Discourse Rules for Holy Conferencing: God Hears the Cries of the Poor

Discourse Rule Three:

Effective holy conferencing that aims at the practice of faithful Christian discipleship will give a privileged place at the table to those whose voices are least powerful in mainstream culture.

As I have noted, among the reasons I am offering critical reflections on the Wesleyan tradition of holy conferencing as currently practiced in the United Methodist Church is that this tradition offers a valuable model for other churches. Other churches already practice what the United Church of Christ calls “sacred conversation.” For churches that interact with the public sphere in a pluralistic democratic society to bring gospel values to the public sphere, holy conferencing provides a sound foundation for the interchange of church and culture.

Holy conferencing brings democratic procedures to the internal life of the people of God. The democratic model is a point of intersection with the pluralistic democratic societies with which the church interacts.

Democracy is a praiseworthy form of government, one perhaps particularly suited to the gospel viewpoint that every human being is of equal value in the sight of God, since we all originate from the hand of the same Creator God. However, democratic polity contains a hidden flaw that we must tease out and address, if democracy is to move in the direction of justice and not of the rule of the powerful over the less powerful.

This hidden flaw is that when human beings meet in the public sphere or in the context of holy conferencing, they do not meet as equals. God may see us as equals. We see ourselves otherwise. We are socially constructed such that some of us have power and privilege that transcends our shared origin in the hands of the Creator God.

Some of us have power and privilege because of the color of our skin, others because of our national origin, many because of our age, some because of our gender, others because of our economic and social status and educational background. Our sexual orientations make us not merely radically different from each other (so long as social and ecclesial structures continue to notice this difference and construct insider-outside lines on its basis): sexual orientation provides a demarcation point for entry to or exclusion from public conversations, power, and privilege, as well as holy conferencing. We do not meet as equals either in the public sphere or in holy conferencing.

Holy conferencing does not deserve to be called holy, if it continues the unequal power relationships of the public sphere within the church context. As a democratic process, holy conferencing is meant to provide a countercultural witness to pluralistic democratic societies—a model of what democracy at its best might be, when it seeks to empower all, bring all to the table, be truly inclusive and truly participatory.

There is a very strong strand in the thought of Main Street USA which assumes that, in our interaction in the public sphere, we are all on equal footing. This atomistic individualistic understanding of democratic society implicitly accepts the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest. We assume that those who make it to the top have gotten there through their wits, hard work, and righteous living. Conversely, we assume that those who have fallen to the bottom are somehow flawed—that they are ill-educated or unintelligent, lazy, and unrighteous.

This understanding of our connection to each other in the webs of power and privilege that run all through democratic society overlooks the various ways in which power and privilege give many of us a head start on the rest of us. Some of our voices will never be heard, because the social networks of power and privilege are so constituted that our voices simply cannot emerge, cannot have a hearing.

Many of us spend so much of our time and energy simply surviving, that participating in public conversation or holy conferencing is well-nigh impossible. It is a luxury to discourse about holy things when getting one’s daily bread is an overweening concern.

The Main Street USA myth that we all interact on equal footing implicitly protects the status quo. That is, it protects the power and privilege of those who already have power and privilege. The myth that, in a society in which power and privilege are unequally distributed, we can remain aloof, “objective,” neutral, serves to bless and excuse the power and privilege of those already empowered, already privileged.

When the balance is strongly in one direction, the only way to change the balance is to place weight on the side that has very little heft. If the church wishes its holy conferencing to be holy—which is to say, truly inclusive—the church has to norm its discourse rules with considerations about justice. The church has to commit itself to an ongoing process of social analysis, which seeks to understand how power and privilege are distributed in any given society, how they operate in that society, and above all, how they function to suppress the voices and contributions of those without power and privilege.

I am making some theological assumptions in saying this. One assumption is that God is always on the side of the poor. God has a special preferential concern for the marginal, the outcast, those pushed to the verges of society. When Jesus announces the inauguration of his ministry in Luke’s gospel, he equates his ministry with the jubilee of Israel: he speaks of his ushering in of the reign of God as a kairotic moment in which slaves will be set free, the hungry fed, the poor brought to the table.

Another theological assumption implicit in what I am saying about the need for justice as a critical norm in the discourse rules of holy conferencing is that we cannot be merciful without doing justice. We Christians of Main Street USA like to believe in ourselves as the good, the merciful, the fair-minded.

We are not merciful, however. We are not merciful because we are not just. We do not look at our social (and ecclesial) structures from the vantage point of justice, to ask who is savagely excluded, who cannot even reach the table, who is asked to sit at the lesser table and be thankful for crumbs.

We are expert at binding up social wounds. We all too seldom ask how to heal and staunch the wound that causes the injuries we bind up. Our gospel message falls on deaf ears because the discrepancy between who we profess to be and who we actually are is too stark, too acute, for many people to support.

We claim to be merciful, while we practice savage injustice.

Holy conferencing will not be either truly countercultural or truly holy, unless and until it devises ways to bring to the table those most often discounted, ignored, and shunned in the various societies in which the church has taken root. The United Methodist Church has given outstanding witness in recent years as it seeks to bring people of color and women to the table.

The United Methodist Church—as with most churches of Main Street USA—has behaved, on the whole, with shocking cruelty towards and contempt for its gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers and sisters. This is all the more shocking when one considers that many of those who wish to continue the exclusion of gay believers from the table speak of their action as countercultural witness! It is all the more shocking when those continuing this savage exclusion willingly play some marginal groups—e.g., people of color and women—against LGBT persons, as they try to engineer the conversation so that it does not reveal the real power centers of the church (the white male heterosexist power centers) whose control is threatened by anyone trying to craft a truly inclusive, truly participatory conversation.

There is perhaps no injustice greater than to define others without permitting the Other a voice in being defined. This is what the United Methodist Church does when, over and over, it passes legislation defining gay believers as sinful and non-normative, while holding gay voices, gay witness, at bay. This continued injustice in the very heart of the church—in its sacred conversation—so radically undercuts the church’s claim to be merciful, that many people repudiate the church’s invitation, and find it impossible to believe that the church is an open-door church comprised of those with open hearts and minds.

If what I am reading in many places about the most recent General Conference is correct, the church paid a very high price at General Conference this year, for continuing its engineered conversation about LGBT brothers and sisters. I am reading of parliamentary tricks, of managed “debates” in which alternative viewpoints were not truly given any voice.

If these reports are true—if the price the church paid to continue its exclusion of LGBT brothers and sisters at this General Conference was the deliberate manipulation of the conversation by a few powerful church leaders acting in unison with political interest groups for whom it is intolerable that the United Methodist Church become gay-inclusive—then one has to ask what it is about the unfettered witness of LGBT believers that the church finds so frightening. What is it about the stories, the lives, the faith-journeys of gay believers, that the church cannot hear, will not permit to be spoken?

The discourse rules for holy conferencing must work against the attempts of those with power and privilege to engineer the conversation. There must be mechanisms in place to name and expose crafty underhanded attempts to subvert authentic conversation. There must also be mechanisms in place to permit the voices of gay believers to be heard.

God is found among the marginal. Churches seeking to hear God’s voice in democratic public conversations and to discern the will of the Spirit for the church on that basis will fail to hear all that God might say and will fail to engage in authentic discernment, if they do not find ways to listen to the voices speaking from the margins.

As it is currently constructed, the public sphere of most societies is hardly a safe space for LGBT persons and our voices. There is much misplaced talk of the wealth of gay persons. One of the malicious lies peddled among the churches of the global South to work up resentment against gay believers in the global North is the lie that all LGBT people are wealthy and privileged.

Careful social analysis does not bear out such an analysis of the economic status of all LGBT persons in the societies of the global North. In the United States, even when gay persons have economic resources, we are still subject to manifold forms of discrimination, including lack of protection against being fired solely because of our sexual orientation, lack of the right to visit a partner in the hospital, lack of parental rights and privileges in many states, lack of protection against being verbally or physically assaulted as we walk down the street or go to school.

Life is not simple in such a society. Life is not safe in such a society. If the churches ever wished to hear voices such as mine, I could tell stories—and I know others who could tell stories—that the churches sorely need to hear, if they really want to be known as places of healing, mercy, justice, and inclusion.

Church should always and everywhere be a safe space for those who are subject to painful exclusion and savage treatment in society at large. Churches cannot call themselves countercultural when they do not seek intentionally to become such safe spaces in every society. To be such safe spaces, churches must turn from either ignoring or demonizing LGBT persons, to welcoming us.

In order to be welcoming, churches must break silence about issues of sexual orientation (saying no over and over again is hardly breaking silence), and build conversations in which Christians of Main Street USA get to know and hear the stories of their LGBT brothers and sisters. To be welcoming, churches must abolish the lesser table and invite LGBT persons to the one table of the Lord. Such welcome will be meaningful only when the same rules that apply to the lives and relationships of all believers apply equally to LGBT persons and our relationships.

It goes without saying that the church will convince no one it is truly welcoming, as long as the institutions it sponsors—e.g., its colleges and universities—are permitted to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Church-sponsored institutions must have non-discrimination statements and policies in place. Gay employees should never be dismissed without the same right to an evaluation (to which they are permitted to respond) accorded to a non-gay employee.

Gay employees should not be demoted and then terminated after bogus “evaluations” by hired “consultants” who do not even know the person they are “evaluating,” and who have no qualifications to “evaluate” the person whom they are evaluating. Gay employees should not be demoted and terminated on the basis of such an “evaluation” when they are never shown this evaluation and given a right to respond to it, but the “evaluation” is distributed to others.

There is a connection between such crafty and unjust procedures within church institutions, and the engineering of the sacred conversation of holy conferencing to keep openly gay voices out of the conversation. Firing people unjustly results in exclusion of that person from the participatory structures of economic and social life: it robs that person of a voice. When the people subjecting LGBT persons to such injustice in church institutions are the same people calling on the church to remain countercultural in opposing full inclusion of LGBT persons, and are the same people engineering the conversation to exclude the voices of LGBT persons, holy conferencing is radically subverted.

The world in which we live does all it can to make gay people victims, and then to blame gay people for exhibiting traits of victimization. The church must not continue this unjust victimization and re-victimization process, if it wishes to engage in holy conferencing. The conferencing of the church will not be holy until the church itself becomes (along with its institutions) a safe space in which to be openly gay.