Minister Joins Catholics, but Seeks to Keep Methodist Credentials

How far does the imperative of Christian unity stretch?

Not yet far enough to allow an ordained United Methodist minister to be a member of the Roman Catholic Church, according to the Protestant denomination’s ecumenical agency.

The Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns has filed a friend of the court brief with the United Methodist Church’s Judicial Council, the ecclesiastical high court, asking it to prohibit the Rev. William Farmer from retaining his clergy credentials if he joins another denomination.

“A person cannot be simultaneously an ordained clergyperson in the United Methodist Church and a lay member of any (other) church,” the commission said in its brief.

Ironically, the brief was authorized during the Oct. 5-9 meeting of the 35-member commission at a Catholic retreat center outside Chicago. The 8.9-million-member denomination’s Judicial Council will decide Farmer’s fate when it meets Oct. 27-30 in Atlanta.

Farmer, a retired professor of biblical studies, joined Holy Cross Catholic Church, a multiethnic congregation in Dallas, in 1990 while a clergy member of United Methodism’s North Texas Annual Conference.

Farmer said his decision to join the church was an expression of his commitment to ecumenism and racial justice.

Earlier this year, Methodist Bishop Bruce Blake declared Farmer “in disobedience to the order and discipline of the United Methodist Church” and declared “illegal” an action of the annual conference’s clergy session that described Farmer as “blameless in his life and official administration.”

Defending his stance, Farmer has argued in the Sept. 24 United Methodist Reporter that the denomination “ordains for ministry in the universal church of Jesus Christ.”

“If an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, in fulfillment of his or her call, is led to make a theologically valid gesture of ecumenical reconciliation and this action prompts the United Methodist Church to terminate his or her membership, then this would be a sign that ordination by the United Methodist Church is something less than ordination for ministry in the universal church of Jesus Christ,” Farmer wrote.

The unity commission’s brief to the judicial council focuses on the incompatibility of being both clergy and lay person.

“A person cannot be both clergy and lay simultaneously,” the brief said.