I have been part of numerous dialogue sessions within the Texas Annual Conference in regard to the denomination’s stance on homosexuality. I have listened and I have been heard. During these dialogues, I heard the deeper issues beneath the presenting issue of homosexuality. They are the same issues I have heard at recent General Conferences. In reality, there are four issues dividing our church that cut to the very heart of what it means to be a church family. They deal with truth, Scripture, revelation, and Jesus Christ….
You never save a troubled institution by refusing to talk about what’s wrong. You save an institution by doing what’s right. You don’t save a hurting institution by maintaining the status quo. You save an institution by changing its present dysfunctional reality. And as important as it is, you don’t make a divided church whole simply by engaging in dialogues. You must at some point provide courageous and, if need be, costly leadership that others will follow.
Like a good counselor, the one thing our leaders must not do is to ignore our deepest issues or act as if they do not matter. They must lead us to those issues and they must speak truth to the Church so that, with a unified voice, we will speak truth to the culture, that the world may believe.
Where are we? We are in a place where band-aid solutions, denial, and institutional responses will not save us. We are in a place where we need leaders to lead and we need people of biblical faith to be people of courage and character.
Outstanding. Thank you Kendall.
Agree with Seitz. A tour de force. [url=http://www.getreligion.org/?p=15811 ]Get-Religion has a piece[/url] on how the Methodist defeat of two resolutions gets no news but the liberal press covers the Episcopal fiasco to the hilt. But the pullback of the Methodists (and others) is not unrelated from the TEClub’s self immolation. They look at the carnage of the TEClub and say, “let’s not go there.”
This is a great quote:
[blockquote]…a time where theology, as one of our bishops has said, goes little deeper than “God is nice and we should be, too.†In our contemporary culture, the highest virtue for liberals is tolerance, except when it comes to tolerating views that disagree with what their hearts tell them is right.[/blockquote]
This is irritating, though:
[blockquote] If there were teachings by Jesus in any of the Gospels about homosexuality, liberals would find these compelling and debate might be ended.[/blockquote]
When Jesus releases us from purity codes but maintains prohibition against sexual morality (Matt 15:19 and Mark 7:21), I wonder what the liberals think that a first century Jewish rabbi considers sexual immorality? Is there any credible Biblical scholar who would think that a first century Jew would NOT have included homosexuality in sexual immorality?
Oops, should be sexual [b]IM[/b]morality!
Yes, and it is just a false way of understanding the meaning of ‘old’ and ‘new’ in a single Christian Bible. The Fathers understood the giver of the Law in the OT to be the Logos, Jesus Christ. It is only a modernist ‘history of religion’ that can only work with developmentalism and progression, and cannot understand ontology and eternity: hence, one singles out a “Jesus” abstracted from the world he presupposed, or a ‘NT religion’ as against something Old. No one read the Bible this way, in the immediate sense, in the early church, and if they did, as Irenaeus put it, they saw a fox instead of the King.
…”fox instead of the king.” Very nice phrase #4, very nice. Strong and clear, forceful, and suggestive. Larry
Excellent essay. I just wish the Episcopal Church could learn from the Episcopal Church instead of being a warning sign to other denominations.
This is a TREMENDOUS lesson for the Episcopal Church! Why doesn’t the Episcopal Leadership have anyone who can speak this clearly and forthrightly?
I wrote the magazine and congratulated them on this author’s being able to both diagnose the concerns AND present the treatment for them. Makes me wonder why my husband and I didn’t consider the Methodists; I think it’s because of what T. Mattingly says about the Press: they “heart” the Episcopal Church.
#2: I liked the comment about Jesus in the New Testament:
[blockquote] If there were teachings by Jesus in any of the Gospels about homosexuality, liberals would find these compelling and debate might be ended. [/blockquote]. I’ve always felt that the liberals will do anything they can to have Jesus on their side. Why do you think they put so much emphasis on “love?” Additionally, they don’t really consider much that they do to be “sexual immorality.” It’s just being true to oneself.
Right.
Recently I’ve written in the blogsphere (at SF) about the lessons we might learn from the United Methodist case. One very important one is the need to support orthodox theological seminaries–key conduits, of course, for biblically-faithful leadership. Asbury Theological Seminary, most especially, has been a crucial center of orthodoxy within contemporary North American Methodism. Certainly the African conferences of the wider Methodist world are important too. So there are interesting parallels here with Anglicanism–seminaries and the African connection.
[blockquote]We will not be made whole by singing “Blessed Be the Tie that Binds†every four years on the last day of General Conference. I wish that would work, but it won’t. [/blockquote]
The money quote. It will be interesting to see how the ABC demonstrates his understanding of this. It is one thing to get it on an intellectual level. It is wholly a different thing to get it. I pray ++Rowan gets it.
[blockquote]”In the beginning, God made man in His own image, and ever since we’ve been trying to return the favor”[/blockquote]
Rev. Renfroe’s discussion of the gulf between liberals and traditionalists on Scriptural authority alone is worth its weight in gold. Would that this could be read from the pulpits in every TEc parish. Sadly, my experience in my “moderate to conservative” parish in the out-in-left-field Dio of Olympia strongly suggests that it would probably be received as an unwelcome arousal to many of the slumbering masses, just more “fundie” malarky to the liberals, and irrelevant to both camps, since he’s, well, an evangelical Methodist, and Not One of Us.