Mark Tooley on Himself

Mr. Tooley of UM Action e-mailed a brief autobiography:

How did I become involved in United Methodist controversies?

I grew up in a mid-size United Methodist church in Arlington, Virginia. My maternal grandmother, who lived with my parents, my brother and myself, took my brother and me to church from a very early age. My mother's family had been Methodist since her ancestor of 200 years ago was converted under the influence of Francis Asbury in southwest Virginia.

The church was typically Methodist. Mostly older people my grandmother'sage. It was friendly, traditional, characterized by the usual personality disputes common to all churches, and hosted a wide spectrum of pastors over the nearly 3 decades I attended there, from pretty liberal to pretty conservative. The congregation was mostly but not uniformly conservative.

Since a small child, I have been a believer in Jesus Christ. My faith grew under several Sunday school teachers, the preaching at my church, and the old hymns that we sang every Sunday. During much of my childhood and adolescence, these experiences often seemed perfunctory or even dreary. Now I reflect and see how God used even the dull moments to reveal Himself and direct my path. For all the complaints about United Methodism, I personally know how the Lord has and is using our church for tremendous good.

While a college student I began serving as the lay delegate to theVirginia Annual Conference and also became the missions chairperson. In the first role, I was often surprised by controversial political resolutions brought forward by the conference church and society committtee. In the latter role, I began to study the General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM).

What I learned about GBGM was highly distressing. The dramatic decline in overseas missionaries. The enormous spending on headquarters expenses. The grants to controversial, non-church related political advocacy groups, all of them liberal to far-left, and a few even Marxist in orientation. I wrote a 15 page report about GBGM, which I shared with my church's administrative board and mailed to all other UM churches in our district. Like me, the people of my church were surprised and in some cases angry. We contacted our bishop and also hosted meetings at our church, one of which featured a GBGM director, the other of which featured United Methodist evangelist Ed Robb, the then chairman of the IRD.

The resulting controversy persuaded our bishop of Virginia to organize avisit by a group of us from the Arlington District to GBGM. About two dozen of us, mostly lay people, met with GBGM executives for several hourson Veterans Day 1989. We were received cordially, but as we got into the details of our grievance, the conversation became somewhat heated. When one of us asked the GBGM treasurer if he realized that the vast majority of United Methodists would disagree with their grants to groups then involved in armed revolution, he responded that he did. But he said most United Methodists had also opposed the civil rights movement. GBGM's spending policies could not be governed by popular opinion in the church.

We left that meeting convince that GBGM, although it executives were clearly sincere, was not attuned to the beliefs of most United Methodists. We formed a group called United Methodists for More Faithful Ministry to advocate reform of GBGM. Several of us also entered into a formal dialogue with our bishop and several other conference officers. That two year dialogue resulted in two petitions that were approved by the Virginia Annual Conference and submitted to the 1992 General Conference. One would have restricted GBGM's ability to fund non-church groups. The other would have mandated priority for direct support of missionaries.

I attended the 1992 General Conference in Louisville, Kentucky as part ofGood News' legislative team. I sat in on the Global Ministries legislative committee and watched Virginia's petitions be defeated, along with other proposals for reform at GBGM. Almost invariably, after a debate, a GBGM executive was invited to speak to the committee about the petitions. The committee always accepted his reassurances that the petitions were unneeded.

After Louisville, I was convinced that only a nationwide education and advocacy effort could achieve any substantive reform of GBGM. In 1994, then IRD President Diane Knippers asked if I would be interested infilling a newly created position at IRD that would focus on reform work within the United Methodist Church. I had frequently hosted Diane and other IRD staffers at events in the Virginia Conference. At this time I was a "reports officer" or analyst covering issues in southeast Africa for the Central Intelligence Agency in McLean, Virginia. But my true passion was for reviving the United Methodist Church. Without hesitation, I joined the IRD's staff.

What has happened at the IRD and within the mainline churches since 1994? I will address that in my next blog entry.

As a postscript, I will add that my grandmother, so influential in theformation of my Methodist faith, died four years ago. She and I attended church together from my earliest childhood, until a few months before her death. She had lived with us during my childhood because both her husband and son had been killed in terrible accidents. But God used those tragedies to strengthen her faith and, ultimately, to transmit faith to me.