http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/us/methodist-pastor-defrocked-over-gay-marriage-service.html?_r=0
An excellent, if sad, article on the continuing fight for marriage equality in our Christian churches. (Any underlines are mine.)"The Rev. Frank Schaefer, a Methodist minister, was stripped of his clerical credentials on Thursday for violating church law by presiding at his son's same-sex wedding. The punishment, imposed by the United Methodist Church in Pennsylvania, was requested by the church prosecutor to deter other ministers from blessing same-sex marriages.
But far from intimidating others, the trial and defrocking of Mr. Schaefer have galvanized a wave of Methodist ministers to step forward to disobey church prohibitions against marrying and ordaining openly gay people.
Members of the United Methodist Church, the nation's third-largest Christian denomination, have been battling bitterly over homosexuality for four decades. The church now faces an increasingly determined uprising by clergy members and laypeople who have refused to cede, even after losing the most recent votes, at the Methodist convention last year, on proposals to change church teaching...
...In Philadelphia last month, 36 Methodish ministers recited the Declaration of Marriage on the steps of a Methodist church for two gay men in a 25-year relationship. In New York, Methodist clergy members have been triumphantly posting accounts on a blog of the same-sex marriages they have been performing.
And in what is considered a brazen act of church boundary-crossing, a retired San Francisco bishop, Melvin Talbert, flew in October to Birmingham, Ala., where same-sex marriage is not legal, to conduct a church ceremony for two gay men against the will of the local bishop. Bishops are considering bringing ecclesiastical charges against him.
Church conservatives, however, say they have the momentum. About a half-dozen more ministers are facing church trials, and the defrocking of Mr. Schaefer proves to them that church juries have the courage of their convictions.
John Lomperis, the United Metodist director at the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a conservative religious think tank, said the same-sex weddings performed by Methodist clergy were 'publicity stunts'...
...Mr. Schaefer is hardly the first Methodist minister to be defrocked for disobeying church teachings on homosexuality. Jimmy Creech was stripped of his credentials in 1999 for performing a same-sex ceremony. Irene Elizabeth Stroud, a lesbian living with her partner, was defrocked in 2005...
...(Mr. Schaefer said) 'The church needs to recognize that things have changed and times are changing and people are changing.'...
...He performed the wedding for his son, Tim, in Massachusetts in 2007 after same-sex marriage was legalized there.
Mr. Schaefer...had been serving as the pastor of a small church in Lebanon, Pa., for 11 years when charges were brought against him this year, weeks before the church's statute of limitations was set to expire. The man who brought the complaint was the son of a choir director whom Mr. Schaefer had removed..."
So, apparently gay marriage is against church doctrine, but ruining a man's life out of spite is a perfectly acceptable Christian act...."Efforts to amend the Book of Discipline have been defeated by increasingly wide margins at the church's quadrennial conferences as delegates representing the church's growing branch in Africa have bolstered the votes of conservative Methodists in the United States..."
I think it's sad that modern and lovingly inclusive American Methodists are being held captive by conservative Methodists from another country--one with a completely different culture. It's even more sad that conservative American Methodists refuse to recognize that American thinking on marriage equality is evolving and is no longer stuck in a backward ideology, choosing instead to use Africa's social norm as justification for their own out of date closed mindedness...."(Mr. Schaefer) said he would not consider leaving the Methodist Church for a denomination that has changed its teaching on homosexuality.
'It's not that easy when a church is your spiritual home,' he said. 'All my children have been baptized in the United Methodist Church. I don't know how to be a minister out of the United Methodist Church.'..."
Part of me applauds him for staying and fighting church hierarchy from the inside; but part of me wants him to take his family, his three gay children, his one straight child and his wife and move to a church that would welcome them all. Ministering "out of the United Methodist Church" is possible. The liturgy may be different, but God is the same...."Those watching the trial were stunned when Bishop Peggy Johnson, who leads nearly 900 United Methodist churches in Pennsylvania and who is Mr. Schaefer's superior, posted a note on her blog this week, saying that she believes the prohibitions on gay ordination and marriage in the Book of Discipline were 'discriminatory.'
The prohibitions, Bishop Johnson continued, taken together with the church's message of inclusion, 'has led to confusion by many from...outside the church wondering how we can talk out of two sides of our mouth.'"
As hard as this country's Bible toting bigots--whether they be Methodist, Evangelical, Catholic, or a Duck Dynasty proselytizer--try, they will not find a clause in the Good Book that says we are all God's children "except for". Jesus did not teach exclusivity.
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