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by
Ed Vitagliano | AFA Journal News Editor
The recent ecclesiastical trial and subsequent exoneration of a
United Methodist Church (UMC) lesbian minister made it painfully
clear that a cultural and spiritual divide is threatening to split
the denomination.
The facts of the case would appear to be straightforward and unlikely
to generate much controversy. In 2001, Rev. Karen Dammann, a lesbian
minister in the UMC’s Pacific Northwest Conference, sent a
letter to Rev. Elias Galvan, Bishop of the Seattle Area, requesting
a new appointment to pastor a church. However, in the letter Dammann
admitted that she was a lesbian and that she was “living in
a partnered, covenanted, homosexual relationship.”
In response, Galvan had Dammann brought up on charges under the
denomination’s ecclesiastical laws, set forth in the UMC’s
Book of Discipline. It states: “Since the practice of
homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching, self-avowed
practicing homosexuals are not to be accepted as candidates, ordained
as ministers, or appointed to serve” in the UMC.
After several initial proceedings, Dammann found herself on trial
before a jury of 13 ministers, taken from her own UMC conference.
On March 20, 2004, Dammann was acquitted.
Conservative Methodists were stunned. As UMC layman Jim Lane wrote
in a commentary following the Dammann verdict, “How can you
be ‘not guilty’ of something you have confessed to?”
Rebellion
in the camp
The short answer is that the jury intentionally looked for a way
to ignore the clear statement of The Book of Discipline.
Instead, the 13 clergy members latched onto the argument of Rev.
Robert Ward, Dammann’s defense counsel, that they should not
elevate “a few, select paragraphs” of the Discipline
above another passage that spoke in vague terms of “inclusiveness.”
The jury agreed, angering conservatives. In their joint statement
about the acquittal of Dammann, Georgia bishops Michael Watson and
Lindsey Davis revealed their dismay: “[I]t is a clear sign
of rebellion when a group chooses to flagrantly ignore [The Book
of Discipline], substituting their own perspective for the corporate
wisdom” of the church.
Rebellion, in fact, is at the heart of this entire mess. In an interview
with The Advocate, a magazine that serves the homosexual
community, Dammann made clear that her letter to Galvan was an attempt
to create a face-off against the UMC’s Book of Discipline.
She said that, with the encouragement of some gay-friendly Christians,
“I decided to challenge the prohibition against homosexual
clergy.”
Like many homosexuals, Dammann seems bitter that society and the
church refuse to celebrate her same-sex predilections. Dammann told
The Advocate that she was outraged that the UMC would have
a problem with whether or not she and her lesbian lover had had
“genital contact.” She said, “That’s barbaric.
… [I]t is a violation of anyone’s rights to ask them about
their sexual activities. It is none of the church’s business
….”
For a supposedly Biblically literate person to argue that ordination
should be detached from a consideration of sexual conduct is startling.
Yet, this defiance is characteristic of the homosexual movement,
even within Christianity. Out of their sexual rebellion against
nature comes an equally vigorous mutiny against spiritual authority.
This is why UMC ecclesiastical law has been continuously challenged
at the denomination’s quadrennial General Conferences –
the only forum for altering church law – for more than 30 years.
What’s exasperating is that those who are continually beating
the drums to confront and overturn UMC policy on homosexuality act
as if their agitation is proof that the UMC is not really settled
on the issue.
For example, in an article in Circuit Rider, a Methodist
publication, Bishop Michael J. Coyner stated that “any objective
observer … would agree that our denomination is still struggling
with this issue. The issue of homosexuality keeps coming to the
forefront of General Conference” gatherings.
That assertion, however, comes immediately after Coyner admitted
that “every General Conference since 1972 has voted to re-affirm
our denomination’s stance that ‘the practice of homosexuality
is incompatible with Christian teaching’ and yes, those votes
have been strong ones.”
That doesn’t sound as if Methodism is “struggling”
with the issue of homosexuality – it sounds as if homosexuals
are refusing to accept the UMC’s verdict.
Value
spirituality
However, in order to sanctify this insurrection,
some sort of spiritual-sounding justification must be established
by activists; and this, they have been busily doing.
In the Dammann trial, for example, the 13-member jury said they
reached their decision “after many hours of painful and prayerful
deliberation, and listening for and to the word of God. … We
depended on the leading of the Holy Spirit.”
This is the language of those who make obscurity the cloak under
which they simply can do whatever they please. About what could
they possibly have spent hours deliberating and praying? The Bible
is abundantly clear in its condemnation of homosexuality, and so
is the UMC’s church law.
The “leading of the Holy Spirit,” then, becomes the artificially
created loophole that is used to set aside plainly written texts.
If one wants to reject the clarity of both Bible and church law,
what better way to do it than to claim that the Holy Spirit has
decreed a change in direction?
This is exactly what Dammann’s supporters did following the
verdict. Rev. Jeanne G. Knepper, a pastor and former spokesperson
for Affirmation, a caucus of homosexuals within the UMC, said the
verdict “represents God doing a new thing.”
Dammann herself claims that God is behind the battle to change the
Methodist p
osition on homosexuality. She has referred to those who supported
her stand as “reformers” within the UMC, “for through
them and through their decisions on this matter, surely the Holy
Spirit is speaking clearly and strongly for the church to hear.”
When conservatives raise doubts that the Holy Spirit would contradict
Holy Writ, activists merely shrug off such sentiments. Rev. Peggy
R. Gaylord, current spokeswoman for Affirmation, said she believed
“a fundamental message of Christ is that the church is open
to all. We get hung up on doctrine.…The doctrine was not what
Jesus was about.”
Bible-believing Methodists should recoil in horror from such postmodernism,
which advocates a retreat from orthodoxy and then claims divine
approval for it. How convenient that, when doctrine speaks clearly
against the practice of homosexuality, Gaylord exhorts us not to
worry about it. If Jesus was not “hung up” on doctrine,
neither should we.
Scuttling
the ship
So what is the answer? Knepper asserts that Methodists
“do not, cannot, and will not agree on the subject of homosexuality.”
However, seeing that it is Knepper and Gaylord and Dammann who refuse
to agree with UMC law, why don’t they simply depart in peace
for a denomination that is open to their peculiar interpretation
of Scripture? Why must the heretics always insist on the church
changing its orthodoxy to suit the devil?
The answer is simple: Homosexual activists, by virtue of their blind
rebellion against God’s Word and those who seek to faithfully
present it, have no problem scuttling the ship if they are not allowed
to captain it.
“I see the split in the church between those seeking full inclusion
and those seeking exclusion getting worse,” Dammann warned
ominously in The Advocate.
Knepper hinted that what the wider Methodist community witnessed
in the Dammann trial will only grow more explicit. The UMC jurisdiction
that acquitted Dammann, she said following the trial, “is increasingly
unwilling to shape its practices by that discriminatory language”
found in The Book of Discipline.
Knepper then issued a thinly-veiled threat in anticipation of a
conservative backlash at the General Conference coming up at the
end of April. She said that if delegates choose to make the Discipline’s
language prohibiting homosexual clergy “more specific,”
“more forceful,” and “more narrow,” that it
will lead to “widespread dissension and probable schism.”
It is apparent that those demanding acquiescence from the UMC have
no problem holding the denomination hostage by virtue of a threatened
rupture within Methodism. These activists see themselves as a new
breed of sailor seeking a brave New World. If the ship must be run
aground on the reefs and destroyed to make a point, so be it.
Conservatives would do well to quell the mutiny before that happens.
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