“Reconciling” Conference Demands Abandonment of Historic Biblical Teaching

On February 28^th, the Florida Reconciling United Methodists hosted a conference entitled “Draw the Circle Wider: Ministry Without Fear” intended to teach about “how the United Methodist Church can be intentionally inclusive of the LGBTQ community.” The conference was held at Reeves United Methodist Church in Orlando. Speakers included Bishop Mel Talbert, Dr. Steve Harper, and Matt Berryman. The conference also featured several gay and lesbian persons who told their personal stories.

Again and again the conference speakers tried to connect their mission with the mission of the civil rights movement.

Barbara and Ava Sheppard-Herron, a lesbian couple, shared their life and church experience and the difficulties that they had encountered. Ava shared their hope for change: “We want to end with the hope that someday, all God’s people will be treated as equals. Just as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Dream’ speech is chiseled into our memories….We can only live that dream if we are willing to be open and affirming to all people, even those who don’t understand.”

Nadine Smith, co-founder and CEO of Equality Florida, spoke about her father’s initial rejection when she came out as a teenager, comparing his move towards acceptance to that of the country’s at large. She appealed for religious voices supporting acceptance of LGBTQ lifestyles “because we are undoubtedly in the midst of a backlash that is primarily propped up and framed around religion.” She also criticized religious-freedom protections: “Right now we have people making the argument that a sandwich shop, a photographer, any business should be able to say ‘Because of my deeply held religious belief, you people can’t be served here.’ And we’ve tried that before in this country and it was a bad idea then and it’s a bad idea now.” She did not cite any example of her misleading claim about sandwich shops refusing to serve gay customers.

Bishop Talbert led a session with Matt Berryman, the executive director of the national Reconciling Ministries Network, discussing the meaning of “biblical obedience.” The former shared some of his experience growing up in a sharecropper family in Louisiana where he experienced Jim Crow discrimination of the “separate but equal” type. As a college student, he began to participate in non-violent “sit-ins” in an attempt to do away with Jim Crow laws. He was arrested and jailed for three days with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who emphasized that the opposition (“white folks”) were their brothers and sisters.

Earlier this year, Bishop Talbert signed a joint resolution stating, among other things, that he agreed “to live according to the Book of Discipline.” According to the United Methodist Church, “Delegates to the Western Jurisdiction’s meeting in 2012 asked Talbert to oversee a Western Jurisdiction grassroots movement to act as if the stance against homosexuality in the Book of Discipline — Paragraph 161F — ‘does not exist.’ Talbert calls the movement ‘biblical obedience.’” His conduct at the “Draw the Circle Wider” conference, however, demonstrated his continued intransigence.

He explained that through experience his “perceptions, biases, and prejudices toward LGBTQ persons were changed.” He recalled growing up in a culture where people did not discuss being gay. It might have been assumed that some people were, and nobody was excluded on that assumption. When he was named General Secretary of the UMC’s General Board of Discipleship in the mid-1970s, a board member invited him to attend a “saturation experience” over a weekend with a mixture of gay and straight attendees. Their sexual orientations were to remain hidden until the last morning, and Bishop Talbert confessed that he expected all his biases to be confirmed. According to Talbert, the Sunday morning revelations were “such a catastrophic experience” that he promised God that he would never again prejudice persons based on their sexual orientation. He spoke of “breaking ranks” with the other Bishops and use his office to call for “biblical obedience” at the 2012 General Conference. It was a difficult struggle, and he had tried to get other colleagues to join him, but nobody would.

He claims Micah 6:6-8 and Matthew 12:28-31 and his membership vow to “resist injustice” as his authority for “biblical obedience” and disobedience to the Book of Discipline. He recollected his 2012 statement that “the derogatory language and the restrictive laws for clergy in our book of discipline are evil, unjust, oppressive, and immoral, and are no longer deserving of our loyalty and support.” He argued that this resistance was in the same spirit as the civil rights era civil disobedience and called for United Methodists to treat the Book of Discipline restrictions “as if they did not exist.”

He noted that complaints were filed against him after he performed a same-sex wedding. He noted that a “just resolution was reached” and announced in early January 2015. He explained that this meant the complaint had been settled. He noted that he had refused to promise not to perform another same-sex wedding and that he had refused to apologize. He did agree to abide by the Book of Discipline “from this point forward.” But he explained that he was able to say that with a good conscience because “Paragraph 164F [of the Book of Discipline] says ‘we recognize the right of individuals to dissent when acting under the constraint of conscience.’” He even declared, “What I did in Alabama [the same-sex wedding] was clearly in keeping with the laws and disciplines of the Church, and if necessary I could see myself doing it again.” He closed by saying “I believe that maybe God is calling the Reconciling Ministries movement to renew our church.”

Bishop Talbert also spoke at the closing of the conference where he remarked that he was surprised and encouraged by the number of attendees. He counseled them to “Use your God-given gift of intuition to navigate through difficult and hazardous waters…. And when we are brought up before religious authorities be prepared to defend ourselves. And use such processes as opportunities to proclaim the good news of the gospel.”

He preached the following Sunday at Reeves United Methodist Church from Nehemiah, noting Nehemiah’s heartbreak when he heard of the condition of Jerusalem and the temple and how that heartbreak led to action. He gave a long litany of the heartbreaks he had experienced: a conversation in the 1960s with a bishop who prioritized unity over integration, apartheid in South Africa, the two wars in Iraq, Congress’ inaction on immigration, and the 2008 UMC general conference that refused to remove prohibitions on same-sex activity. Each time, he said, he spoke out and then retreated into his comfort zone. He said that changed at the 2012 UMC General Conference where he called for clergy and laity to disobey the regulations of the Book of Discipline. He closed by asking, “For whom does your heart break? And what are you going to do about it?”

Dr. Stephen Harper, former professor of spiritual formation and Wesley studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, an evangelical bastion, spoke on the subject of “How did I change my mind with respect to human sexuality?” He noted the importance of “The voice of the spirit saying to us what was said to Isaiah. ‘I’m doing a new thing, don’t you recognize it?’… the first invitation to widen the circle is always a personal one where God says ‘what about you?’”

Harper spoke of the important role the example of the openness to and acceptance of others shown by parents and wife played in his change of mind. Another factor was his understanding “that the church is undergoing continuous revival. We are always on the way, we never fully arrive, God is never finished with us.” He proclaimed that he had “become a pilgrim on this pathway, a fellow participant in emergent Christianity” with Eugene Peterson, Marva Donn, Phyllis Tickle, Brian McLaren, Barbara Brown Taylor, and Rachel Held Evans. He said, “But they in their own way have reminded me that we all stand in the historic stream of Christianity to be nourished with the desert mothers and fathers, St. Benedict of Nursia, St. Francis and Clare of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, John Wesley, Evelyn Underhill, Dorothy Day, E. Stanley Jones, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

One of the catalysts for his change of mind was his decision during Lent 2014 to fast from Facebook and his blog. This gave more time for reflection, solitude, and prayer, and his prayers began to come alive in new ways. One impactful prayer was the prayer “For the Unity of the Church” from the Book of Common Prayer which asks in part, “Give us grace seriously to lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions; take away all hatred and prejudice, and whatever else may hinder us from godly union and concord.” Harper began to become very worried about the divisions that homosexuality was causing in the church and wrote his book, For the Sake of the Bride, in response.

Harper said that kind of praying gave him new eyes to see the crying of LGBTQ Christians pleading for a place in Christian community – a place not fraught with judgement, condemnation, and limitations. He felt deep sadness as he saw straight Christians using a bunch of “I love you, but…” clichés to justify exclusion and animosity against gay people in the church and in society. He became “convinced that my sin of claiming to be a generous and open Christian but remaining silent in the face of growing schism between gay and straight Christians was not right… [and] that my silence was contributing to the great danger [of division and schism].”

The climax came with the “World Vision fiasco,” as Harper put it; World Vision had decided to offer marriage benefits to employees in same-sex relationships in states permitting same-sex marriage. Harper noted the effect it had on him:

The announcement went viral in just a few hours. Jeannie and I rejoiced in the decision believing that it was the right thing to do. But as you know, the joy that we and others felt was short-lived. In less than 24 hours, a small group of fundamentalist Christians lashed out with vitriolic and condemnatory remarks including their threat to withhold financial support and to encourage others to do the same. Within two days World Vision reversed that decision. When I learned of that reversal I immediately felt that the gown of the bride of Christ was being shredded by sibling rivalry. In my deepest self I heard the spirit saying “enough is enough.” And I regret that I didn’t hear it sooner. I knew from that moment on that I would be on a new journey. That conviction only intensified as I saw United Methodists, some of whom are personal friends of mine, not only agreeing with the reversal but also the tactics which were being used to pressure World Vision.

Responding to the hypothetical question, “What book were you reading when you got these new ideas put into your head?”  Harper held up a Bible and said, “This one.” He continued saying that he used the inductive Bible study skills he used as a seminarian and professor to probe the “seven or eight controversial passages in the Old or New Testaments in order to see what the word of God would say to me at this time in my life.” He claimed to have discovered not only new understandings of those explicitly anti-homosexuality verses, but also recalled learning that they needed to be put in a broader context than is often the case. He admitted he had just assumed the conservative view was the biblical view.

He came to believe that what he had been taught was either not the whole story or not the only way of interpreting biblical sexuality. Over five thousand pages of reading later, he claimed to have found “credible evangelical scholars who interpret passages differently than right wing Christians do,” and discovered that he was not alone. Harper stated, “It is possible to be an orthodox Christian and interpret biblical sexuality differently than the traditionalists are doing.”

Harper argued that he saw that the gown of the bride of Christ was being shredded by a lack of three virtues that he claims kept Christianity authentic and vital across the centuries: “the principle of love, the practice of non-judgment, and the process of holy conversation.” He claimed that’s what his book is really about. He closed saying he now understands he has sailed his boat out of one harbor on the way to another and that he will not go back. He said, “The God who does new things, the God who widens the circle, has done a great work in my life. I am in fellowship with straight Christians who are being prompted to change their minds about biblical sexuality. I’m also in fellowship with gay Christians who show me what it means to hold on to the faith and to remain involved in the church despite persecution and despite a plethora of reasons to leave.”

The arguments presented remained the same tired appeals to emotion, experience, and eisegesis. Speakers accused those holding to the universal teaching of biblical sexuality of causing disunity in the Church, ignoring the fact that they themselves are opposing over thousands of years of biblical teaching and sowing disunity where two thousand years of unity existed. Reconciling Ministries Network and the various conference speakers also demonstrated an absence of both charity and logic in their comparison of traditionalists to racist supporters of Jim Crow laws. The tone of the conference speakers clearly demonstrated that, for them, reconciliation could only mean the surrender of the Church’s unbroken witness to the truth of human sexuality.