Soul Work: Holy Conferencing in Postmodern Context

Now that the United Methodist Church General Conference is over, it seems imperative that the UMC (and other churches) think carefully about what is entailed when the Christian community meets for holy conferencing.

I’ve noted previously that the United Methodist Church has iconic status as the church of the radical middle and of Main Street USA. Following my 2 May posting on that theme last week, Religion News Service reporter Daniel Burke published a 3 May article in the Washington Post, using the Main Street USA metaphor to discuss what happened at General Conference. Burke’s article is entitled “Methodists Struggle to Reflect Diversity” (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/02/AR2008050203416.html).

He notes that the UMC strives to hold together diverse constituencies: it is the church of George Bush and Hilary Rodham Clinton, as well as of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia. Though Burke’s article echoes a right-wing trope I find rather tired—liberal churches of the global North losing members while conservative churches in the global South boom—it also notes that the tensions within the UMC communion require that the church figure out ways to bring everyone together in its international dialogues.

The United Methodist practice of holy conferencing is a valuable tool for churches that seek to engage the public sphere in dialogue. All churches that try to remain faithful to the gospel while seeking to understand the demands of the gospel in new cultural contexts stand to learn from the UMC practice of holy conferencing. All churches that see the interchange between religion and culture as dialogic—an interchange in which the church brings the gospel to bear on contemporary culture, while simultaneously listening for the voice of the Spirit that speaks in culture as well—can benefit from a careful study of Wesleyan holy conferencing.

As I have noted in previous postings, I find the Wesleyan tradition of holy conferencing useful for all churches, because of the following hallmarks:

1. At its best, it tries to bring everyone to the table (and “everyone” is the subject of salvation: God calls and wishes to embrace everyone);
   

2. At its best, it allows everyone a voice in ecclesial decision-making that, after all, affects everyone, both those inside and outside the church;
   

3. In fidelity to Wesley and his spirituality, at its best, it seeks out in particular the least among us, to give that person a privileged place at the table, and a voice in an ecclesial context, whereas cultural contexts always give the voice of the powerful more authority than the voice of the less powerful;
   

4. At its best, it listens carefully for the voice of the Spirit in the whole Christian body, and, in particular, in the witness of the least among us.
   

5. At its best, it constantly tries to keep hearing the voice of the Spirit anew in new cultural contexts, by bringing church, culture, and scripture/tradition into fruitful conversation.

As other churches struggle to engage in similar church-wide (and culture-engaging) dialogues, the Wesleyan way of holy conferencing has something to offer. The United Church of Christ, the church to which Mr. Obama belongs, has just inaugurated a “sacred conversation” about race in American society and churches (www.ucc.org/sacred-conversation). We desperately need such dialogues—provided (an important proviso, the subject of this series of posts) that we can develop discourse rules to make them productive.

We are a culture fractured by interconnected fault lines of race and gender, heterosexism, homophobia, economic privilege and exploitation, militarism, and environmental destruction. We who are believers need to find sane, holy, gospel-centered ways to talk together about these issues (and their interconnections) in a culture in which religious ideas and commitments have tremendous sway in the public sphere.

In the next several days, I want to argue that, as wonderful as the concept of holy conferencing is in theory, as it has currently come to be practiced in Methodism, it leaves much to be desired. In order for the United Methodist Church to offer a useful paradigm to other churches that seek to engage believers and the culture in sacred conversation, the UMC needs to think much more carefully about what is really entailed in holy conferencing.

In my analysis of holy conferencing, I hope to offer some insights from the perspective of someone who is an outsider to the Methodist church, but who has worked in Methodist institutions, and who has experienced at first hand both the strengths and weaknesses of the technique of holy conferencing as it is now practiced in United Methodist institutions.

I am also speaking as a theologian who, throughout his theological career, has had a strong concern to understand the relationship between culture and religion. In particular, I have written and published for several decades now about the relationship between the church and public life.

My research into the origins of the Wesleyan movement and the effect of this movement on British working classes, and then on the social gospel, has convinced me that the relationship between church and culture must always be reciprocal. The church has an obligation to bring its beliefs and values—the gospel—to the public sphere.

At the same time, the church stands to gain when it engages culture in respectful dialogue, keeping in mind that in a world that is God’s parish, the face of God is to be found everywhere, the voice of God to be heard everywhere. Throughout history, the church has sometimes reluctantly ditched its most obdurately cruel beliefs and practices (slavery, subordination of women to men, burning of witches, Jews, and heretics, "holy" wars, etc.) only when secular movements have demonstrated to the church that its commitment to such beliefs and practices utterly contradicts the gospels.

My theological work on these themes has made me particularly concerned to understand what is at stake when various constituencies gather in public dialogue to discuss the connection between religion and the public sphere. As a theologian, I am especially interested in the “discourse rules” that must govern public dialogue, if such dialogue is to be fruitful.

Readers might better understand where I’m coming from here if I point these abstract reflections back to the recent UMC General Conference. General Conference has ended. Delegates have now gone home. I imagine many have done so with light hearts: business completed, the church can carry on as usual for another four years.

I’d like to hope that the holy conferencing of this General Conference will have longer-lasting effects, however. Specifically, I’d like to hope that some delegates are returning home with troubled consciences.

I’d like to hope some have returned carrying in their minds the faces of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, aunts, and uncles. These are the faces that watch from the sidelines as the church holds the line yet again. These are the faces that remain on the outside looking in, while the church puts its foot down one more time.

I’d like to think of some delegates returning home with these faces in their minds, because in my reading of the gospels, Jesus never stands with the middle, but always with those on the margins—as a sign of contradiction seeking to make us in the middle uncomfortable. I can understand and appreciate the attempt of a church to hold many different kinds of people together in the radical middle: that’s catholicity at its best, and is a hallmark of church.

But in my view, the price the church can never pay for holding many kinds of people together, if it seeks to remain faithful to Jesus and the gospels, is affirmation of the middle when the middle stands for cruelty, whether the oblivious cruelty of the unthinking comfortable who can imagine no one other than the familiar, or the overt cruelty of those with a need to turn a targeted group of human beings into demons to be humiliated and expelled.

Unlike many delegates who will now go home relieved to have the fuss behind them—who may imagine that they won’t have to encounter another gay face again for four years, thanks be to God—LGBT folks have to find some way to live with the decisions the church made at this General Conference. This was a General Conference in which delegates gathered for holy conferencing had to hear a delegate from the global South refer to LGBT brothers and sisters as “the spawn of the devil.” LGBT folks now have to decide how to live with a church in which such words can be uttered in holy conferencing, and in which such words continue to ring in the ears of LGBT persons, even if they will soon be forgotten by delegates who go home relieved to be shut of the gay mess for four years.

What does it portend for the United Methodist Church that it is a church in which such declarations are thinkable, doable, in holy conferencing? As we consider this question, it might be worth asking whether any United Methodist anywhere in the world would any longer dream of saying that Africans or African Americans are the spawn of the devil (though Christians made this statement freely in the past). Would any United Methodist anywhere in the world think it permissible to say at General Conference that women are in league with the devil, though Christians for many centuries made that claim without batting an eye?

I think the answer to those two questions is obvious. The fact that it is still thinkable and doable in United Methodist holy conferencing to call LGBT human beings the spawn of the devil—openly, on the floor of General Conference—points to some very serious problems with how Wesleyan holy conferencing has come to be envisaged and practiced in the current United Methodist Church.

In the series of postings that follow, I want to probe those problems and to suggest—totally unsolicited input from a fellow-traveler sympathetic to Wesleyan spirituality—some ways for the UMC to develop a practice of holy conferencing that will help move it beyond the gridlock of this General Conference, in which delegates rejected resolutions right, left, and center. It is clear to me that they did so because the churches of the radical middle do not know what to say, where they stand, and how to speak a coherent word (and a word faithful to the gospel) today, in the face of the repeated request of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered human beings to be treated humanely by the churches.

An America as Good as Its Promise

And now Barack Obama has addressed the murder of Lawrence King. According to today's Bilerico blog, Mr. Obama released the following statement yesterday:

It was heartbreaking to learn about Lawrence King’s death, and my thoughts and prayers go out to his family. King’s senseless death is a tragic example of the corrosive effect that bigotry and fear can have in our society. It’s also an urgent reminder that we need to do more in our schools to foster tolerance and an acceptance of diversity; that we must enact a federal hate crimes law that protects all LGBT Americans; and that we must recommit ourselves to becoming active and engaged parents, citizens and neighbors, so that bias and bigotry cannot take hold in the first place. We all have a responsibility to help this nation live up to its founding promise of equality for all.

Kudos to Mr. Obama.

And now, as someone who has donated** to Mr. Obama's campaign, I challenge Barack Obama to continue to distance himself from "ex-gay" proponents such as Rev. Donnie McClurkin, who performed in the Obama campaign in South Carolina. The damages done to tender human psyches by bogus reparative "therapies" purporting to change sexual orientation are too well-documented to be dismissed easily. "Ex-gay" ministries are especially damaging to young people finding their way through the maze of gender issues in adolescence, youth whose families sometimes place them in "Christian" reparative therapy programs such as Love in Action in Memphis.

This weekend, there has been a conference of survivors of ex-gay ministry in Memphis, in which speakers and artists explore and publicize the damages of this spurious form of psychotherapy which has been soundly repudiated by all psychotherapeutic organizations of any standing. Peterson Toscano's a musing blog, to which my blog is linked, reports on this conference.

I also call on Mr. Obama to support the courageous stand his own church, the United Church of Christ, has taken on LGBT issues. This denomination was the first mainstream denomination in North America to ordain openly gay pastors. The UCC also supports gay marriage. Mr. Obama has stated that he is not in favor of gay marriage--that he has not yet found himself able to come to the place at which his church has arrived re: this issue.

Yet an editorial in today's NY Times reports that studies in New Jersey are showing that legalized gay unions result in a second-class status for gay couples. Gay couples in New Jersey report meeting obstacles in dealing with inheritance questions, in making medical decisions on behalf of one's partner or even in being permitted visitation rights when the partner is in the hospital. A horrific story from Miami last year, which is now resulting in legal action, reported that a woman whose partner collapsed and died when they were visiting Miami from Washington State was told that she might not see her partner in the hospital, since they were in an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws.

The NY Times editorial notes that gay couples of color are especially prone to meeting obstacles under gay union laws, since they often do not have the financial resources to hire lawyers to fight discrimination, or to prepare estate documents to protect inheritance rights. The editorial calls on Gov. Corzine of New Jersey to demonstrate courage in addressing these issues.

I call on Mr. Obama to show the same courage. I was heartened by the speech he gave in an Atlanta church some weeks ago, in which he challenged the African-American community to deal with its homophobia. As someone who has worked within historically black colleges and universities, as an openly gay employee, I can testify about this: homophobia is alive and well in the African-American community (as in the white community). And it needs to be addressed. Silence about this issue contributes to the HIV epidemic in the African-American community. The failure to admit that black men can be living on the down-low and spreading AIDS to female partners, the silence about the presence of LGBT African Americans in the black community, contributes to the alarming rise in HIV cases among black women.

The black churches have historically been silent about these issues and about issues of sexuality in general. It is time for honest, open conversations. It is time to forge a new, safer social space for LBGT youth of color. The black churches should play a significant role in this regard. They--and Mr. Obama--would do well to listen to the courageous testimony of African-American athlete Charles Barkley about these issues.

Thank you for speaking out, Mr. Obama. Please keep on keeping on. And as you do so, please remember the inspiring words of a powerful African-American woman (and a lesbian), who helped pave the way for your success today. As Barbara Jordan once said, “What the people want is very simple--they want an America as good as its promise.”

This is what many of us in America--gay, straight, black, white, male, female--long for today. Please do not disappoint those who have pinned their hopes on you.


**I certainly don't want to imply that I am a major donor to Mr. Obama's campaign. I have given the bit I can as someone who is unemployed and without health insurance. But what I have given is given with strong hope that the changes Mr. Obama promises will actually be enacted, should he be elected. For those of us who are LGBT Americans, whose vocational lives have often been disrupted by prejudice, who have no federal protection when we are discriminated against in the workplace, it is crucially important that laws be enacted forbidding discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation in the areas of employment, housing, benefits, medical care, and so on. When our jobs are ended due to a discrimination we can't challenge in the absence of laws protecting us, we lose access to healthcare benefits which, without an income, we cannot afford. For those of us in committed relationships, if one partner is lucky enough to obtain another job when discrimination interrupts both partners' lives, there is often no chance of carrying the other partner on the new health insurance plan, since the majority of employers do not provide partner benefits. All of this needs to be part of any serious platform of change in contemporary America. We all lose, when the gifts of some cannot be realized due to prejudice. When those being impeded by discrimination are talented young people beginning their careers, the nation as a whole stands to lose very much, if those youth cannot achieve their goals due to insupportable discrimination.