25 April 2008
Reports from GC - Day 3: Apr 25
25 April 2008
The most interesting event today happened at lunch. Prof Mark Yarhouse gave an excellent and provocative presentation for the Transforming Congregations Lunch (i.e. IRD/Renew/Good News/Confessing Movt). Did I cause you a double take? I’m really attempting to engage myself in a species of Holy Conferencing by making an effort to attend functions by caucuses with which I have fundamental disagreements. I figure I already know generally what MFSA will present at its lunches, but hearing the opposite perspective provides me with an opportunity to really learn something. And I did!
Yarhouse is a psychologist who has made his career studying sexual identity. Theologically, he considers homosexuality a sinful disorder of God’s intent for creation, but in his Calvinistic worldview, the entire creation is fallen and disordered. So, homosexuals are no more sinful than anybody else–they just have a different struggle than he does. I won’t rehearse his entire lecture, but suffice it to say that he elided the issue of whether homosexual attraction can be “cured” and focused on relativizing it as one of several factors comprising sexual identity, about which we have some agency in choosing how we will express that identity. And then he challenged the folks in the room to provide a safe place for LGBTQ persons in our churches and not to stigmatize this disorder differently than other struggles that people face. I had the feeling that this was not the lecture/sermon that most of the room expected to hear. I found it well-balanced (although I disagree theologically) and his theory of sexual identity (which I have not explained adequately) to be thoroughly substantiated by his clinical research. The potential for his research to provide a nuanced grey area between the extremely divisive theological camps in our church, potentially allowing for a common way forward that challenges everybody. I’m not sure that this was the intent of the organizers of the luncheon, but it sure was worth attending.
As it is, I felt like an interloper. Crashing the IRD functions, I feel very self-conscious. My table was populated with a group of middle aged white men, one of whom kept asking me questions in an attempt to size me up. Since I told him I taught at Candler, he knew I didn’t really belong to their caucus. He didn’t know me, and that was the give-away. If I were an IRD supporter on a UM seminary faculty, he would have already known my name.
Divisiveness is promoted by the structure of GC. Not in the official business meetings of course, but in the informal gatherings, particularly caucus events. When the meetings break for lunch, caucuses provide a place to belong. And it is virtually impossible to attend both the IRD and the MFSA functions since they are scheduled at the same time. Added to that is the absence of a caucus to provide a common space for folks from these two camps to meet together. We have created a structure that virtually insures that people won’t talk to each other across the divide, at least not at GC (or AC). To opt out of both caucuses and their activities is to miss a significant portion of the experience at GC.
