This Fall, the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, our church’s $5 million political lobby office in Washington, D.C., is organizing a series of seminars speaking against our nation’s immigration laws. Several of our bishops will enthusiastically participate. 

       UM Action needs your help right now to counter this lopsided radical political witness from our own UMC lobby office. Our goal is to raise $50,000 by November 30. This will enable UM Action to send staff to uncover these radical activities, publish our investigative reports, write resolutions for next year’s annual conferences, and to offer a better, more balanced and BIBLICAL political witness. 

         But let me first tell you about Church and Society’s ultra-liberal crusade against our nation’s immigration laws, and how several bishops will once again speak political rhetoric rather than the Gospel.

         The overall theme from United Methodist officials has been that virtually any restriction against illegal immigration into America is “unjust.” According to liberal church officials, nearly everyone in the world has a “right” to live in the United States. To suggest otherwise is “racist” or uncaring or bigoted.

      One of the seminars was in Arkansas in September. Another was outside Chicago in October. A United Methodist-sponsored rally for liberalizing immigration laws convened in Ohio in September. One of the speakers was Arizona’s Bishop Minerva Carcaño. She chairs the United Methodist Council of Bishops committee on immigration. She also heads a UMC “interagency task force” that “targets reform of U.S. immigration laws.”

      According to Bishop Carcaño and other United Methodist officials, it’s all very, very simple. During the recent UM General Conference, several of our bishops held a press conference to denounce U.S. Government policies that “criminalize” illegal immigrants as a matter of “national security.”  Bishops Mary Ann Swenson of the California-Pacific Annual Conference and retired Bishop Felton May spoke out in favor of liberalizing immigration laws.

      Why do United Methodist Church officials get to spend church dollars on their pet political projects? And why do these liberal church bureaucrats commonly deride our church’s conservative members as bigoted for not being as supposedly enlightened as they are?

      “Today’s policies on immigration are the new slavery,” Bishop Swenson unthoughtfully claimed. Bishop May pondered sarcastically, “I wonder what it would be like if we as United Methodists said, ‘Bushie [President Bush], tear down this wall [along the Mexican border]!’”

      UMAction is about exposing and counteracting the radical and far-left politics that too many United Methodist officials offer up as a substitute for the Gospel. 

    We at UMAction doggedly monitor and report what the ultra-liberal United Methodist Board of Church and Society is up to on Capitol Hill, where it lobbies Congress every day in the name of our church.  We expose and widely disseminate otherwise unavailable information about bishops and church bureaucrats who exploit the church’s money and the church’s good name in the promotion of political causes that most United Methodists find shocking.

UMACTION NEEDS YOUR HELP TO RETURN UNITED METHODISM TO THE BIBLE!

      If you agree with UMAction that United Methodism needs to return to the BASICS of the Gospel, we need YOUR help! Our UMAction Briefing goes to hundreds of thousands of United Methodist homes. We introduce resolutions to local annual conferences and help local United Methodists advocate for church reform. We work with other church renewal groups to affirm traditional Methodist teachings among our bishops, our seminaries and our church agencies.  At the recent General Conference, we helped international and U.S. delegates beat back liberal efforts to approve homosexual clergy in our church.

      Fighting the entrenched liberalism of the United Methodist bureaucracy is a very steep, uphill battle, of course! But God is slowly renewing our still great church.

      Meanwhile, UMAction depends upon YOU for our ministry to move forward. Your gift of $50, $100, $250 or more will hasten the day when all our bishops work together to win disciples for Jesus Christ rather than devote themselves to questionable political causes, like liberalized immigration laws. Please donate now. 

      Our goal is to raise $50,000 by November 30. Can you help us continue to prayerfully challenge and push United Methodism forward into a new era of church growth and biblical faithfulness?  If so, please let me hear from you today!

Many thanks!

Mark Tooley

UMAction Executive Director