Troubling Words

Tuesday morning, the Connectional Table of the United Methodist Church hosted and streamed a panel discussion on sexual minorities in the denomination.  It was a good discussion, honest, fruitful, at times prophetic, and a sign of a willingness on the part of the leadership to open these meetings to the whole Body of the church.

One of the panelists was Prof. Mark Teasdale, professor of Evangelism at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago.

 

Prof. Teasdale began his talk with a story from his first appointment as pastor of a church in the Baltimore-Washington Conference.  A couple things he related in that story were more than a little troubling for me.  His subsequent remarks, moreover, demonstrated – to me, at any rate – that he might not have reflected as deeply on the experience he was relating as he could have.  There was one major point in his presentation that I found even more troubling, considering he is a student and scholar of church history.

First, to his story.  He related that on his first Sunday in his first church, a member said to him, “Remember: We’re Fundamentalists.”  As a student of United Methodist Church history, doctrine, and polity, as all clergy are required to be, he made no further comment on this particular statement, not least an outline of how he spent some time and energy during his appointment helping the congregation understand that they cannot be a United Methodist congregation and “Fundamentalist”.  They can be traditionalist, to be sure; they can be theologically, communally, and politically conservative in the several senses of that word*.  Fundamentalism, as a movement, is foreign to the Wesleyan tradition, if understood and upheld with honesty and integrity.

Teasdale then went on to describe the arrival of a gay couple to his congregation.  He described how they were welcomed, became engaged and committed active members.  He related a talk with them, about the pain they had felt in trying to find a congregation that would accept them for who they were, and how happy they were at the church they were then attending.

I’m guessing the implicit lesson he was trying to get across to listeners was that even a self-avowed “fundamentalist” congregation could be open and welcoming to a same-sex couple; and that, in turn, a same-sex couple could find such a congregation a welcoming community with whom to worship.  Except, I wonder just how open and out to how many in the congregation this couple were.  While many may have wondered or guessed about the couple’s orientation, experience has taught me that there are many who can remain clueless to the sexual orientation of others, even if it is plain to many others.  Finally, I think this anecdote, while a wonderful tale of the ability of a congregation to welcome all, was beside the point of the larger topic at hand: how do we as a denomination live with our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in such a way as to honor their full humanity and dignity as children of God?  That one self-avowed “fundamentalist” congregation could be open and welcoming to a gay couple does not mean that we as a denomination can uphold the full dignity and worth of all persons, including their call to ministry and presiding over and blessing their marriages.  Teasdale’s story was little more than that oft-heard statement, “See?  Even conservatives can be nice!”

Later in his talk, he mentioned that while John Wesley never touched on the subject of same-sex love – and why should he have?  It wasn’t even a concept in the 18th century, at least in the way it is in the early 21st century – Teasdale insisted that Wesley would have supported the status quo of the denomination, limiting the participation of sexual minorities in the life of the church and refusing permission for clergy to officiate at legal weddings between members of the same gender.  How such a statement is possible, coming from a church historian, is beyond me.  It is impossible to know or even guess what a dead person might have said about a topic about which they neither wrote nor spoke.  It may very well be true that Wesley, an 18th century Christian, would have been appalled at the thought that two men or two women would even consider loving one another as a man and a woman love one another; he might well have balked at the thought they would want the church to bless their union in the name of God.  This may be true.  That doesn’t mean it is true.  Were Wesley “alive” today, he would not be the Wesley we know from history, and his attitude on all sorts of matters, not least of them how the church relates to and includes sexual minorities in the life of the Body, would be very different from what we have on the record.  Precisely because we are dealing with a figure who was time-bound, our contemporary discussion is carried out in ways that were not even thinkable at the time Wesley lived.  Any assumption about what Wesley might or might not say on such a topic is meaningless.  It’s a bit like wondering what Wesley’s attitude toward electric guitars in church would be; how can we possibly know the answer to that particular question?

I was left troubled by Teasdale’s talk, for several reasons.  Without for a moment doubting the seriousness or depth of his faith and commitment to the church, I nevertheless was left feeling he had not reflected on his experiences as a pastor.  I felt he had not taken the time to make clear that, while tradition is important, it cannot bind us, especially if doing so creates conditions that dehumanize and limit the full participation in the life of the church of some class of human beings.  Finally, I felt that invoking Wesley as he did was meaningless.  We should, rather, focus on the words as they currently exist in the Book of Discipline, and whether or not they fit within the larger concerns of Wesley and his ministry, described by Bishop Reuben Job’s little book, Three Simple Rules, particularly the first: Do no harm.

*I count myself as theologically conservative.  I adhere to the Trinitarian reality of the Godhead; the fully human, fully Divine two natures of Jesus Christ; the bodily resurrection from the dead of Jesus on Easter; and I look forward to the final consummation of Creation in the eschatological coming of the Kingdom of God and the dawn of the New Creation without sin, as all creation praises God.