Q Toon: The Untied Methodist Church

Leaders of what has up to now been the United Methodist Church reached their breaking point this month. Conservatives, largely from Africa, the Philippines, and the southern U.S., have been horrified by acceptance by their liberal peers — mainly from North America and the British Isles — of marriage equality and the ordination of LGBTQ clergy.

A 16-member panel will now draw up a divorce settlement to present to Methodists' General Conference in Minneapolis this May. Conservatives are expected to break away to form their own denomination, taking a $25 million alimony payment on their way out. Everybody gets to keep their own churches, seminaries, ministries and property.

The devil, to coin a phrase, is in the details. Where congregations have a variety of viewpoints in the pews, there are bound to be some nasty fights, hurt feelings, and perhaps a few locks changed. Is Pastor Kim still covered under the old retirement plan? Who gets to keep the paten bought with Aunt Esther's memorial funds?

I'm being facetious when I suggest giving the judgmental, law-centric books of the Old Testament to one side and the Good News, salvation-laden books of the New Testament to the other.

You can think of the Old Testament as the part where God lays down the law and then gets pissed off by the children of Israel and sending plagues and serpents and Persians. Then Jesus shows up in the New Testament and hangs around with prostitutes, tax collectors, and fishermen, and sending them off to run errands on the Sabbath. His disciple Peter, the rock on whom Jesus's church would be built, dreams of eating bacon cheeseburgers and shrimp scampi.

But that's a simplistic summary of the Bible. The New Testament is also dominated by a convert from Judaism, Paul, who writes volumes to haul believers back to the Law of Deuteronomy. Pauline epistles to Timothy and the church in Rome preach against gay sex; Paul would rather that all believers abstain from sex, but he grudgingly cuts heterosexuals some slack.

Instead of divvying up the Bible by Testament, I should have granted the antigay conservatives custody of all the books of the Bible with an "O" in the title. That way, they get Deuteronomy and several of the Pauline epistles, as well as Exodus, Revelation and a smattering of doom-and-gloom prophets.

The liberals, sadly, would lose the Johannine gospel and epistles, but would keep the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Genesis, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, which are the only books of the Old Testament that get frequent usage in the Western Church anyway.

Perhaps the liberals and conservatives could agree on visitation rights on holidays.