish ministers, he could either keep his ministry and continue to live a lie, or he could acknowledge his sexual orientation to church officials and lose his ministry. Night after night, we stayed up late to talk about the options. We also probed our relationship. We loved each other; I wanted that to be enough. But, of course, it wasn’t. I eventually moved out. He told church officials and was forced to give up his parish ministry. Soon, he moved to New York City and launched the first national resistance movement aimed at changing discriminatory Methodist doctrine.

The United Methodist Church in the United States is in a major schism, as a quarter of the affiliated individual churches have left, over precisely that issue.

A quarter of U.S. congregations in the United Methodist Church have received permission to leave the denomination during a five-year window, closing this month, that authorized departures for congregations over disputes involving the church’s LGBTQ-related policies.

This year alone, 5,641 congregations received permission from their regional conferences to leave the denomination as of Thursday, according to an unofficial tally by United Methodist News. In total, 7,658 have received permission since 2019. Thursday marked the last scheduled regional vote, according to the news service, when the Texas Annual Conference authorized four congregations’ departures.

The vast major(ity) are conservative-leaning churches responding to what they see as the United Methodists’ failure to enforce bans on same-sex marriage and the ordaining of openly LGBTQ persons.

The new year^[1]The cited article was published on December 15, 2023. is expected to bring more changes.

The first denomination-wide legislative gathering in eight years, slated for spring 2024, will consider calls to liberalize policies on marriage and ordination. It will also debate rival proposals, either to decentralize the international church — which has at least as many members outside the United States as in — or provide overseas congregations with the same exit option their U.S. counterparts had.

Yup! At the beginning of this month, the United Methodist Church General Conference repealed bans on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage. Apparently, for the General Conference, God had simply been wrong when he prohibited homosexual activity (Leviticus 18:22), or changed his mind, despite Malachi 3:6, “For I am the Lord; I change not.” The General Conference must have missed the words of Jesus, who said, in Matthew, Chapter 5:

17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

Perhaps the General Conference believe that they are now smarter or wiser than God?

‘Cafeteria Catholic’ is a term of long derision, describing professed Catholics who just pick and choose whet parts of Catholic doctrine they’ll accept, and which ones they ignore or outright reject. Our nation’s most famous Catholic, Joe Biden, certainly fits into that, openly and strongly rejecting the Church’s teachings on abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism. Perhaps ‘Muddled Methodists’ would be the proper term here?

There have been uncounted articles noting the fall off of religious affiliation in the United States, of people who have simply ceased going to church, or were never brought up to attend. But, just as serious is the number of people who do still go to Christian churches, but reject the teachings of the God in whom they profess to believe. Being good and kind and nice has overtaken actual belief in God in so many people.

Back to the originally cited OpEd:

Despite our separation and eventual divorce, Mike and I remained soulmates. In the fall of 1983, I moved from Oregon to Philadelphia to take a reporting job at The Inquirer. I was excited to be joining the staff at one of the country’s leading metropolitan dailies, but just as excited to be moving within easy commuting distance of Mike in New York.

Our rekindled connection was short-lived. Michael Leroy Collins died of complications due to AIDS on Oct. 15, 1984, a week and a day after his 37th birthday. He was among the first wave of gay men in New York to succumb to a virus that would go on to kill more than 40 million people worldwide.

I do feel sorry for Mrs Collins, who has continued to use her late ex-husband’s last name, forty years after he went to his eternal reward. But, in the remainder of her column, she goes on to tell us that she has continued his work of attempting to steer the Methodist Church away from the words of the Lord recorded in the Bible in which she professes to believe.