Editor’s Note: This is another installment in an interview with Gerry Charlotte Phelps (click her name to see the other articles in this series).
ReformationUCC: You’ve recently retired. What message do you want to convey to Bible Believing Christians in the mainline churches? To others?
This is my message: Don’t quit. Don’t leave. Don’t give up. Stay in your denomination and fight. The tide is beginning to turn!
In the United Methodist Church, it has been a long, hard slog. Like you, we Bible-believing Methodist pastors have been passed over, ignored, sometimes hounded and occasionally fired. We’ve been invisible most of the time, voiceless almost, without power in most ways. Like you, we gathered ourselves into groups. The number of those groups kept increasing. We had a newsletter, then a magazine. We learned the politics that our opposition knew so well. Then we began to prevail on a few more issues, then a few more.
Meanwhile, the new seminarians coming into the clergy were more and more conservative theologically. That has been going on since the 70s, when the professors at my liberal seminary were alarmed about it. It is happening more every year. And the great bulk of United Methodists still believes the Bible and wants their pastors to as well.
Finally, we are seeing that we are likely to win control of the denomination in just a few more years. What if we had given up earlier?
Maybe that is why God has simply refused to let so many of us leave and go where we would be more at home, but has kept us within our denominations. I, for one, yearned to leave through the years, but God never gave me the freedom to go.
As for us Methodists – I suspect John Wesley has been addressing God about us without let-up ever since he got there. No doubt your founders are doing the same. Along with all those who have gone on before us. And God does seem to be on the way to answering their prayers. I don’t think it will be much longer now. God is good!
