A UMNS Commentary By Steven E. Webster*
Many voices from across The United Methodist Church are suggesting there is no way forward in the 36-year-long dialogue about the role and status of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in the church. Declaring an impasse, these voices call for an end to this dialogue in the name of peace and unity.
Forty-five years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a now-famous letter from a jail cell in Birmingham, Ala., to a group of white clergy (including two Methodist bishops) who--in the name of "unity" and "peace"--had publicly called on King and his allies to cease their disturbing nonviolent protests against racial segregation.
King wrote that the "great stumbling block" in the African-American struggle for equality was not blatant bigotry, "but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."
I embrace our Wesleyan Christian vision of "making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world" and applaud the General Conference for seeking to build unity around four focus areas:
1) developing principled Christian leaders for the church and the world;
2) reaching new people in new places by starting new congregations and renewing existing ones;
3) engaging in ministry with the poor; and
4) stamping out killer diseases by improving health globally.
Yet we undercut these same goals when we continue to:
1) reject the gifts and graces of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons and their allies;
2) turn off a younger generation that views the Christian faith as "anti-homosexual;"
3) push LGBT youth into poverty and homelessness as families reject them because church and society stigmatizes LGBT persons; and
4) fail to address the role that ignorance and stigmatization of homosexuality (and other sexualities) play in the global AIDS epidemic.
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