Ministry, Church structure

A Modern Reformation, for LGBT Christians

Today, Wednesday 18th September, will see the inaugural leadership congress in Kansas City of “The Reformation Project“, which describes itself as

“a Bible-based, non-profit organization dedicated to reforming Christian teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity”.

This fall, we will host our first leadership conference for 50 straight, gay, bisexual, and transgender Christians who are committed to reform. From September 18th -21st at Asbury United Methodist Church in Kansas City, KS, we will put them through a Bible boot camp. There, we will equip them with the tools and training they need to go back to their communities and make lasting changes to beliefs and interpretations that marginalize lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. Once they go back, we will continue to offer them personal, financial, and infrastructural support for months and years to come. We will ensure that even those with the biggest and most daunting of goals will have the means to accomplish them.

- See more at:Reformation project website

Keep an eye on this one. It’s an initiative of Matthew Vines, the young man whose hour long Youtube video on “The Bible and Homosexuality” in May last year brought him widespread attention - and had wracked up 620 041 views to date, with a book to be published soon. This week’s conference is not some flash in the pan - this is just the inauguration, leadership conference for a continuing project that was begun 6 months ago. Those six months of preparation culminated in the selection of 50 participants, from a range of denominations, selected from hundreds of applicants.

Nick Norton, a Catholic among those 50, has described the process at Huffington Post:

This year Vines started the Reformation Project. From hundreds of applicants, 50 were chosen to join him at a leadership training conference in Kansas City. We spent all summer in an intensive prep period, reading scholarly research, engaging in group discussions, and learning more about this issue from all angles. One of my fellow reformers, AnaYelsi Sanchez, hosted on her website, browneyedamazon.com, a blog series titled “Out of the Closet and Into the Pews.” Her site features dozens of articles written by our fellow conference participants.

So this week’s conference is the culmination of the preparation phase, the end of the beginning, during which participants will be thoroughly trained, and then sent out into their own communities to do continuing work to implement lasting change in beliefs, attitudes biblical interpretation pertaining to LGBT people. That’s where the real work will begin.

The project name is significant: “Reformation”, or re-formation. This is not an attempt at revolution, or a challenge to the essentials of Christian belief, or to the importance of the Bible as God’s revelation. There is nothing included in the statement of faith that could cause offence to any fully orthodox Christian, including Catholics:

We believe in:

  • The inspiration of the Bible, the Word of God.
  • The Triune God, eternally existent as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
  • The supremacy of God the Father, who created all things seen and unseen through Christ our Lord.
  • The deity of Jesus Christ, only begotten Son of the invisible God, firstborn over all creation, fully God and fully man, head of the church, author and finisher of our faith; His death for our sins; and His resurrection and eventual return.
  • The regenerative power of the Holy Spirit, whose fruit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

- See more at:Reformation project website

The original Reformation also was not a challenge to the essentials of faith, but an attempt to cleanse it of the distortions and corruption that had intruded into Christian practice over the many centuries since the origins in Christ’s life and teaching. That reform was in fact necessary, was abundantly illustrated in the Catholic Church’s response, with its own attempts at reform in the counter- reformation and the Council of Trent.  This modern reformation, likewise, is simply aiming to challenge one of the distortions of Christian faith that has become so embedded in much of conventional thinking about religion, that many people seem to think it is inherent in Christianity and the Bible - the idea that homoerotic sexual relationships are “clearly” condemned in Scripture, and incompatible with Christian belief. This misinterpretation and misunderstanding has had tragic consequences over many centuries, from the physical execution of thousands of men and women under the Inquisition and secular laws that followed,  to the Nazi gay holocaust, to violent hate crimes ir unjustified discrimination against sexual and gender minorities today, and as a result, to exceptionally high rates of mental health problems for many LGBT people, especially for young people attempting to come to terms with the challenges and difficulties inherent in coming to terms with their sexual or gender identities.

This emergence of openly LGBT  or LGBT sympathetic, faith,is not simply a modern phenomenon. More than fifty years ago, Canon Derek Bailey’s “Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition” began the reexamination which demonstrated that the Biblical verdict was by no means as clear cut as had once been believed. Fifty years ago this month, the Quakers published “A Quaker View of Sex”, marking the first major denomination to accept that same - sex relationships are not inherently sinful. Even before Stonewall, the first pastor in a mainstream denomination announced that he was gay, resulting later in the Unitarian Universalists’ commitment to full inclusion for LGBT people, and Troy Perry founded the Metropolitan Community Church, as a religious home specifically to welcome gay and lesbian Christians. In the years that followed, numerous other support groups have been founded, including Quest, for British gay and lesbian Catholics which recently held its fortieth anniversary conference.

But in recent years, there’s new momentum and energy not simply in support for and acceptance, but for direct affirmation and rejection of discrimination. In many denominations, there have been explicit moves to full acceptance in congregations which are not simply welcoming but affirming of their LGBT members, campaigning  at synods and general assemblies for amendments to discriminatory church rules and regulations, on marriage and standards for ordination, There has even been the emergence of openly gay or lesbian, partnered ministers as bishops and in other  leadership positions, Now, this drive for change has entered the mainstream. Everywhere you look these days, it seems there are LGBT Christians and their straight allies speaking out in support of equality and full inclusion, in marriage and other secular law, and in church. (Last week it was the NALT project, which in its listing of sponsors demonstrated some of this impressive array).

This modern flowering of LGBT full inclusion in church has major momentum behind it, and is certain to grow still further.  We are currently witnessing a major transformative moment in Christian history, in respective of the religious response to LGBT people, what the pioneer Catholic theologian John McNeill has accurately described as a “Kairos moment” in the church - a time ripe for taking advantage of the opportunities before us. We need to grab these opportunities, wherever they arise, and work with them.

For the record, here’s a partial list of the major organisations already working in this field - and this is just the Americans:

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Leave a Reply