Timothy Tennent

Tribute to Eddie Fox

Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints, declares Psalm 116:15. This is a verse which surprises us with a different understanding of death than what we typically think of. For us, death is not normally described as “precious.” We often use words like “sad” or “tragic,” but not a […]

The Crisis at Mt. Bethel UMC

By now most United Methodists have heard about the tragic disruption of the thriving ministry at Mt. Bethel UMC. Mt. Bethel, by their own public declaration, has decided to disaffiliate with the United Methodist Church due to long standing episcopal hostility towards evangelical churches who stand in opposition to the so-called “progressive” future many of […]

What They Wrote in Chalk

This article is about the Free Methodist Church, not the United Methodist Church. For those who may not know your brothers and sisters in the larger Wesleyan family, the Free Methodist church traces its history back to 1860. It was founded out of the mainline Methodist Church (then known as the Methodist Episcopal Church) for […]

A United Methodist Lament

I am one of those cradle Methodists. I will also soon be approaching forty years of ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church. For those of us who have been in the denomination that long, we have had front row seats to the slow and tortuous decline of the UMC. We have watched our beloved […]

The Trust Clause in the United Methodist Church

One of the key features of the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation (hereafter referred to as the Protocol) is the suspension of the Trust Clause, which is permitted within the current Discipline of the church. The Trust Clause is a provision in the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church which states […]

Psalm 41 and Holy Week

As we prepare for Holy Week, we should remember that the early church boldly decided to include in even the early eucharistic liturgies the phrase, “on the night in which he was betrayed.” They are, of course, following the apostle Paul who uses the phrase in 1 Corinthians 11:23 as he gives us that earliest […]

Rise Up, O Church of God – Have Done with Lesser Things!

Like many United Methodists around the world, the Council of Bishops’ decision to delay, yet again, the General Conference and consideration of the Protocol until August or September 2022 was met with great disappointment. COVID-19 is, of course, the cause of the multiple delays, first from May 2020 to August 2021 and now to 2022. […]

The Movement from Shouting to Silencing in Contemporary Culture

In his classic work After Virtue, the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that while there is plenty of evidence of declining morals in Western society, the more profound challenge is the inability to even frame a moral argument.1 We no longer have sufficient shared assumptions as a culture to reach any kind of consensus on […]

Embracing the Checkmate in Our Fifty-Year Struggle in the United Methodist Church

Now that 2021 has finally arrived, we can begin to turn our attention, once again, to the momentous season which will likely unfold in 2021 in the United Methodist Church. This year will almost certainly be the year that the United Methodist denomination agrees to some kind of separation agreement, known as the Protocol. Millions […]

The Glide Memorial Story

The Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco was the largest Methodist Church in the California-Nevada Conference. From 1964 to 2000, the church was led by Rev. Cecil Williams, who removed the cross from the sanctuary, stopped all celebrations of the Eucharist, and baptized people not in the name of the triune God, but in […]