A founding fear fulfilled

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It:

Holding the line on Biblical sexuality.

The United Methodist Church changed its definition of marriage in 2024, a decision that has had ripple effects.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: The latest of those is a severed relationship with a school in Kentucky. WORLD Reporter Travis Kircher has the story.

TRAVIS KIRCHER: Asbury Theological Seminary President Dr. David F. Watson likes to show off his school’s new global alumni center.

WATSON: We’ve had alumns in all 50 states, 80 different countries…

One of his favorite displays is a wall showing the names of each graduating student since the school’s first class in 1924. There was only one student in that initial class. Since then, more than 14,000 graduates call Asbury seminary their alma mater.

WATSON: We have pastors, we have evangelists, missionaries, professors among our distinguished alumni.

Watson says that in the early 20th century, evangelist Henry Clay Morrison was disturbed by what he saw as a liberalization of Methodist theology and education in the United States. He felt it was leading students away from Biblical truth. So he founded the school in Wilmore, Kentucky, in 1923.

WATSON: They wanted to establish a seminary in the Wesleyan Holiness tradition that would teach students in a way that would help them maintain their faith, the historic faith, the Orthodox faith throughout their time in seminary.

Over the decades, Watson says seminaries have faced a wide variety of heresies.

WATSON: It's hard to hold the line...all the inertia in the academy is to the left, and so if you want to maintain a position of historic orthodoxy, you're, you're going to have to be constantly vigilant about that.

But recently, Watson says the school has had a falling out with a onetime partner in that struggle: the United Methodist Church. Late last month, the school learned that the UMC removed it from the denomination’s list of approved seminaries for students pursuing UMC ordination.

WATSON: There were two reasons given. One is that we didn't have UMC faculty to teach UMC courses, history, polity, and doctrine. The second reason was incompatibility with the social principles.

Watson says the first issue—the question of faculty—was an easy fix.

WATSON: We do have United Methodist faculty here who could have taught those courses, but we weren't afforded the opportunity to make that change.

He thinks that’s because the real conflict centered around the second reason given for the delisting, Asbury’s refusal to sign onto the UMC’s recently revised social principles. Principles which underwent a major change two years ago…at the UMC’s General Conference.

AUDIO: Overwhelming majorities of delegates voted to remove barriers to full participation in the church for LGBTQ persons. These changes bring the Book of Discipline back to a neutral stance ensuring no group faces discrimination...

That’s how the UMC describes the changes in a General Conference recap video. More precisely, what the church did was remove language that said that the practice of homosexuality was incompatible with Christian teaching, and redefine marriage as a lifelong covenant between two people—rather than between a man and a woman.

Watson says that’s a radical departure from Biblical truth, one his seminary isn’t willing to make.

WATSON: Asbury has an ethos statement, and our ethos statement teaches we affirm marriage as sanctioned by God, which joins one man and one woman in a single exclusive union for life, as delineated in Scripture, and provides the sole context for sexual intimacy.

WORLD reached out to representatives of the UMC’s General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, but they declined to be interviewed. I was instead pointed to a written statement by the board’s general secretary, Rowland Fernandes, in which Fernandes said in part, quote, “Asbury’s published ethos statement is not compatible with the Social Principles of The United Methodist Church.”

I asked Watson if Asbury would ever consider changing its ethos statement.

WATSON: No. We're not going to change our sexual ethic in the future. You know, we would love, in time, to reconcile with the United Methodist Church, but that's not going to happen because we change our sexual ethic.

He says that’s because Biblical truth is objective and unchanging.

WATSON: Christian faith has a content, it has an historic orthodox content, and that content matters. It's rooted in scripture, it's given over to us in the creeds of the church...and the temptation is always to say, “Well, that was okay for back then, but today we know better, you know.” But God is not the author of confusion, and if God has told us something that's true, then we need to abide by that truth.

Watson says any student who is enrolled at Asbury by the fall semester will be eligible to pursue UMC ordination. Students enrolling after that…will not.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Travis Kircher, in Wilmore, Kentucky.

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