The Place of Gay Human Beings as a Church-Dividing Issue: Again

I’m thinking these days about a theme I discussed briefly back on 22 April in my posting entitled “The Church’s One Foundation” (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/04/churchs-one-foundation-homosexuality.html). This is the claim of some church groups that homosexuality should be placed on the back burner of church discussion, since the gay issue is not truly a church-dividing issue.

The Florida United Methodist Conference has just held a “Conference Table” to which anyone in the conference is invited. The headline announcing this conference table noted that this was a table at which everyone was welcome.

The topic of this roundtable public discussion was “In Defense of Creation.” A description of the conference table topic on the website of the Florida UMC Conference notes, “IDOC2, as it is called, is the church's attempt to engage public policy on issues that most affect the human race, according to Florida Conference Bishop Timothy Whitaker, task force chairman. The document addresses three areas: nuclear proliferation, global poverty, and environmental issues” (see http://flsite.brickriver.com/event_detail.asp?PKValue=1845).

Issues that most affect the human race: nuclear proliferation, global poverty, and the environment. From one standpoint, it’s hard to argue with the claim that this configuration of issues covers the terrain admirably well—these are, indeed, among the issues most affecting the human race, the ones churches most need to address in their preaching and ministry today.

From another standpoint, however, there’s something wrong with this picture. In the first place, search as one will through the entire Florida UMC Conference website for any mention at all of homosexuality, and one draws a complete blank. Scrutinize the program for the recent Florida UMC Annual Conference meeting for any mention of the term “gay” or “homosexual/ity,” and you’ll come away with the impression that any issues revolving around those terms must have been resolved.

Because the church is totally silent about them. The church is totally silent about issues relating to homosexuality as issues most affecting the human race today.

The implication of the church’s claim that nuclear proliferation, global poverty, and the environment are the key issues affecting the human race today is that the issue of homosexuality—the place of gay human beings within the human race and the churches—is a non-issue, a side issue, one beneath notice.

But if this is the case, why did the most recent General Conference of the United Methodist Church spend an inordinate amount of time discussing that very issue? Why have state conferences such as the Florida Conference almost come to blows about that issue, such that there are fears the church may split?

If the issue of where LGBT human beings fit into the human race and the churches is a non-issue, why has every UMC General Conference for almost a decade now battled through this issue? Why is the worldwide Anglican Communion in anguish over this issue? Why are almost all the churches in the world groaning through this critically important moment of human history in which, for the first time in history, LGBT human beings are claiming the right to a place at the table, as openly gay people affirming their own God-given identities and refusing to apologize for these identities as they approach the Lord’s table?

If the question of where gay human beings are to be “placed” within the human community and the churches is a non-issue, one about which churches can justifiably be silent while discussing issues of key importance to the human race today, why have some Anglican churches in the United States chosen to break communion with gay-affirming bishops, placing themselves under the episcopal jurisdiction of bishops far from their own dioceses? Why have bishops such as Peter Akinola in Nigeria bitterly resisted inclusion of LGBT people in the churches, while bishops such as Desmond Tutu have spoken out courageously about homophobia as the new apartheid of the human race and the churches?

If the issue of where gay human beings fit is a non-issue, one about which churches may justifiably be silent when discussing the important issues facing the human community today, what is one to make of the recent announcement of the president of Gambia that he wished to see all gay persons in his country sought out and beheaded?

If the question of how to fit LGBT human beings into human society and into churches is not a premier issue causing conflict within the human community today, why did the Human Rights watch send a letter to the president of Gambia—only days before the Florida United Methodist Conference held its discussion of “the” issues that most affect the human race—noting that the president’s violent rhetoric and actions towards gay human beings violates human rights covenants and “abdicates one of the most important responsibilities of political leadership: to respect, protect, and promote the human rights of all” (see http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/06/10/gambia19088.htm)?

If the question of how our gay brothers and sisters are to be included in our human and church families is a non-issue, why did the Pope announce immediately before new year’s day that he considers the issue of protecting the family (read: of resisting gay marriage) to be one of the premier issues confronting the churches today, one to which he intended to devote primary attention in 2008?

I sense more than a bit of flim-flammery in the claim of many church folks today that the question of how to place our gay brothers and sisters is not a significant, crucial, noteworthy issue for discussion—not truly a church-dividing issue. What is really going on with this claim is a dishonorable attempt to keep gay people in the shadows—and to keep in the shadows, as well, the shameful way the churches continue to treat gay human beings.

It goes without saying that nuclear proliferation, poverty, and the environment are among the most significant issues facing the human community today. It goes without saying that churches which wish to be faithful to the example of Jesus and to the gospels should be discussing and trying to deal proactively with these issues.

But these issues do not exist in isolation from issues of gender, from issues of patriarchy. The militarism that is at the root of nuclear proliferation is rooted in male domination and exploitation of women, of anything regarded as feminine. Exploitation and destruction of the environment is intrinsically linked to patriarchal systems of social order that give men unmerited dominance over women.

As feminist theologians have long noted, the social issues demanding the critical attention of churches are all interconnected in a web, all interwoven. One cannot understand and deal with militarism, economic exploitation of minorities, or destruction of the environment without understanding and dealing with patriarchy, misogyny, and homophobia. As feminist theologians have long noted, societies that are racist are also not coincidentally almost always societies that are misogynistic and homophobic.

Nor can one understand and deal with the key issues confronting society today without confronting the unjust domination of the churches by white males who profess to be heterosexual.

Part of the silence—a big part of the self-censorship of bishops and other church leaders today, when it comes to gay issues—is a tactic of keeping at bay critique of the ways in which white males who profess to be heterosexual still control most everything in the world, including in the churches. Or perhaps particularly in the churches.

The issue of how to fit our LGBT brothers and sisters into the churches is neuralgic because it casts a spotlight on church leaders themselves—an unwanted spotlight. It casts a spotlight (an unwanted one) on how the churches treat LGBT people.

The discussion unmasks the claim that everyone is invited to the table as a false claim—a shamefully false, starkly false claim. A lie.

Churches must find ways to keep at bay the discussion of the place of their LGBT brothers and sisters at the table, because that discussion will open too many doors to questions about how the church pursues its ministries, how it deals with money, what kind of alliances with powerful people drive the churches and their rhetoric and actions.

The question of how or whether to provide a place at the table for gay human beings should, of course, never have become a church-dividing issue. No church can justifiably claim to be church, when it excludes any group from the table. Every sinner has a place at the table of the Lord. Period. No questions asked.

That is, every sinner has a place at the Lord’s table if the church setting that table wants to claim to be following in the footsteps of Jesus.

No, the question of the place of LGBT human beings at the table should never have been made a church-dividing issue. We who are gay did not choose to make this an issue. Other forces in church and society have done so, and have done so with a vengeance.

That being the case, no church today can flim-flam around the gay issue, claiming it is not and should not be a church-dividing issue, or an issue of key importance to the human community. Indeed, it might well be argued that this question of how to set a place for gay brothers and sisters is the premier issue facing all churches today—the one with the most potential to test the fidelity of churches to the gospel, the one with the strongest ability to test whether churches intend to be church at the most fundamental level possible, the only level that counts: whether churches intend to set the Lord’s table for all sinners.

The church and its bishops don’t pay any price at all, do they—really now—when they take a stand on nuclear proliferation, poverty, and the environment? But the church and its bishops do pay a price, and a steep one, when they resolutely and without qualification announce that their table is open to all, including their gay brothers and sisters, and that their institutions will demonstrate this praxis of discipleship by resolutely and without qualification discarding all forms of discrimination within church institutions against LGBT human beings.

Perhaps Bishop Whitaker and other church leaders who are flim-flamming around discussion of the place of gay brothers and sisters at the table will make the topic of their next roundtable discussion of key issues confronting the churches the following excerpt from a sermon that retired Catholic Bishop of Detroit, Thomas Gumbleton preached recently on what the Catholic liturgical calendar calls the 10^th Sunday in ordinary time. The gospel for the day was Matthew 9:9-13 (see http://ncrcafe.org/node/1907):

There are so many other ways in which we must become a welcoming community, a community that is like Jesus, that is ready to welcome sinners, to be with sinners, to be with those who others would think as not worthy. We have to become a church of great diversity, where we welcome everyone regardless of race, sexual orientation, poverty, wealth. We have to be a church of diversity. We have to share our Eucharist, we have to share our banquet, with all who are out there in the world with us.

When we can reach out as Jesus did and welcome tax collectors and sinners into our midst without making judgment, simply welcoming everyone as God does, God says, "I want mercy more than sacrifice; love more than ritual," this is what is very important and this is what we must try to make happen in our communities, in our church, and in our civil society, so that we really become one beloved community, one family of God where everyone is welcome and everyone gives thanks and gratitude for the God who shows them such love through those who follow his son, Jesus.

This is what is very important and this is what we must try to make happen in our communities, in our church, and in our civil society: to welcome everyone regardless, to share our banquet with all who are out there in the world with us.

White Eyelet Lace: Florida UMC Annual Conference, Day Two

I knew she was trouble the minute I saw she had a bible cover with white eyelet lace on it.

Thus saith one of the people I love most in the world, whose identity I won’t reveal here for two reasons. First, she lives in a big-small city/town where everybody knows everyone else, everybody talks about everybody else (while smiling in the face of those they talk about), and everybody will punish you, all in one collective huddle locking arms against you, if you tell the truth they do not want to have spoken.

I know. I live in such a place.

Second, I want my friend to keep making these pithy observations. Too many of my friends are already leery of me because they say that 1) I never forget anything they say or do, and 2) I’m liable to report what they have said or done in something I write. Comes from growing up among many Southern ladies who never missed a beat, as they pretended to socialize with each other, eyeing the other mercilessly all the while, in order to give a cold-eyed detailed report once the lovefest had ended.

And so to the Southern state of Florida and its United Methodist Annual Conference, which is now in its second day. (Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this: white eyelet lace bible covers do have something to do with the Florida UMC Annual Conference—at least, in my mind they do.)

The Florida Conference has helpfully uploaded its workbook to the conference website. Anyone who wishes can read the workbook at www.flumc2.org/page.asp?PKValue=1339.

Yesterday, I read it carefully, searching for any indicator that this annual conference will follow up on the unfinished work of the recent General Conference to keep praying about, talking about, and working for the full inclusion of gay brothers and sisters in the United Methodist Church.

I was not surprised to find—not really—that the workbook has not a single mention of this topic. The words “gay,” “lesbian,” “homosexual” are entirely absent from the workbook.

This is not surprising because the 2006 essay on homosexuality and the church by Florida’s UMC bishop (a copy is on the same website) argues for eliminating terms such as “homosexual” and “gay” from the vocabulary of the church, as it deals with people who are, well, gay and lesbian. What is not spoken does not exist. There is no problem, where there is no language to identify a problem.

We can go about our business with cheerful hearts and smiling faces when we do not have to confront those we cannot see, since we do not give them even a linguistic place at our table. Without linguistic structures to frame the problem for us—the problem that the Other exists—we can talk about radical hospitality while practicing radical inhospitality.

This sometimes seems to me to be the Methodist way. The way of the churches of the radical middle, of Main Street USA. The hug-smack way. It is easy to continue doing business when our business is not disrupted by the presence of intrusive, meddlesome, demanding Others.

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I often get the impression, when I look at the way the churches of Main Street USA do business, that doing business is pretty much what it’s all about. It’s about impression management and keeping up morale in precisely the same way that the corporate world deals with these marketing issues.

When our brand is sinking, we find a new way to market it. How about big screens in the sanctuary? Clowns for the children? A new logo would be nice, one with flames to show that we are on fire with love, having been snatched from the flames of damnation.

No gloom and doom for us. That would be a turn-off, and we want our brand to sell. We need it to do so. How else can we compete with those big megachurches that sell their own brand of coffee, have gym classes, snack bars, dating services, clubs of every kind a body could wish, all on huge sparkling “campuses” suggesting that God does, in the final analysis, really prosper those who believe in God?

The gays make things difficult because their very presence is a downer. Bring them in, and who knows who might leave in a huff (and take their money with them)? As a priest Steve knows once said in a discussion of how to deal with the gays in the Catholic seminary in which they both taught, “There’s no theological reason to keep them out. But they bring all these problems with them!”

They bring all these problems with them. They bring dirt with them, because being gay is being dirty. Just like the Samaritan lying bleeding by the side of the road. It was so much easier for the priest to pass the wounded man by. Remember the story? The one inside the pretty lace-covered bible? The priest was on his way to worship (to engage in salty worship, as the new Florida Methodist brand would have us say). Touching a bleeding man would make the priest ritually impure. It would interfere with his worship.

The lawyer couldn’t stop, either. After all, who knows what kind of legal tangles might ensue, if we pick up a person lying bleeding by the roadside? Better not to get involved. If he's lying there bleeding, he must have done something to deserve his lumps. Getting involved might end up implicating us—and our money.

The unexpected person is the one who notices, stops, and helps, in Jesus’s parable. Remember that the story inside the pretty bible cover was Jesus’s answer to the question, Who is my neighbor? The one who stopped was a Samaritan, a people considered racially and ritually impure by their orthodox Jewish neighbors. They had (it was alleged) intermarried with non-Jews. They worshiped on the hilltops and not in the temple.

They were not the practitioners of orthodox, right, true religion. They practiced a mixed (read: dirty) religion, not the pure religion of Judaism. And yet it was one of these—someone who was himself the Other—who deigned to stop and pick up the bleeding man, to staunch his wounds (thus contracting ritual impurity), and then to go the extra step of taking the man to a hospice to be treated. It was one who knew himself to be considered unclean who actually saw the Other we would prefer not to see, since out of sight is out of mind.

An article by Steven Skelley on the Florida UMC website today says that a workshop at the Annual Conference yesterday focused on “radical hospitality” as a mark of Wesleyan discipleship (www.flumc.info/cgi-script/csArticles/articles/000048/004841.htm). The article notes that participants thought about how congregations have to live discipleship collectively, if they expect to make a difference. The whole congregation has to practice radical hospitality, if it wants to live the Methodist way as a congregation.

And it has to reach out into its own community, where many people are removed from church. It has to take risks to “step out with Jesus” into the surrounding community.

I’m trying to get my head around these statements, given the total silence of this Annual Conference’s workbook about gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. Who do those talking about radical hospitality imagine the alienated Other of their community to be?

Who is more excluded than those we make invisible by denying even linguistic structures to allow these invisibilized Others to make their presence known?

Will the Wesleyan brand convince others that it is a good brand, if it will not even talk about the group most clearly and obviously excluded by its church today? It is, after all, so easy to love the sanitized Other, the good, the approved, minority.

It is so much harder to step out with Jesus and notice that bleeding man by the wayside, whose presence raises troubling questions about the validity of our worship, when we will not even touch his wounds because we must keep our hands clean for the sanctuary.

We like our bibles, we Southern folks. We like them covered.

We’ll even cover them in white eyelet lace.

When we do that, perhaps we don’t have to peek inside them to see what they really say.

It’s so much easier to look at the pretty cover.

Florida on My Mind: Reflections on the United Methodist Annual Conference

Keep the Door Shut!: Churches and the Threat of Gay Energy

Colleen,

Once again, you’ve left a comment that is so rich, I want to lift it from the comments section and reply to it in my blog proper, rather than in the comments box.

Your comment focuses on the creativity, spirituality, and energy for institutional transformation that self-accepting gay folks bring to our vocations in secular and ecclesial institutions. Using transpersonal psychology, you say, I'm talking about a kind of freedom from gender typing, and because of that, a freedom to explore and accept other realms of thought, creativity, and spirituality.

Your analysis notes that, because gay folks have to learn to negotiate complex questions about gender roles in accepting our God-given human natures, we develop the ability to move between various definitions of ourselves demanded by the rules of straight society. In the process, we often develop a balance of male-female principles inside ourselves, which can translate into creativity and spirituality:

This is a case of knowing you have what it takes to be competent and successful in non traditional gender roles. In this sense gays exhibit a kind of both/and rather than either/or. This is very different from the straight world, where gender roles are much more tightly defined. This tight definition manifests sexually as well.

The gay way of being in the world, at its best, involves a both-and rather than either-or. The balance—or, better, creative tension—that gay people can achieve in learning to negotiate conflicting demands of gender roles, a creative tension rooted in the ability to hold together male-female principles inside ourselves, results in a release of creative energy with the potential to transform institutions that welcome self-accepting gay people and our talents.

Key to this release of creative energy is learning to transcend the either-or thinking of hierarchical institutions that want to subordinate one group to another—in particular, female to male:

There's a school of thought currently being developed which explains spiritual, creative, and relational abilities as products of sexual energy. Sexual energy can be really polluted when a person fails to deal with dominance and submission issues.

Social and ecclesial institutions locked into dominance-submission ways of thinking thwart the release of creative energy, because they siphon off a huge amount of energy that could be expended in institutional transformation in the work of maintaining the status quo, and in particular, the dominance of one group over another (often, of males over females):

The problem with this is that if you can't get out of that system you can't experience transcendence in creative expression, spirituality, or sexual relationships. As you say, maintaining takes precedence over mission.

I think you’re absolutely right in these observations. Since our spiritual life calls on us to discern the movement of spirit within our daily lives and the experiences of daily life, I can’t help “processing” your rich reflections through the prism of Steve’s and my most recent experiences at a United Methodist university in Florida.

The Florida United Methodist Conference website has uploaded an article about the recent General Conference’s discussion of LGBT people, and the decision to hold the line against us yet again at this General Conference. This article by reporter Tita Parham focuses on the need for continued dialogue about the place of gay people in the Methodist church in Florida (www.flumc.info/cgi-script/csArticles/articles/000047/004774.htm).

A response to this article by a lay leader of First United Methodist Church in Orlando, Robert MacLeish, focuses on the role played by the Florida UMC bishop, Timothy Whitaker, at the 30 April deliberations that resulted in the vote to hold the line. Mr. MacLeish states,

My heart goes out to our good Bishop. He was in a bind with that abominable, counter biblical homosexuality issue. It's a shame it must be dealt with when addressing it as sinful should be so simple a matter. My heart goes out to him also for having to abide by Roberts Rules of Order.

There’s quite a bit to note about this response to the 30 April vote at General Conference. Again, I want to stress that I do so in light of Steve’s and my experience of being actively recruited in 2006 by a Methodist college in Florida under the pastoral jurisdiction of Bishop Whitaker.

I’d like to suggest that our experience is, in some sense, paradigmatic. It’s paradigmatic for gay people in general, insofar as our being self-accepting, open, celebratory of the love and grace in our lives and relationships, threatens the status quo of the very institutions that tell us they need our creativity, energy, and transformative potential.

This is not the first time Steve and I have experienced this invitation-expulsion dynamic. We have learned much about it in our professional lives as openly gay theologians working in church-affiliated colleges.

We have learned that the church and its institutions want (and need) our talents and creative energy. But they do not want our openness. They do not want our honesty. They don’t want our integrity. They don’t want our love.

In other words, they want our talents and creative energy without wanting the very pre-conditions for the release of creative energy in our lives as a gay couple.

This creates a horrible quandary for gay people, vis-à-vis the churches. It creates a terrible quandary for those of us who still feel called by the Spirit to live vocational lives that have some connection to the churches—which are capable of tremendous cruelty and deceit towards us as gay human beings. (And I have to say honestly that it grows harder and harder for me as a gay person to see anything but evil in many churches today, given the extremes to which churches seem willing to go to keep gay people at bay.)

On the one hand, we have inside ourselves—precisely as a result of our willingness to undergo the hard struggle to understand and accept our God-given natures—creative energy that needs to flow somewhere. Somewhere good. It’s creative. It issues forth in our lives and hearts as the desire to do good in the world, by helping to build a better world. We know it's good and creative energy because it has good and creative results in the lives of those around us with whom we interact.

This energy flows forth in our lives and hearts, as well, because, having learned to celebrate our unique natures as God’s gift to us (and to others), we then often form strong loving relationships that endure one assault after another, in a world that wants to reduce who we are and what we do to sex, and not love. Living together in long-standing committed relationships in a world that offers almost no reinforcement for such relationships, and many obstacles to them, takes miracles, on a daily basis.

We bring all of this—this history of struggle to understand ourselves, to accept ourselves, to love—to the church-affiliated institutions that tell us they want and need our talents. These church-affiliated institutions then use the talents gladly, but just as gladly discard us when it is convenient to do so—when powerful monied pressure groups “notice” that there are gay folks working in church institutions and not hiding themselves or lying about who they are; when a leader without guts and courage finds it useful to scapegoat the gays in order to save her own skin; when rewards flow to such spineless leaders from the church itself precisely because they are willing to lie to and about the despised gays and to expel them in vicious rituals of public humiliation.

I’m looking at these dynamics as a problem for those of us who have to live with them and with their aftermath in our lives. I’d like now to turn the analysis around and to examine how these dynamics affect not us who are the obvious victim of them. I'd like to look at the the churches who employ these dynamics against us and to analyze the increasing cost the churches are paying by victimizing gay human beings.

I’d like to begin by noting that the churches clearly need energy. They need creative energy. The churches of Main Street USA are aging. They are, in fact, dying. Fewer young people take part in church life, and there is every indicator that this trend will continue into this new millennium.

The response of churches to this process of internal decay has often been to engage in ever more glitzy media shows, to commercialize themselves and the gospel message, to pander to the lowest common denominator in their expectations of discipleship, by reducing what they have to say to media sound-bites. This response has been “successful” insofar as it allows the churches of Main Street USA to stay afloat.

It continues, above all, to bring money into the business of church life—and churches are businesses. It allows the churches to congratulate themselves about all those they bring to Christ—that is, to engage in self-congratulation as long as they don’t ask critical questions about what bringing people to Christ actually means. As long as we equate success with how much money comes into the coffers, how many new buildings we throw up, how many heads we count in the pews on Sunday . . . .

At their heart, in the depths of their souls, the churches of Main Street USA experience a certain soulnessness today, I would propose. Many of those hanging on with their fingernails through the happy-clappy media shows recognize that something is wrong, radically wrong, and know in their bones that more glitz and more media and more bearded pretend-macho men leading the shows are not really going to address the soulness at the heart of it all.

For many of us, church is about something else altogether. It’s about engaging in authentic community, community that affirms each of us in our uniqueness, and values and uses the gifts we each bring to the table. Community celebrated when we gather around the Lord’s table, as children of God who all have a place there, as sinners all in need of the medicine of mercy. Community that makes it unthinkable for any of us to kneel beside another brother or sister in the Lord on Sunday and then knife that person in the back economically, professionally, and interpersonally on Monday.

We long for community that embodies the gospel message. We long for authenticity in the message we first live and second proclaim. We long for authentic connection to our spiritual roots, whether they are Franciscan, Wesleyan, Protestant, Catholic, whatever. We long to find our way around commercialized sound-bite distortions of our tradition that translate into mindless acceptance of any nonsense we are told in both the religious and political spheres.

And so enter the gays. The churches of Main Street USA are in a mess. Youth—the brightest and best of this generation—want nothing to do with the happy-clappy media-driven babble about winning souls for Christ. Most youth today in the global North know and love some specific gay folks who put a human face on the stereotype the churches continue to maintain. They cannot understand the cruelty and deceit that are the price the church is willing to pay to keep gay people and gay voices and gay talents outside.

The church needs the gays. The youth of the church know this and are raising their voices. The energy and talent we bring to the institution are attractive. But who we are—our potential to rock the boat—is tremendously frightening to the same institution that recognizes the gifts we bring. And so the cruelty and deceit continue, even as they are increasingly unmasked for what they are by younger church members who recognize the violence being done to people whom they love, insofar as the church adverts to its LGBT brothers and sisters.

I continue to follow discussions about General Conference, in part, to continue trying to understand what happened to Steve and me at a United Methodist college in Florida. In many blog discussions of that fateful 30 April discussion of the place of LGBT brothers and sisters in the Methodist church, I find recurring concerns about several issues:

1. Since Bishop Timothy Whitaker of Florida is known to be one of the leading proponents of holding the line against gays in the Methodist church, how did it happen that he was chosen to preside at the fateful 30 April session on this issue?
2. Doesn’t the choice of a leading proponent of holding the line in itself represent an a priori attempt to skew the process of holy conferencing in an anti-gay direction?
3. Were Roberts Rules of Order misused by those trying to engineer another anti-gay vote in the 30 April session?
4. If so, do Roberts Rules of Order have much at all to do with holy conferencing?

I might add two more questions based on my own experience

I am putting these questions in very personal terms because those personal terms indicate how acute is the crisis the churches of Main Street USA face today, re: gay people and gay energy. The churches want our energy and talent.

They do not want us.

Not us, insofar as we are open, honest, living lives of integrity and love—all of which is the precondition for our having the very energy we bring to church institutions.

This is a serious problem, one the churches can no longer avoid or gloss over, no matter how hard they try, by uploading to their institutional website one more happy-clappy article about "approved” minorities, or by electing to positions of power and authority members of “approved” minorities who do the dirty work to gay brothers and sisters on behalf of the white male power center of the churches.

It is a problem the Spirit will not allow the churches to avoid any longer, because the Spirit is creative energy. The Spirit wills creation, ongoing creation. The Spirit wishes to see the churches alive with profound transformative energy. The Spirit speaks to the churches of Main Street USA today through the voices of young members in whose hands the future of the churches lies.

The Spirit calls gay brothers and sisters to the churches, gives us creative energy for our vocations in the churches, and is grieved when the church slams its doors in our faces.

In conclusion, to return to your analysis, Colleen, I see two wellsprings of this creative energy in gay lives, following your transpersonal psychological analysis. One is the hard struggle we who are gay go through to see ourselves as God’s children, when the churches insist on calling us spawn of the devil or “abominable, counter-biblical” sinners.

You locate the wellspring of that energy, once we accept ourselves, in freedom, “freedom from gender typing, and because of that, a freedom to explore and accept other realms of thought, creativity, and spirituality.” I think this is absolutely right.

A study was done some years ago (and I can’t place my fingers on it now) of the moral development of priests. The study used the Defining Issues Test to identify levels of moral maturity among priests.

The priests studied were asked to identify themselves as gay or straight. The study found an interesting correlation between sexual orientation and moral development. On the whole, gay priests scored higher on scales of moral development than did straight priests.

The author of this study and others who commented on it at the time noted that coming to moral maturity requires that one struggle with issues that test the boundaries of our moral assurances, of our givens about what is “obviously” right and wrong. We develop conscience (and the moral maturity to use conscience correctly) not by being provided all the answers, but by encountering disjuncture between what we take for granted and other worldviews that have different ways of viewing the world.

The author of this study noted that straight priests often do not have to struggle in the same way gay priests do to come to terms with their sexual orientation, with profound questions about gender identity and gender roles, and with the inadequacy of formulaic answers (in bible or church teaching) to all moral dilemmas. This struggle—when one undergoes it with honesty and integrity (and obviously not everyone, gay or straight, is ready to undergo such struggle)—yields higher moral sensitivity, ability to negotiate difficult moral questions in one’s own life and that of others, and compassion for others in their struggles.

You also put your finger on another wellspring of creative energy in the lives of many gay people which demands a whole other blog posting: this is the creative balance of male-female principles within ourselves, which gives us the potential to bring such creative balance to the churches.

And the churches definitely need that balance, along with the wisdom to move beyond paradigms of female subordination that idolize masculinity in its cheapest, rawest forms. Look at the pictures of those sitting at the presiding podium and on the stage, as the churches pass laws to keep gay people and our energies out. They are essays in the problem the churches need to overcome today, if they wish for authentic transformation.

When the rule of white males in the churches must be protected even at the cost of lying, deceit, manipulation of rules for holy conferencing, overt violations of the social principles of the churches, the price begins to seem simply too high. And when the energy being kept at bay demands that we use such devilish tools to keep that energy at bay, then what is the church doing to itself, by refusing the gifts of its gay brothers and sisters?

When Doing the Right Thing Means Not Playing It Safe: Christians of the Radical Middle and LGBT Human Beings

I continue to read blog discussions dissecting what happened at the United Methodist Church General Conference. I find the “voice” of these discussions much more compelling than the news accounts (and essays) about General Conference appearing on UMC websites, both at the international level and at the level of various regional conferences.

These official news accounts are glitzy. They skim the surface—of what happened, of thought itself. They bruise gospel meaning with lots of breezy (and ultimately vapid) rhetoric about global connections, concern for women and people of color.

On many UMC websites, side-by-side with the gut-wrenching announcement of the 30 April decision to hold the line on homosexuality—that is, against our LGBT brothers and sisters—are happy-clappy news releases showing beaming natives smiling and singing.

I use the term “natives” deliberately. I know it’s condescending. The approach of the UMC to people of color and women is itself condescending. The approach of all churches of Main Street USA to the peoples of the global South and to women is condescending. People of color and women are being used today in disreputable games, in which the white male power structures that still determine the conversation in the churches of Main Street USA play preferred outcasts against disdained outcasts.

This is despicable. It is hurtful. How can our LGBT brothers and sisters not feel pain, when they read these self-congratulatory news stories about how the UMC is full of such compassion towards the suffering, the outcast, the poor and despised: except, “No gays need apply”?

How can our LGBT brothers and sisters look at the pictures of smiling and singing people of the global South and not remember what happened on 30 April with gnawing hurt in the pit of the stomach? How can the church itself—its white male leaders—not see that the game they are playing with talk of globalization and of promoting the rights of women and people of color is transparent and ugly? It is a game that will bring shame on the heads of these leaders of the churches of Main Street USA down the road, when society at large eventually recognizes how cruel is the accepted treatment of LGBT people in much of our culture at present.

Better to admit, frankly, that there’s no strong intent to bring anyone to the table except white men and representatives of approved minorities who have been vetted to assure that they’ll play the white-male power game and not upset the apple cart.

There is, in other words, not just a tiny bit, but a large helping, of prevarication in what the churches of Main Street USA say and do today to our LGBT brothers and sisters, and what they say and do to other sanitized minority groups. To get the real picture beyond prevarication, one has to set aside the glitzy self-congratulatory news stories, the official Comintern-like rhetoric of essays on local UMC conference websites (the two that have appeared on the Florida Conference website, authored by

are especially illuminating), and listen to authentic testimony on blogs.

To get the real picture, one has to delve into first-hand accounts, particularly reflections by those who were actually there and whose lives were yet again determined, without their input, by what one blog has characterized as acts of hate and deceit on the floor of General Conference.

Strong words, hate and deceit. But words I’m inclined to believe. I’m inclined to give credence to these words because I know some of the key players in the 30 April actions that told our LGBT brothers and sisters they aren’t welcome in UMC churches (yes, that’s what the action meant; that’s what it said, beyond the glitzy rhetoric about happy-clappy inclusion). And I know these players are capable of all kinds of deceit, in the name of Christ, to keep our LGBT brothers outside, to hold the line.

I also know this deceit is a manifestation of hate, even when the face speaking the official Comintern words to an LGBT believer is the face of a smiling white man who vaunts his achievements at bringing women and people of color to the table of power and privilege. Hate is hate, and those who feel its cutting edge know what it feels like, even when it’s enshrouded in rhetoric and hidden inside chatter about the power of the Holy Spirit and conversion and campaigns to revive the church.

An interesting recurring theme in the blog accounts of some General Conference delegates who voted to hold the line against our LGBT brothers and sisters is how “tough” the decision was, how “anguished” they felt in making it.

I don’t doubt this testimony in the least. But I’d like to expose it to some analysis, to ask some critical questions about what it really means, about what it means at the level of fundamental reality to say that decisions to keep our LGBT brothers and sisters away from the table are tough and anguishing.

The first critical questions I'd like to ask are, Really? Why? If we know that what we are doing is right, then why anguish? If we have listened for the voice of the Spirit in holy conferencing and have discerned that it is the Spirit Herself who moves us to exclude brothers and sisters, then why do we find the decision tough?

I’d like to propose that these admissions of how tough and anguishing the decision to exclude our LGBT brothers and sisters was contain a revelatory nugget of truth about just what really is at stake in the continued shoving of LGBT people away from the Lord’s table in the churches of Main Street USA.

What’s really at stake is not, as many delegates want to propose, a tough, anguishing decision to hold the line of doctrinal and moral purity, of orthodoxy, of biblical inerrancy. What’s really at stake is exclusion, pure and simple: stark, hate-fueled, fear-filled, Spirit-denying decisions to keep LGBT brothers and sisters outside, to define LGBT human beings as people whose humanity doesn’t count—at least, not the way my own humanity counts.

One blogger (again, someone I know, in that I grew up in the same town as did this General Conference delegate: flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood) who speaks of the tough, anguishing decision she had to make on 30 April actually notes that the focus of concern has shifted in recent years in the UMC from excluding openly gay people from ordination, to excluding openly gay people. Period.

That's quite an admission. I find it a refreshing admission, an honest one, all the more so because it is coming from a theologically trained United Methodist who proclaims herself to be a feminist theologian, but who represents what she clearly sees as the radical middle of the church. This admission has the ring of authenticity about it.

I can appreciate, then, that this delegate’s decision to hold the line was tough and anguishing, because she knew precisely what she was doing in holding the line: she was holding the line against LGBT brothers and sisters, not against doctrinal error or heterodoxy. She was telling these brothers and sisters that, sorry, the door is closed just for now. Come back later. Perhaps we’ll have a crumb or two for you then, when we've fed everyone else and assessed our resources. Only one table—can't feed everybody, you know.

In fact, how about coming back four years from now? Perhaps by then, we delegates will pay a less taxing price if we rethink the tough, anguishing decision to exclude you. Maybe then our fellow church members will no longer punish us so severely if we finally decide to stand up for inclusion.

Because the churches of Main Street USA are, at heart, culture churches, this is really the underlying logic of what is going on in the exclusion of LGBT persons, isn’t it? It’s too risky right now to stand against the radical middle. Many of us have careers to make, after all. We don’t get to one of the big “first” churches of urban areas—the power pulpits where our voice is beamed out across an entire state as "the" Methodist voice of the area—except by playing it safe.

We don't get the power pulpit unless we become skilled at calculating the next step in the radical middle and assuring that we're in line with that step. That's what the radical middle means, for goodness' sake! It means walking lockstep and never stepping out of line, baptizing our conformity as a holy tactic for holding the church together.

We don’t get those coveted episcopal appointments if we step out of line. We would have headaches to deal with if we came back to Main Street USA and told the folks of the radical middle that we had let the gays inside: battles to fight, letter-writing campaigns to combat, dwindling donations, threats of power mongers to make our lives miserable.

Now that the Supreme Court of California has knocked down that state’s ban on gay marriage, it’s interesting to compare the underlying logic of this civil rights decision with the logic underlying the choice of churches of the radical middle to continue excluding our LGBT brothers and sisters.

Yesterday, Maura Dolan of the Los Angeles Times published an interview with California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald M. George (www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gay18-2008may18,0,4272300.story). George, a Republican who voted with the majority in the recent gay-marriage decision, speaks about how tough and anguishing the decision was for him to make.

Dolan notes that, as George pondered the decision, he kept returning in his memory to a trip he and his parents made to the segregated South years ago:

As he read the legal arguments, the 68-year-old moderate Republican was drawn by memory to a long ago trip he made with his European immigrant parents through the American South. There, the signs warning "No Negro" or "No colored" left "quite an indelible impression on me," he recalled in a wide-ranging interview Friday.

George’s conclusion about his decision to grant gay Americans civil rights, just as African Americans have been granted civil rights, is fascinating: "I think there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe."

“I think there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe.”

Churchmen (and churchwomen formed in the churchman's image) of the radical middle, do you hear what the California Supreme Court Chief Justice is saying? When African Americans were told that they were unwelcome at your table in the Jim Crow South, what did you do then?

Did you provide prophetic witness about how the church of Jesus Christ always welcomes everyone to the table, and most of all those who are excluded, demeaned, outcast?

Or did you play it safe? Did you play it safe while talking about the power of the Holy Spirit and conversion and bringing new life to the church?

Now that you have another opportunity to provide prophetic witness, how will you behave? How will you behave now, when you have confessed to the world the sin of your previous racism and misogyny?

Will you continue talking about the power of the Holy Spirit and conversion and bringing new life to the church, while belying that rhetoric with your ugly treatment of your LGBT brothers and sisters? Will you reverse the discrimination you currently practice only when society itself makes such discrimination unthinkable?

Or will you demonstrate the power of the Holy Spirit, conversion, and how new life is brought to the church by welcoming everyone to the table, and most of all those who are excluded, demeaned, outcast? Will you demonstrate this now when it still not entirely safe to make such courageous (Spirit-inspired) decisions?

Or will you once again repent only when it’s safe to do so?

What would Jesus do?

An Open Letter to Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker: Only One Table

Dear Bishop Whitaker,

In conclusion, I want to thank you for listening to my testimony in this week of preparation for General Conference. Thank you for your public appeal for commentary on your essay “The Church and Homosexuality.” My comments are a response to your invitation to hear the reflections of the Christian community regarding your essay.

I do not speak as a United Methodist. I do speak, however, as someone whose life and vocation have been strongly influenced by the Wesleyan tradition, and who has served in a leadership capacity at two United Methodist institutions. I speak as well out of an experience of gross injustice at a United Methodist institution under your pastoral charge.

In discerning God’s will in our lives, we must speak from where we are placed—by biological inheritance, by economic structures beyond our control, by social and ecclesial structures, and so on. For many of us, including those of us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered, the place to which the churches relegate us is a place of second-class citizenship. We are invited to partake of crumbs at the lesser table while other believers feast at the great table.

Being placed in marginal positions, being subject to injustice, certainly does not automatically make us holy. The experience of repeated injustice can cause us to be bitter and angry. If we do not learn to let our justifiable anger at injustice enter the depths of our soul, and be transformed there into a passion for justice for all God’s creatures—and, in particular, for all subject to injustice—our anger can eat us up.

For some of us, finding ways to speak out about our injustice, to make links between the injustice we have experienced and that experienced by other communities subject to historical marginalization, is a way of trying to respond redemptively to the place offered us. We hope, in recounting our painful experiences, to offer the church in return the opportunity to transform injustice into mercy. We hope to make the passage from bitterness to redemptive love for all in our own lives, by offering our reflections as honestly as possible to the Christian community.

Thank you for taking these reflections into your heart prior to the upcoming General Conference. I hope to have provoked you to give consideration to at least one overriding concern: this is the recognition that, in order to be effective and compelling as it challenges social injustice everywhere in the world, the church cannot itself practice injustice. Acts of injustice within the church and its institutions radically undercut the church’s effectiveness, as it offers the world the redemptive love of Christ, in which justice and mercy meet.

I read yesterday an interesting reflection on the fact that, in the past two weeks, two prominent men representing the contemporary church have been in the United States. As Hilary Rosen’s Huffington Post article entitled “I Am a Papal Party Pooper” notes, just prior to the current visit of Pope Benedict XVI to our country, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was among us (see www.huffingtonpost.com/hilary-rosen/i-am-a-papal-party-pooper_b_96976.html).

The article reflects on the very different message these two men offer gay and lesbian human beings. On the one hand, Benedict offers a teaching centered on the proposition that gay and lesbian human beings are intrinsically disordered in our very natures. Many of us who are gay and lesbian Catholics have rejected that teaching, since we do not experience ourselves as disordered. To the contrary, we experience our nature, including our sexual orientation, as part of the inestimable artisanship of the Creator God, who has chosen to fill the world with many different types of human beings, to mirror the tremendous diversity within the Creator’s own nature.

We reject the tag of “intrinsic disorder” as well because, in dehumanizing us, it implicitly justifies discrimination against us. Just as in the United Methodist Church and some of its institutions, in my church, the Catholic Church, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered human beings are subject to many forms of discrimination. In the Catholic Church as in the United Methodist Church, we are bidden to sit at the lesser table where crumbs are handed out, and not the one great table the church offers to all believers.

Archbishop Tutu offers a radically different word to gay and lesbian believers. He speaks to our hearts and to our experiences of injustice and exclusion. He speaks prophetically. In listening to him, we hear the church offering us the redemptive love of Christ—an unconditional love that encompasses all of creation. Out of his own struggle with draconian structures of racial injustice, he has come to name homophobia as a new form of apartheid. He tells the church that if it offers a homophobic God to the world, the world will not find the message of redemption in the image of God offered to the world.

Archbishop Tutu challenges the church to stand against savage injustice towards gay and lesbian believers, just as it has stood against slavery, segregation/apartheid, and the subordination of women to men.

Which of the two speaks for the future of Christianity? For those of who are LGBT, the answer is plain: we cannot see the face of God in the word the Pope offers us; we do see the face of God in the word Archbishop Tutu offers us.

These two radically different words spoken by the contemporary church: they call for believers to take sides, to be engaged, to discern what currents within contemporary culture point to God’s redemptive yes to all of creation.

We who are believers now look back and confess our previous lack of justice and mercy in upholding slavery, segregation, subordination of women. We will, many of us believe, one day look back as well and confess our lack of justice and mercy towards gay and lesbian persons. As Mr. Obama, in challenging the deeply entrenched homophobia of his African-American community, has reminded us, equality is a moral imperative.

To remain credible, the church must respond to that moral imperative. Moral imperatives demand a response . . . .

As you go to General Conference, where once again, God will set this particular moral imperative before United Methodists and will ask for a response, please remember the guidelines for ethical treatment of gay employees I offer in my “Open Letter to the United Methodist Churches” cited in yesterday’s blog. These arise out of my experience at a United Methodist university under your pastoral charge. They are as follows:

1. United Methodist institutions that claim to deplore discrimination against gay employees MUST have non-discrimination policies enshrined in the documents that constitute the institution’s official statements of policy.

2. Official policy statements forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation are particularly needed in areas in which local laws afford NO legal protection to gay employees, and permit at-will firing without any stated reason on the part of the employer.

3. When United Methodist institutions hire openly gay employees with the full acknowledgment and approval of the governing board of the institution, and when those employees are summarily dismissed without even having received an evaluation of their work, the governing board has an exceedingly strong responsibility to investigate what has happened in the dismissal.

4. United Methodist institutions should not hire openly gay employees who are also couples if the institution is intent on treating the gay couple differently from other married couples in the same institution.

And please remember, as well, the prophetic words of Bishop Kenneth Carder in his Episcopal Address to General Conference, 2004 entitled “The New Creation and the Church’s Mission”:

When we welcome the stranger, extend hospitality to the marginalized, embrace with agape love the despised and rejected, we are pointing toward Christ’s redeemed and reconciled community.... When we live the oneness of the human family that Christ makes possible, we are providing a foretaste of the heavenly banquet when people will come from the north and the south, the east and west and sit at table with Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and Mary, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mary McLeod Bethune, Oscar Romero and Mother Theresa, Desmond Tutu and Albertine Sisulu.

When God’s new heaven and new earth come to completion, justice will permeate all relationships, institutions, and policies. Biblical justice is defined primarily as extending God’s loving righteousness throughout the whole of human existence, enabling the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalized, ‘the least of these’ to have access to God’s table of abundance and to flourish as God’s beloved children.

Thank you for listening, Bishop Whitaker. Blessings on your ministry at General Conference. Please feel free to copy and share these reflections with other delegates, as the Spirit moves you. I am happy to have them shared with anyone at all who is concerned to listen to the experience of one gay believer.

An Open Letter to Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker of the United Methodist Church (#2)

Dear Bishop Whitaker,

Again, greetings in Christ as General Conference approaches. Thank you for continuing to listen to my testimony as you prepare for this important gathering.

As I noted yesterday, today I will continue my account of my own story, as a prelude to offering some reflections on your essay “The Church and Homosexuality.” I hope that in offering these public reflections on a topic with which the church today struggles just as strenuously as it struggled in the 19^th century with the issue of slavery, I can provide some light on the experiences of gay Christians—of at least one gay Christian.

In telling my story, I do not by any means intend to suggest that it is more than one person’s story. I do not intend to suggest that it is normative, or representative of the experiences of all gay Christians.

There are, however, aspects of my story and Dr. Schafer’s that, I would propose, are common to the stories of many gay believers. We who turn to the churches for welcome, for a family to embrace us and nurture our faith, for a place in which to exercise our gifts, are all too often repudiated. Where we ask for bread, we often receive a stone. The experience of gay believers in their families of faith—including the United Methodist Church—is all too often the experience of being invited to the lesser table, where crumbs are doled out, and not to the one great table around which all other believers gather.

It does not escape our attention, those of us who are gay believers, that the church’s treatment of us is premised on unexamined presupposition that we deserve no better than crumbs. From where we stand, it is clear that the churches all too often imagine that we are human in some sub-normal way that legitimates the unjust treatment we receive at the hands of the church.

Since we who are gay believers experience our own human lives and human nature differently—as fully human lives and human natures equivalent to the humanity of anyone else—we feel compelled to tell our stories. We do so in the hope that the churches will recognize that, though our humanity has been framed as sub-normal, we nonetheless bleed when cut. We experience pain when expelled from our families of origin or faith. We mourn when injustice is done to us. Like anyone dealt with unjustly, we pray for a hearing, for justice.

And so we keep speaking out. We keep telling our stories, at the risk of tiring the many who do not wish to hear these doleful stories. We keep trying to find and tell the truth in our experience of discipleship, even when the very telling of our stories often exposes us to false charges of self-concern, of being professional troublemakers, of all sorts of slanderous accusations.

I speak in the hope of articulating the experience of other gay Christians, though I am also aware that I am telling my own story, and no one else’s. I speak in the hope that, even if I am not heard now, my story will live on and Christians in an age that has recognized the cruelty the churches presently practice towards gay believers will look back to study the mechanisms of that cruelty, so as to avoid replicating it with any other social group in their own day and age.

This is, is it not, how the churches currently look back at the period of slavery—a period in which it was well-nigh impossible for dehumanized people of color, whose humanity even church members regarded as sub-normal, to have a voice? When people of color attained an education and a social space within which to speak in their own voices—something almost impossible in the period of slavery, so that miracles attended this attainment—they spoke over and over again, monotonously, about their thirst for justice. They spoke to the point of boring the churches to tears, about their hope one day to be treated as fully human.

They were often not heard. Today, however, the churches repent of their inability to hear these voices of brothers and sisters in Christ who asked for a place at the table, at the great table, but who were shoved away. Today, in looking back at the period of slavery and the churches’ complicity in that massive social system of evil, we tell ourselves that we must never again treat another human group this way. We also tell ourselves that the churches can clearly succumb to culture, can preach not the gospel of redeeming love, but a culturally shaped “gospel” of conformity to the social status quo. We remind ourselves, as we look at history, that the churches can be plainly wrong, on the wrong side of great historical moments of liberation. We remember that economic self-interest and capitulation to the wishes of powerful interest groups can cause the church to mute its proclamation of the redeeming love of Jesus for all human beings.

Perhaps there will be a day when the churches look back on our own period of history and wonder why the insights they gained in the aftermath of slavery did not fuel their imagination about the injustices they do to gay believers today. I live in hope that this will be the case. And so I tell my story.

I am also telling my story to you in particular, because I had no opportunity to do so when I worked for a college under your pastoral leadership. When the president of that college chose to terminate my employment without cause, without even providing an evaluation of my hard work, while also lying to and about me, I might easily have disappeared, as she intended for me to do—to go away silently, as if I had merited the unjust treatment accorded to me.

I cannot do so in good conscience. As a believer, I have an obligation to speak out, in the hope that, by doing so, I may make it more difficult for a United Methodist institution to treat anyone else this way again. Though, while working at two Methodist colleges, I never told anyone of my family’s own historic ties to Methodism and of how a Methodist religious sensibility informs my own life of faith, I feel compelled to do so now, to provide you with background to make sense of my theological critique of your statement on the church and homosexuality.

It is better that brothers and sisters in Christ know each other as human beings, is it not? This is what our communion in the body of Christ is all about. We are all interrelated. When one of us suffers, we all suffer. When one bleeds, we all bleed. In sharing our human stories in all their rich complexity, we find a shared humanity that makes it much harder for any of us to imagine the Other as sub-human.

I ended my chronicle yesterday with the promise to tell you today about the rich Methodist heritage of my mother’s father. The strand of his story I want to tell begins with an ancestor, Abner Winn, who was born in Virginia, grew to manhood in South Carolina and Georgia, and died in Alabama.

Two of Abner Winn’s sons, Genubath and Abner, Jr., were ordained Methodist ministers. Two others were, according to my family’s tradition, lay ministers who were not formally ordained. These include my ancestor John Alexander Winn and his brother James Russell Winn.

Among my Winn ancestors, there is a persistent strand of resistance to slavery, even while these ancestors lived within the slave states and held slaves. Family stories passed down to me, and documents I have discovered as an adult, indicate a tremendous uneasiness with the practice of slavery in which this Southern family was enmeshed, and an attempt to take the Christian witness of John Wesley seriously and end the practice of slavery.

Abner Winn’s own serious commitment to Methodism is apparent in an 1813 deed in Jackson Co., Georgia, in which he and a number of others, including his brother Lemuel, who was the father of three Methodist ministers, deeded land for the formation of a Methodist church on the Mulberry Fork of the Oconee River. This was, I believe, the first permanent Methodist church erected in that county (Jackson Co., Georgia, Deed Book F, p. 129, 13 Dec. 1813).

The decisive commitment to Methodism that pervaded the lives of these ancestors is also apparent in the obituary of Abner Winn’s wife, Lucretia Posey Winn. The obituary was published in the Methodist newspaper the Southern Christian Advocate (Nashville) on 28 May 1857. It notes that Lucretia Posey Winn had died at the residence of her son-in-law, Judge John McConnell, in Tuscaloosa Co., Alabama, on 19 April, aged 84 years, 3 months and 5 days.

Like Abner Winn, Lucretia Posey had been raised in an Episopalian home. Both became Methodist when their families moved (hers from Porttobacco, Maryland, his from Lunenburg Co., Virginia) to Abbeville Co., South Carolina. The obituary provides specific information about her shift to Methodism: it notes that in 1787, when she was some 12 years old, she heard a sermon of the famous Methodist minister Rev. Hope Hull (founder of a Methodist academy in Wilkes Co., Georgia, and president of the University of Georgia for a brief period) and joined the Methodist church. The obituary, written by her grandson Chelsea Cook, characterizes her life of deep faith as follows:

She was endowed by nature with a vigorous intellect, which was highly cultivated by judicious reading, especially of the Bible, and other religious books. She was well acquainted with the Holy Scriptures, and was able at all times to call to mind its leading doctrines and most important events. . . .Her exemplary and godly conversations showed that she regarded this world as the place to prepare for a better and a happier one; and this she endeavored to impress upon the minds and hearts of those with whom she associated; the effect of which was highly salutary. Thus lived and died one, whose examples we should follow, and whose virtues we should imitate.

Stories told to me often as a child speak of one of the sons of Abner and Lucretia Posey Winn as a Methodist minister who actively sought to ameliorate the lives of slaves in his community. These stories do not specify the son in question, and since I have found evidence that at least three of their sons were involved in such ministry, I am not certain to which of the three these stories refer.

In a 21 May 1978 letter to me, a first cousin of my mother, Lula Mae Giersch, places some of these stories into writing. Lula Mae had previously told me the stories a number of times, noting that they were told to her by her grandmother Samantha Jane Braselton, a granddaughter of Abner Winn’s son John Alexander Winn. Her letter states, "I can recall hearing her tell of incidents when she was a young lady (pertaining to the Civil War). I remember her telling of some relative keeping slaves. He was a Methodist minister. He did not want slaves, but they always came to his place when they ran away from other masters. He felt sorry for them & bought them when he could afford it.” In Lula Mae’s opinion, these stories referred to John Alexander Winn, with whom Samantha Jane Braselton and her mother, Elizabeth Ann Winn Braselton, and siblings lived in Tuscaloosa Co., Alabama, following the families’ move from Georgia.

Though I have found no historical documents to confirm this conclusion, I do find various indicators of how John A. Winn’s strong Methodist faith informed his life. Because he was known in his community in Jackson Co., Georgia, for his assistance to orphans, he was elected commissioner of the poor school, where he taught indigent children who could not otherwise afford an education (see Frary Elrod, Historical Notes on Jackson Co., Georgia [Jefferson, GA: Elrod, 1967], p. 146, citing 1834 "Poor School Report" by William Cowan). John A. Winn and wife Laodicea Horton raised at least one orphan themselves, her nephew James William Horton, who was brought up as one of their children.

A 29 April 1874 letter of John A. Winn’s sister Narcissa Byron Winn Weir to their brother James R. Winn speaks of the faith that permeated her brother’s life: "Though he left no dying testimony he has left to his children the world & the Church the influence of a long life of untireing fidelity. We can not doubt of his happiness, hope that we too will be numbered with the faithfull A few more years of toil & care & the storm of life will be over. Oh that we may be ready when Our Lord cometh."

If my family stories of a Winn ancestor who was a Methodist minister and who sought to ameliorate the conditions of slaves’ lives do not refer to John A. Winn, they may refer to his brother Rev. Abner Winn, Jr., who also lived in Tuscaloosa Co., Alabama, and who was an ordained Methodist minister. Abner Winn was a man of some note who served in the Alabama legislature.

His will indicates how his Wesleyan commitments affected his life as a slaveholder. It was written 31 Oct. 1855 and proven 20 Jan. 1858 (Tuscaloosa Co. Will Book 3, p. 35). In addition to leaving $1000 for the use of the Methodist Episcopal Conference of Alabama, the will specifies that his slave Jemy is to be permitted to purchase his freedom at a modest sum, and states explicitly, “I do this to enable him to get to Liberia and I do not wish him to be held in bondage by any man."

The will makes explicit arrangements for other slave families, as well, specifying that they are not to be separated or sold at public auction. Regarding one member of these families, a young man named Newton, Rev. Abner Winn notes that, if he so desired, he might accompany Jemy to Liberia. The will specifies that a free man of color, Jack Winn, was to accompany Jemy and Newton to Liberia and see them re-settled there.

I have strong reason to suspect that Jack Winn was a blood relative of the other Winn families in Tuscaloosa Co. He lived among and was protected and promoted by the interrelated white Winn families.

If the stories handed down in my family refer neither to John A. Winn or their brother Rev. Abner Winn, then they would apparently be accounts of the life of another of their brothers, James Russell Winn. According to the tradition of his descendants, he, too, was a non-ordained Methodist lay minister, who built and preached in a Methodist church at Hillsboro in Union Co., Arkansas.

James R. Winn led a fascinating life, divorcing his white wife in Mississippi, and then living for the rest of his long life with a free woman of color whom he was not permitted legally to marry. His letters to family members demonstrate that he regarded this spouse, Margaret Shackelford, as his wife. They raised their children together as his legal progeny, sending them at considerable expense to Oberlin, Ohio, as the Civil War approached, to assure their safety. Those children are listed in the family bible of their grandfather Abner Winn as the acknowledged children of his son James R. Winn, and one son, Powhatan Winn, inherited all his father’s land in Arkansas.

Descendants of this Winn brother, who now live in Iowa and Minnesota, have visited Union Co., Arkansas, on several occasions. They tell me that they spoke there to African-American families who remembered James R. and Margaret Winn and noted the esteem in which they were held in the African-American community in southern Arkansas. These families confirm family stories that James R. Winn built and maintained a Methodist church for African-Americans in his community, and preached in that church.

The courage of this relative who crossed the color line at a time in which such public actions was not permitted in the South is remarkable. Though white slaveholding men frequently fathered children by women of color, and even lived in marital arrangements with these women, social and legal restrictions made it well-nigh impossible to recognize their spouses and children of color.

James R. Winn’s letters to his children following the death of his wife Margaret Shackelford speak forthrightly about the Methodist convictions that undergirded his choice to acknowledge a spouse and family that he was not legally or socially permitted to acknowledge. These letters also speak very poignantly of his love for Margaret, and note that, since his reason for living had gone, only his faith kept him alive. He died in less than a year after Margaret left him.

The decisive commitment to Methodism, and the effect of that commitment on families’ view of slavery, are apparent in branches of the Winn family beside my direct ancestral line. A noteworthy example is Judge Richard Dickson Winn, son of Abner Winn, Sr.’s, brother Elisha Winn of Gwinnett Co., Georgia.

In November 1860, Richard Dickson Winn was elected to the Georgia secession legislature from Gwinnett County. When the statewide vote was taken at this assembly regarding the decision to secede, all three Gwinnett Co. delegates voted against secession. When it became apparent that the vote would be pro-secession, one of the Gwinnett Co. delegates changed his mind and offered a resolution to support Georgia under any circumstances. Richard D. Winn refused to sign or to change his vote.

Richard D. Winn left an abundance of written works testifying to his staunch Methodism. These clearly indicate that, though he and other Winn families were enmeshed in the slave system, he opposed secession because he wished to see slavery ended, because he accepted John Wesley’s verdict that slavery was immoral.

His cousin, my ancestor Elizabeth Ann Winn Braselton, agreed. Following the Civil War, she filed a claim in Tuscaloosa Co., Alabama, asking for reimbursement for expenses she had incurred in hiding local men to prevent their conscription into the Confederate army. The claim, which was verified by several neighbors, states that she was a Unionist throughout the war. Family stories handed down to me indicate that she did not wish to support the cause of her native South because it centered on the defense of slavery.

I do not wish, in telling these stories or those I told yesterday about my Lindsey ancestors, to suggest that these people were saints. Their lives were complex, as ours were, a mix of good and evil. They grew up within a social system that was taken for granted, the system of slavery.

They were enmeshed in that system. Even when they wrestled with the immorality of slavery, some of these families held slaves (though others explicitly repudiated slavery). Despite her devout Methodism, Lucretia Posey Winn was the aunt of a Confederate general, Carnot Posey of Woodville, Mississippi. Among the many Methodist ministers in the Winn family was a noteworthy Georgia and South Carolina minister, Rev. Alexander McFarlane Wynn, who was raised by the Andrew family—by the family of Bishop James O. Andrew, who caused the split between Northern and Southern Methodists by refusing to manumit his slaves.

According to George W. Clower, Rev. Alexander McFarlane Wynn was “among the most dedicated men in the work of the Methodist Church in the nineteenth century," and was noted for being one of the initial pastors of Atlanta’s first Methodist church, Wesley Chapel (see "Rev. Alexander McFarlane Wynn, D.D., 1827-1906: Pioneer in Atlanta Methodism," Atlanta Historical Bulletin 11,3 [1966], pp. 46-50).

And, just as our Methodist forebears in the South—yours and mine, Bishop Whitaker—struggled with an immoral but deeply entrenched social system premised on the assumption that some human beings are less human than others because of innate traits such as skin color, we today struggle with an immoral and deeply entrenched social system. That system accords power and privilege to men, and, in particular, to heterosexual men.

This social system is premised on the outrageous assumption that innate characteristics—gender and sexual orientation—make the humanity of some human beings more valuable, more normative, than that of other human beings. I wish to suggest to you, as I begin critiquing your essay on the church and homosexuality in tomorrow’s installment of my public letter to you, that just as John Wesley found such presuppositions odious and antithetical to the gospel when they manifested themselves in the slave system of his day, today he would find them odious when they manifest themselves in the social system of heterosexist patriarchy.

Far from courting the danger of becoming a culturally-determined religion if it grants the full human status of gay and lesbian persons, as your essay argues it will, I wish to propose that unless Methodism responds to heterosexist patriarchy with the same critical moral urgency that it brought to bear on the issue of slavery, it will be in danger of capitulating to culture. And in doing so, it will not be able to offer compelling and consistent witness to social justice in any area of our socioeconomic lives.

Thank you for continuing to listen to this testimony.