Revisiting the GracePoint issue

In late 2009, one of the most visible stories within the United Methodist Church was the decision by the Rev. Bryson Butts to resign as a clergy member of the Kansas West Annual Conference and take almost all of his congregation of GracePoint UMC with him. Butts founded GracePoint Community Church just afterward.

What has gone relatively underreported is that Butts was fired by the Board of Directors of his new church in January of this year (see the article on Butts' firing in the Wichita Eagle).

At the time of Butts' departure from the UMC, a lot of criticism was directed at the annual conference in Kansas. Butts was a dynamic young pastor whose ministry was proving itself, so the thinking went, and his decision to take himself and his congregation out of the UMC was just another example of church bureaucracy getting in the way of the gospel.

I was skeptical of that view from the beginning, and my skepticism only increased when I had the chance to speak to an elder from the Kansas West Conference near the end of 2009. This pastor suggested that there was a lot more under the surface, specifically that the conference leadership had a lot more information than it felt willing to speak in public. The view given to me was that public opinion about Butts was ill-informed at best, and that people would view the annual conference with a lot more sympathy if they knew what folks in Kansas knew.

There are good reasons why a bishop or annual conference doesn't go public with all the details in situations like this, despite the contemporary craving for such things (a facet of our culture that I blame on the 24/hr news cycle). In the GracePoint situation, my guess is that most people will never know the full story. But they might get an inkling of the character of the person at the center of the controversy by considering the subsequent history of Bryson Butts and his former church.

I say 'former' not just in relation to GracePoint UMC but also to GracePoint Community Church. And that's because Butts was fired by GracePoint Community Church just about a year after he founded it following the GracePoint UMC exodus. A widely-distributed letter from the GracePoint Board of Directors to the GracePoint congregation details the reasons for Butts' termination, which I have personally read.

My current column in the United Methodist Reporter takes a look at the story with an eye to the lessons we can learn from it for those of us who are committed to something other than bare congregationalism in our church polity. Check out the column at this link.