How has Equality, Diversity and Inclusion affected your church?

[hopeforhappiness]

I just wonder whether this whole thing is a way of us avoiding persecution, by emptying all the ministries in the church and our church of the gospel challenge.
Is it just a grifting scam for the world, or is it something significantly more dangerous for the world and for us.

 

[jas3]

DEI has been infiltrating Methodism for a long time, mostly with "egalitarianism" and an emphasis on "gender neutrality." So the UMC hymnal, as you've probably noticed, has a lot of revisions or alternate suggested verses (e.g. substituting "faith of the martyrs" in place of the original "faith of our fathers") and has modified the Scripture in the psalter to remove references to God as "He" or "Him," as well as replacing the generic "he" with "the person" or "the one" (e.g. "blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" becomes "blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord"). I have two older hymnals from my grandparents, one from 1939 (original copyright 1932) and one from 1966 (orig. copyright 1964), and it's amazing how numerous the changes between those and the 1989 hymnal are. And ironically the 1989 version is the one that has John Wesley's directions for singing in the front, which say not to change the hymns.

The influence of "egalitarianism" is seen in the women holding the positions of pastors and bishops. This was a major deviation from historic Methodist teaching that I was hoping the Global Methodist Church would correct, but unfortunately they have firmly stated that they intend to continue the practice.