Remember way back in 2022 during a period called "Discernment" at our local United Methodist Church?

There isn't much about that season that I want to remember, but a few things are burned in my brain.

Remember how our pastor assured the conservatives that we were overreacting to the notion that the next UMC General Conference would abandon biblical, orthodox Christianity in favor of worldly, heterodox views on sexuality and biblical authority?

Remember how a couple of very vocal schoolteachers raised their angry, condescending voices at us to charge us with fear-mongering and spreading rumors?

Remember how the pastor and several 'insiders' recruited by him smeared our names, saying we were liars and divisive because "clearly" none of these things would happen?

Yeah, I remember that, too.

As it turns out, everything that traditionalists / conservatives said would come to pass at the next General Conference happened over the last two weeks as if being performed from a script:

• the UMC removed the prohibition on LGBTQ clergy
• the UMC removed a ban on contributing church money to pro-LGBTQ causes
• the UMC removed disciplinary measures for clergy officiating LGBTQ weddings
• the UMC reversed its biblical, orthodox position on human sexuality to chase after the affirmation of the unbelieving world

According to the UM News, the official news agency of the UMC:

The United Methodist Church’s condemnation of homosexuality — which sparked a half-century of conflict — is now no more. By a vote of 523 to 161 after about an hour and a half of debate, General Conference delegates eliminated the 52-year-old assertion in the denomination’s Social Principles that 'the practice of homosexuality… is incompatible with Christian teaching.' In the same vote, delegates affirmed 'marriage as a sacred, lifelong covenant that brings two people of faith (adult man and adult woman of consenting age or two adult persons of consenting age) into a union of one another and into deeper relationship with God and the religious community.'

And just in case you're foolish enough to think the UMC won't continue to follow the same trajectory into continued heterodoxy, the Council of Bishops president appealed to Psalm 46 and reminded United Methodists that their call is be still before God, but that "Being still is not God’s call to rest, but it is God’s call for us to get out of God’s way." (As a sarcastic aside, what I find even more ironic than the bishop finding something in the bible she says she still believes is her hateful refusal to call God by His 'preferred pronouns' that He clearly stated in Scripture, something that would most likely bring her under UMC disciplinary measures if she were talking about anyone other than God.)

"God is with us," she asserted confidently, "God is with this United Methodist Church leading us, and guiding us, and sustaining us, and preparing for us a future with hope."

Good luck with that. Seriously. You'll need it.

As I pointed out in September 2022, "I suspect that at the next General Conference, when progressives/liberals have the majority of delegates, the UMC will change their views on paper also (i.e. the Book of Discipline) and then join the apostate bodies [i.e. the ECUSA, PCUSA, and ELCA) as church bodies in name only but not by any objective, historic measure. At that point, the post-split UMC will no longer be united, nor any longer meaningfully Methodist, nor any longer truly a church in any historic sense."

Well, I'm not a prophet or a prophet's son, but it didn't take a prophet to see this coming. It didn't even take a remarkable amount of foresight. It only took liars and the blind (willfully or otherwise) to pretend like it was anything but Satan snickering while lighting a match...well, we told 'ya so.