Resist or Submit: Surviving Religious Scapegoating (ePub)

In Submit or Resist: Authoritarian Leadership in the Church, I share the wisdom I gained from ten years of struggles as a spiritual leader within the United Methodist Church (UMC). In 2003, after a great deal of soul-searching, I responded to a call to full-time professional pastoral ministry. I submitted to a lengthy and often humiliating process that the UMC requires to become Ordained as a full Elder. I would complete a Master of Divinity and a Master of Arts in Transformational Leadership in the next ten years. Traveling to Honduras, El Salvador, Rwanda, and Uganda with other spiritual leaders changed me from a country hick to a global citizen.
After years of resisting the authoritarian power of Bishops and District Superintendents, I found the Church Within A Church Movement, a place without hierarchy, a community committed to dismantling oppression.

The journey was never easy; it was always costly. Yet, there were transcendent moments I will never forget. Although I suffered from the wrath of the UMC's authoritarian hierarchy, I would also discover hundreds of ordinary Methodists making huge contributions to spreading compassion and grace in their communities and around the world. Sometimes I succeeded beyond my wildest imagination, and other times I was crushed by my own failures. I survived the journey, but the person who survived is not the same person who began the journey.
This is my story. It begins with my basement flooding in 2003, which I took as a sign that I needed to submit to God's call. Over the decade of submitting and resisting, a great power guided me, but I could not always discern the source of that power. My image of God expanded from John Wesley's rational Triune God to an immense benevolent Cosmic creative force. I may have started by following the Jesus described in the gospel stories, but I ended up simply a speck of stardust in the Cosmic Christ.
The story is not just about the United Methodist Church. It is about an age of humanity and our evolution to overcome thousands of years of patriarchy, hierarchy, and violent authoritarianism. I finally pulled these pieces together to form a memoir because there is so much work that needs to be done to save humanity and save the earth from a culture of domination and authoritarian leadership.