Methodists aflame

The logo of the United Methodist Church (UMC) is a cross and a flame signifying the spirited mind, heart, body and soul of its constituency. This weekend, the local congregation that meets in Saipan’s Immanuel UMC is celebrating its 10th year anniversary as a connected body to the global communion. A part of the California-Pacific Annual Conference (a unit analogous to the Archdiocese of the Catholic Church), the English congregation gathers in the same compound with its Korean, Filipino, and Chinese institutionally separate counterparts in the siblinghood of faith.

Its celebration begins with a Peace Vigil on Friday in the environs of the American Memorial Park. In an island that accentuates the relics of war and glorifies the warrior, this call to conscience moves against the communal grain.

The UMC’s Book of Discipline declares: “We deplore war and urge the peaceful settlement of all disputes among nations.” However, it supports and extends its ministry to both the conscientious objector and the conscionable military service inductee.

It’s intent to be an inclusive community is exerting considerable pressure at the denominational center. This had been the case previously, e.g., the issue on slavery, and later, race, which rent the body politically and geographically. It did manage to reunite itself in concert with the advances of contemporary urban and secular society. In its last global assembly, the denomination showed a deep cleavage between those who seek a strict return to the historic practices of the faith, and those who insist that the movement of the Holy Spirit is leading the Church to new dominion. The ecclesiastical dance leans towards the former, particularly in divisive issues such as the Iraq war and Roe v. Wade. This will grow stronger with the influx among its ranks of newly converted members of the developing world, coming to the communion table from the tutelage of evangelical missionaries. The culture of 19th century Middle America that is vehemently poised against the cutting edge of science and the metropolis has been transfigured with a vengeance into the values of these new adherents.

Come Saturday, the congregation gathers its communicants, friends and supporters to lunch together at Pau Pau Beach. Relationships within this heterogeneous group is marked by civility between the races, but in the Koblerville compound, those who attend the Korean, Chinese, and Filipino worship services pretty much keep to themselves in self-sufficiency and survival. Cultural cohesion unites them more than identical religious convictions. In the English-speaking congregation, nationalities represented in the last 10 years have included continental U.S. citizens—mostly Caucasians though with a sputtering of hyphenated Americans, Korean and Filipino nationals, Tongans and Samoans, Fijians and other Melanesians, and the occasional Australians and Canadians who wandered into the worship service. All bring a previous connection to the British and the American branches of the communion.

Sunday’s English liturgical service will be led by former pastor and recently retired reverend Barbara Ripple. While pastor Ripple represents a more open-minded force within her denomination, her kind is increasingly becoming the minority opinion.

What has this got to with the concurrent Flame Tree Art Festival, or the obvious absence of Saipan’s arboreal bloom normally resplendent this time of the year?

Well, not much directly. Yet, though Saipan’s foliage and verdure is not aflame with its signature flora, the Festival has a Filmfest that can only lead to the iconic realm. This week commemorated the birth of a prominent eastern icon, Siddharta Gautama Buddha. Most vividly, the world poured admiration to the genial, politically astute and ecclesiastically adept newly departed Santo Papa Giovanni Paolo II. He left behind a deceptively monolithic structure whose fractious body had been kept together by the sheer force of Il Papa’s personality. A Vatican Conclave chooses his successor. I expect continuity rather than discontinuity.

Meanwhile, the current White House Methodist occupant and his retinue of evangelical advisers, confidants and subordinates are belligerent. They are out to wrestle the world back from the wayward ways of radicals and heretics within its fold (read, infant murderers and same-sex liaison cuddlers), and the malediction of the satanic and demonic practices of the Axis of Evil (read, Muslims, President Chavez, and North Koreans).

As a former Methodist cleric in Loyolan Retreat, it is evident that the issue of religious life is in the front burners of contemporary politics. Militant Christianity is on the march. But my non-performing Methodist heart, though ablaze and aflame, beat to a different march. It challenges the basic mode of Mesopotamian supernatural metaphors still dominant among Christians today.

The 17 centuries clergy-dominated patriarcal mode of ecclesiastical life needs revamping. Church structure is authoritatively oppressive, religious piety disastrously otherworldly. Social gospel expressions are Band-Aid operations to a hemorrhaging body. Even calls to ethical behavior are desperate remedial repair on obsolete social systems needing an overhaul. Traditional liturgies only hold sentimental nostalgia. Doctrinal irrelevancies parade for intellectual certitude. A thoroughgoing religious transformation is the call of the hour.

My wife advised that I stay on retreat mode a while. And religiously take my high-blood pressure medicine.

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School