Groups Within UMC Confront Denomination's Scripture-Affirming Rulings
by Jim Brown
December 22, 2005
(AgapePress) - - A coalition of groups related to the United Methodist Church is calling on the denomination to reverse rulings by its highest court that went against homosexuals.
The "Here We Stand" coalition has issued a statement urging the UMC to "embody God's love" by reversing a Judicial Council decision that allowed a Virginia pastor to deny church membership to an unrepentant homosexual man. One of the signatories, retired clergyman Gilbert Caldwell with the group "United Methodists of Color for a Fully Inclusive Church," likens "discrimination" against homosexuals in the United Methodist Church to racial prejudice blacks encountered during the civil rights era.
"One justifies prejudice or exclusion because one bases one's exclusion on a negative stereotype," says Caldwell, "whether we're talking about women, whether we're talking about blacks, whether we're talking about gay persons."
Caldwell, author of the new book What Mean These Stones, equates the UMC's ban on homosexual clerty to "the Republican Party's southern political strategy of an earlier time."
He asserts that within the UMC "the ban against gays in the clergy, the hesitation about gay persons in some churches, represents a political strategy that sort of plays on the emotions of people." In fact, he adds, he believes it "denigrates and minimizes the depth of our faith in who we say we are as a people called United Methodists."
But such assertions are "absurd," says Mark Tooley, a Methodist activist with the Institute on Religion and Democracy. "Those who are attempting to overthrow the Church's standards on Christian sexual teachings," he contends, "have responded to these rulings with great hyperbole and exaggeration and a lot of apocalyptic rhetoric."
Tooley maintains that recent Judicial Council rulings simply affirm scriptural and church teaching that sex is reserved for heterosexual marriage.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
