Methodists live in a house divided over same-sex issues

After more than a week of spirited, angry, righteous and sometimes-uncivil debate, the United Methodist Church has decided to give itself more time to consider changing its opposition to homosexuality, which it declares “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

Faith communities often — and purposefully — stand against developments in the culture. But those communities are at their best when they do that by being leaders for liberating oppressed and outcast people, as many of them were in the civil rights movement.

Now, however, instead of being advocates for liberation, the Methodists, at least for now, have chosen the road of caution.

They remain the only large mainline Protestant denomination — though the biggest in the U.S. — not to allow ordination of non-celibate gay and lesbian pastors and not to let pastors perform same-sex weddings, even though such unions now are legal in all 50 states.

Instead, delegates to the church’s General Conference, meeting in Portland, Ore., agreed with the Rev. Adam Hamilton — founding pastor of the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, the largest United Methodist Church in the U.S. — to compromise by turning to the Council of Bishops for leadership on this divisive issue.

After a confusing debate process, the conference voted to give the bishops time to appoint a commission to recommend how to proceed. Hamilton has been working in a quiet but determined way to move the church toward a more open stance on human sexuality issues but has been unable to get the majority of Methodists to follow his lead.

The outcome was disappointing to LGBT advocates — including more than 100 clergy members who risked disciplinary moves by coming out as gay at the conference.

One area pastor who came out to her congregation before the conference opened, the Rev. Cynthia Meyer, pastor at Edgerton United Methodist Church, is among the many who now don’t know how the church will treat them while this whole matter is unsettled. Such uncertainty seems unfair.

But as distressing as the church inaction was to Meyer and others, it was no shock.

After all, more than 40 percent of the delegates to the General Conference were from countries outside the U.S.

As members of the Episcopal Church know, many church members and leaders in those countries — especially in Africa — are a long way from recognizing gays and lesbians as equal or as anything but degenerate sinners.

In fact, the U.S.-based Episcopal Church has run into a buzz saw of criticism from other members of the worldwide Anglican Communion for its willingness to elect gay bishops and support gay marriage.

Among Methodists, as with other Christian branches, the primary point of contention on this has to do with how to interpret Scripture passages that at least seem to condemn homosexuality.

Methodists who want to keep the denomination’s current rules say that God’s word is clear and that violating biblical standards would be sinful.

Methodists who want to do away with the current official bans argue that when the Bible is read in context it has essentially nothing to say about homosexuality and what appear to be condemnations of it are misinterpretations of the original Hebrew and Greek. Or such passages represent the thinking of cultures and times that no longer apply to today.

Although talk of schism was widespread among conference delegates, it is unclear now whether — or perhaps when — the United Methodist Church will shake apart over this issue. With this compromise, the church at least has given itself a chance to hold together long enough to see what its bishops’ commission recommends.

In the meantime, no one in the church on any side of the issue is happy in a house divided against itself.

This story was originally published May 20, 2016 at 4:02 PM with the headline "Methodists live in a house divided over same-sex issues."