General Conference 2008

John Wesley Ministered to a Gay Man?

I wanted to share with y’all an excerpt from a legal brief that RMN submitted to the Judicial Council during the trial of Rev. Beth Stroud in support of her efforts to regain her credentials as an ordained pastor within the Church. Before reading this document, I knew that Wesley actively served the poor, people in prisons, and even advocated for the abolition of slavery, but I had no idea that this man – in the early 18th century – felt called to serve and be in ministry with at least one gay man that we know of.

Amicus Curiae Brief of Reconciling Ministries Network, Inc. in Support of Respondent Rev. Elizabeth Stroud. August 25, 2005, pp. 15-16:

The United Methodist Church follows the model of Wesley striving to include the disadvantaged, especially those disadvantaged due to socially dictated status. Wesley's experiences beyond the conventional church with the poor, working-class laborers, prisoners, children, and slaves transformed him and help make care for the disadvantaged a hallmark of nascent Methodist Church Societies (¶103). His "tenacious [obsession with] every point relating to decency and [Anglican] order" yielded to inclusive ministries that stood in solidarity with God's oppressed people, even when that placed him against conventional church custom (13). Wesley recognized entire groups of people as victims. He committed himself to ministry with them, and agitated for major reforms on behalf of them and the church eternal. He saw "the finger of God" touching them.

Wesley's ministry is exemplary in the context of the present case. In practice, Wesley shunned bigotry, controversially including an actual homosexual (14). The Holy Club's ministry with Blair a protégé of Wesley who was also a homosexual and imprisoned for sodomy provides context for the Judicial Council's current deliberations. Members of Wesley's Holy Club "showed an unconventional and unpopular sympathy" for Blair. Nowhere in fourteen journal entries does Wesley judge Blair; instead, Wesley read to him, contacted his attorney, and wrote his legal case. On November 14, 1732, however, some Methodists met at a local inn to discuss Blair's case. People criticized Wesley and the Methodists, believing it would be better for Blair to suffer in prison than to associate Methodism with homosexuality. Despite hostile criticism, Wesley and the Holy Club maintained their ministry with Blair (15).

Wesley embodied the doctrinal belief in God's prevenient grace, justifying us in Jesus, and refused any temptation to commit bigotry when he encountered a homosexual. Although his own church used Blair as a pretext for gossip, coercion and conformity, Wesley demonstrated an abundant sense of grace and reckoned the homosexual as his protégé. Both Wesley and Jesus urged a faithful response to those in need, regardless of their status, and in firm resistance to human religious authorities.

13. See, Snyder, Howard A. The Radical Wesley and Patterns for Church Renewal. Illinois; InterVarsity Press, 1980. 186-87. See also Snyder, Howard A. Liberating the Church: The Ecology of Church & Kingdom. Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1983. 181-194. and Carder, Kenneth L. A Bishop's Reflections. Tennessee: Providence House, 1996. 90-91,100-101,107-108.

14. See Knotts, Experiencing God's Love: A MFSA Presentation to The United Methodist Committee to Study Homosexuality, December 1989, citing V.H.H. Green and Wesley's Journal entries from Oxford, Autumn and Winter of 1732.

15. Green, Vivian Hubert Howard, John Wesley. Nelson, 1964. 32.; Green, Vivian Hubert Howard, The Young Mr. Wesley: A Study of John Wesley and Oxford. Epworth Press, 1963. 167, 178-179.

Why I Love the Quadrilateral

Part of why I love being a Methodist is that we are a dynamic people with dynamic and diverse ways of interpreting scripture, understanding God, and how we as God’s people relate to each other and to God. So, I am grateful for Wesley’s Quadrilateral.

For non-Methodists or those of you who are suspicious of theological frameworks that include within their names geometric shapes (jk), Wesley’s Quadrilateral is a means of ascertaining how we think about God, what it means to be Christian, and how we should act as Christians by reflecting on four things:

    1) Scripture,
    2) Tradition,
    3) Reason, and
    4) Personal Experience

Our Discipline has some beautiful language describing the Quadrilateral:

“Wesley believed that the living core of the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason” (Book of Discipline, 2004, p.77).

Revealed. Illumined. Vivified. Confirmed.

At the very least those are some great verbs! But seriously though . . .

As a people of the Book, I find comfort in believing that in Methodism, we are charged to use scripture as the authority and foundation of our work, actions, and interactions. In my opinion, scripture is at the core of our faith as it is through Scripture that we come to know the revelation of God's Word and the prevenient grace of God.

But we are also challenged to consider the scriptures in their entirety – in their clarity and ambiguity as well as their conformity and contradictions. So our faith is augmented when we not only examine our faith through scripture but also tradition, experience, and reason.

For example:

As Christians, we are grounded in a long faith tradition, one that springs forth from the Jewish faith tradition. We believe that the promises God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are revealed in Jesus Christ and expand the circle to whom God chooses as God's chosen people to include both male and female, Jew and Gentile, free and slave, and every human category (Gal. 3:23-29; Mark 3:35; John 1:10-16).

And as ours is a Living God, we believe that God works within us through the Holy Spirit in years past, this very day, and through the ages to come. We can see God in our everyday experience whether through the silence and burning of our hearts (Matt. 6:6; Luke 24:32), the majesty of God's creation, the relationships we build and the people we meet, and through our actions and those of others (Matt. 5:14-16). Our experience also includes the many frames through which we have come to interpret the world based on our gender identity, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, condition of ableness, sexual orientation, economic status, etc.

While we live in a very different world than when God walked the earth in the Garden of Eden and in the flesh as Jesus Christ nearly 2,000 years ago, there are also many things that we share in common with every age of history, including the struggles of war and peace, gross wealth limited to a select few in the midst of pervasive poverty, doing what God would want us to do vs. what we want to do, etc. Ultimately, we know that things change. But we have tradition that carries us through all the changes in our lives and the changes throughout the ages.

Yet, not all of our tradition has stayed the same across the ages. It is through reasoning and reflection on and of the Good News as proclaimed in the Scriptures and of our personal experience and how the Spirit is moving within our hearts that we as Christians determine what we believe to be God's Truth and God's plan for our lives. There was a time when Christians used scripture to justify slavery. There was a time when Christians used scripture to justify structural racism in the form of racial segregation, discrimination, and forbid interracial relationships and marriage. Yet I believe with the exception of some extreme groups, as a Church, we have been able to change our positions on many social issues because the heart of scripture and God's Good News is God's love for the world and for all people. Striving to mirror God's perfect love, we too must show compassion, mercy, and love toward all people – even our enemies and those we do not like (1 John 4:7-21; Matt 5:43-48; Luke 6:32-36; Luke 10:25-37; Rom. 12:9-21).

So as we move ever closer to General Conference, may our hearts and minds be on Jesus the Christ, our eyes on the revealed Word with a vision of the Great Banquet – where all God’s children are invited, our tongues ready to speak the Truth, our hands ready to wash, feed and serve, and our spirits diminished so that the Holy Spirit might dwell in us to invigorate our souls for the greater glory of God and God’s kin-dom.

Conversion

When I was running to be a delegate for General Conference, I was distraught by all of the politics involved. I guess I somehow forgot that as a nearly 300 year-old institution within a 2,000 year-old tradition and institution, even the Methodist church is not immune from politics. Call me naïve …

There was a moment, sometime after the 15th round of balloting and after numerous caucusing of the Common Witness strategy team, I felt immensely dejected. And it wasn’t because I hadn’t been elected but I felt sick to my stomach that this - OUR Church - conducts business in such a way that so frighteningly parallels partisan politics within secular government. Are we not the Church? Are we not called to a higher order of business and conduct? To this so-called practice of “holy conferencing?”

I apparently wasn’t the only one annoyed at the conference. Seated to my left was a charming woman, not quite middle-aged – still young with a husband and young children. This was my first annual conference and the conference was trying to help guide “newbies” like me through the process by partnering us up with veterans or at least those who had been to conference before. This woman had attended several annual conferences and was partnered up with another newbie but I still chatted with her throughout the conference.

We talked about our experiences in the church. I talked about coming from a conservative Christian background, longing for progressive social justice but also my deep desire for progressive Christians to reclaim the name of Jesus, reclaim the Bible, and spread the Good News that Jesus came for all people to transform all lives so that we could also transform others.

At some point there was a proposed petition requesting our conference to support secular legislative efforts to amend the Illinois State Constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman and go even further by prohibiting the creation of institutions such as civil unions.

Trembling, I walked to a microphone and waited for the Bishop to call on me. Thankfully, I had a friend in the Conference Secretary, Harriet McCabe, a woman of good Christian faith who reminds me of my grandmother. I told her that if I were to ever speak before the assembly that I would be looking to her for strength and prayer.

When the Bishop announced, “Microphone 4, are you in favor or opposed to this petition?” all I remember is looking at Harriet in the eyes. With a smile and glow on her face, my hands and arms were trembling, but my voice and the words exited my mouth with assurance and strength. I spoke something of my faith and journey as a gay man and what it would mean for me to one day be able to walk down the aisle of my church and swear before God, my family and faith community, that my partner and I dedicate our lives to each other and to God. And at some point I sat down.

At the very end of the conference, as we all prepared to leave the convention center and head home, the woman next to me pulled me aside and said she had to tell me a story. She told me that for all of her life she had been on the other side of the fence pertaining to homosexuality. Everything she had been taught and from her own reading and thoughtful interpretation of the Bible told her that homosexuality was wrong. She felt that she was still called to love homosexuals but that the Bible was unequivocal about homosexual acts.

Then she told me that she had had a conversation with her brother about homosexuality immediately before leaving to come to annual conference. In that conversation, she told her brother that she knew that homosexuality would come up yet again in legislation this year and she still struggled with it. She confessed to her brother that the only way she could imagine ever changing her mind and ideas about homosexuality would be for her to meet a homosexual. And here, for four days, she sat next to a gay man who she saw no difference in orthodoxy, we shared a belief in the centrality and power of Christ to transform lives, and how after four days she had gone from believing all homosexuality to be immoral to now believing that there could be something loving and something having to do with God in gay and lesbian relationships. She didn’t know what to do next or have everything sorted out about what she did and did not believe. But we both hugged and cried in each other’s arms.

During the 20th Laity Ballot, I was elected as an Alternate Delegate to Jurisdictional Conference. But it didn’t matter to me. I had experienced a conversion that day.

Evangelism

Evangelism. We progressive Methodists often shudder at the sound of this word. There are many reasons why, many of them good. Yet I believe evangelism is at the core of our faith. In the Great Commissioning, Jesus commands:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matt. 28: 19-20).

As Rev. Troy Plummer recently preached, so often we confuse evangelism with saving souls and getting people baptized as if what it means to be a Christian ends there. Yet we come from the Wesleyan tradition and so we must ask ourselves, how has becoming a Christian transformed our lives and how are we transforming the lives of others?

My personality does not lend itself to door knocking or the direct inquiry evangelism of “Have you accepted Jesus into your life?” Thankfully, I think there is a place for this in Methodism but our tradition has a history of evangelism through works of righteousness and relationships. We know that no amount of deeds will make God love us any more or less but often our neighbors notice when we do acts of loving kindness and humility, especially in a world so often devoid of them. I think the best form of evangelism then is when we praise God, follow the commandments, and live as the living sacrifices we proclaim ourselves to be during every celebration of Communion. Thus my form of evangelism is to try to be the man that God wants me to be - a living example of Christ - as well as to tell my story to others.

Telling one’s story, though, is not an easy task and is quite a vulnerable act. You open yourself up to criticism and even harm.

I have the utmost respect for Joey Heath. Joey is a modern day evangelist: he has the courage to preach the Gospel – God’s unfailing love for him as God’s creation. Joey spreads the Good News by telling his own story – his struggles to be the kind of human being God wants him to be, his longing to be accepted by our institutional church which denies him, and his hopes and dreams that the United Methodist Church will soon accept him for whom he is – as God already has – as God’s own and beloved.

My own life story and coming to terms with my sexuality and my faith greatly parallel Joey’s and yet our stories diverge because I come from an extraordinarily privileged position. I live in a Reconciling Annual Conference with a Bishop who in the first years of his episcopacy openly welcomed gay and lesbian folk by name. I have the luxury of attending a Reconciling United Methodist congregation where we openly and regularly affirm the sacred worth of all people. I had the privilege of being able to run as a delegate for General Conference as an out, gay, young adult and more or less unknown candidate and then actually be elected.

This comes with its own dangers as well though. I can comfortably forget that there are many congregations in my own conference that still have not heard the Good News that Christ has opened the invitation to all people of every human category. I can comfortably forget that there are GLBTQ children of God and their allies in my own conference who do not feel like they have the support they need to be and feel fully human. This leads me to regularly question: As a member of a reconciling annual conference and congregation, how can I as an individual and we as a community of faith better nurture those within our own regional community as well as reach out to those like Joey who live in congregations and regions and communities that have yet to recognize their sacred worth? I lift this up as a prayer and hope that God might use me and others to transform it into action.

“Fearfully and Wonderfully Made”

Being gay and Christian seems somewhat oxymoronic. Being gay and fundamentalist Christian borders on masochistic. But in high school anyway, I seemed to be entrenched in both lives. It took me a solid four years to come to terms with my sexuality in middle and high school. Even just acknowledging to myself that I was gay involved years of denial, lies to myself and others and trying to believe that I was straight, and then resignation that this is who I am. I think it took another four years for me to feel the grace of God afresh in my heart and feel like a child of God and not as a victim of an unjust world.

At the same time that I was coming into my own and growing into my sexual orientation, I was growing in my understanding of Christianity. In high school, I felt like my United Methodist church youth group was focused too exclusively on how to get youth to come to church by using secular activities such that they abandoned exploring what it meant to be Christian sufficiently. So, instead of regularly attending MYF, I attended Christian Fellowship – an evangelical Christian club at my high school that was not school sponsored due to Separation of Church and State “issues.” When I attended Fellowship, I felt energized by their contemporary worship service held in a U.S. History classroom and intellectually stimulated during our bible studies held in the Foreign Language department. Fellowship largely influenced my spiritual formation in terms of what it means to be Christian.

Barely three weeks into my senior year, September 11, 2001 occurred. As a Christian I felt immediately the need for us to offer students the time and space for prayer. I ran to my Fellowship co-leader and began to ask her when we could start planning some prayer services. Before I even finished my sentence, she informed me that she and the rest of the leadership team had discussed my “situation” and determined that although it was okay for me to be struggling with and resisting my unnatural lifestyle, it was unacceptable and inappropriate for me to be a leader within Fellowship as an “active homosexual.” I was speechless and felt betrayed by the faith community I had come to love more than my home church. Part of me died that day and I did not feel like I belonged to any church or as a child of God for the next three years of my life.

In 2003 as a sophomore in college, I lived in Spain and studied the religious confluence of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism during the Islamic polity of the Iberian peninsula from 711 – 1492. Before school started, two Catholic friends and I decided to journey along the pilgrim trails to Santiago de Compostela, where James the Apostle is buried according to legend. For two days we walked roughly 50 km of the pilgrim trails that start in France and Italy and traverse the entire length of northern Spain. We would spend an hour walking and talking – getting to know each other better. Then we would walk for an hour in silence – reflecting on ourselves, our lives, God, wherever our hearts led us. I remember feeling like I was walking on holy ground. As a Protestant, I am not one to venerate the saints or the apostles but there was something about walking the same pilgrim trails that Christians have traversed for nearly 1,200 years that enlivened me. I was in the company of brothers and sisters in Christ of ages past, present and future. It was here that – maybe for the first time ever – I really listened for God. And I know that in the silence of this our pilgrims’ journey, I heard the voice of God calling me home to the United Methodist Church.

When I returned to the States in 2004, I began church shopping. I knew that finding a church was going to be challenging not because of the lack of reconciling congregations as there are a dozen or so in the Chicagoland area but more due to my own standards. I am always troubled by congregations – and there are a lot of them – that in their journey to be inclusive, equate inclusiveness with not offending anyone and therefore water down Jesus and begin to dismantle the Holy Trinity. I needed a church that would accept me for who I am and not be afraid to claim the name of Jesus, the Christ. I wanted to feel the Holiness Movement in the 21st Century.

During Advent of 2004, I found Holy Covenant UMC and immediately fell in love. Here was a church that upon walking in the door welcomed me and treated me like I was a part of their family. The first two people to welcome me at Holy Covenant were Troy Plummer and Walter Treash, and I’m sure they knew I was already a part of their family. I was blown away by the passionate worship and music – songs of praise I had not sung since my days in Fellowship, which was a union of pain and rejoicing. It was my first experience of hearing God as Father and Mother of us all. If there is one thing that Pastor Trey Hall emphasizes at Holy Covenant, it is the Great Invitation and that all our welcome at God’s table. It was the first time that I had heard gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people named as called by God and welcome at the Banquet. Since that first worship service, I have been actively involved at Holy Covenant and became a member on Easter Sunday of 2005.

The primary reason I decided to run for election to the General Conference is my experience of Holy Covenant. Holy Covenant UMC has been such a place and a community of healing for me. Coming out as a gay man in retrospect seems for me to have been so much easier than reconciling my sexual orientation with my religion. For years I had not felt like a whole person and confused my relationship with the institutional Church for my relationship with God. Holy Covenant gave me a home to feel safe and proud of who I was and am: a fearfully and wonderfully made child of God. Holy Covenant has given me a glimpse of what the Banquet can be like. I want so much for the United Methodist Church to experience a revival of its roots, to claim God and God’s great, all-inclusive invitation. I ran in order to be a voice and a testimony of these things. As an elected alternate delegate from the Northern Illinois Conference, I pray for God's grace that I might be a humble and worthy example of Christ.