A Heart Wrenching Time For United Methodists

If there were easy answers to the church's current
dilemmas, we would have probably arrived at 
them a long time ago.

As someone who decries same-faith church divorces, I can't help but feel grieved over the second largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., the spiritual descendants of John and Charles Wesley, possibly splitting into two separate bodies in May.

I certainly have lots of empathy for churches everywhere faced with the increasingly divisive issue of how to deal with gay and lesbian members who want to be in some kind of marriage union. And I totally understand the case to be made for traditional marriage, defined as being between a man and a woman for life. For the record, this is the position I've supported for pretty much all of my life.

So far be it from me to have an easy answer for United Methodists. But one of the problems all churches face in dealing with this and many other disputable issues is that there are no simple binary positions into which their members, or their member congregations, fit.

On the issue of same sex relationships. there is a whole range of responses supported by members of most of their congregations, as follows:

1.  Condemn and ostracize all lesbians and gays, keep them “in the closet.”

2.  Advocate acceptance of gays and lesbians but expect them to undergo a change of orientation (“healing”), enter into a heterosexual marriage or live a life of celibacy and secrecy.

3. Openly welcome and accept all believers into membership without making sexual orientation a barrier, but continue to support sexual relationships for only one man and one woman in marriage.

4.  Support the above approach as the church’s official position, but make pastoral exceptions for faithful same-sex relationships where no other option seems viable, similar to Paul’s “better to marry than to burn with passion” counsel (much like the approach many churches have taken with divorced persons seeking to remarry).

5.  Celebrate and affirm all monogamous and faithful relationship equally--heterosexual or homosexual.

6.  Encourage monogamous relationships, but make questions of exclusivity and fidelity matters of personal conscience.

7.  Leave all questions about sexual behaviors up to the individual.

So in order to actually accommodate everyone, should UMC divide into seven groups? And how are they to accommodate all of the other differences of conviction held by members of their churches?

In my opinion, our ultimate responsibility is to prayerfully seek to have our membership rolls correspond with the names of those we believe are written in the Lamb's Book of Life.

But since that may seem hard to discern, do we risk erring on the welcoming side or on the excluding side of the above spectrum?

That is the question that's tearing my soul apart, and the soul of churches everywhere.