Unity in the Body Of Christ: The Creech Trial, part I

This morning in church we sang one of my favorite hymns, "We Are One in the Spirit." For those who don't know, the lyrics are as follows:

We are one in the Spirit
We are one in the Lord
We are one in the Spirit
We are one in the Lord
And we pray that our unity
May one day be restored
And they'll know we are Christians
By our love, by our love
And they'll know we are Christians
By our love.

If you'll indulge me in a bit of old-school text analysis: the fascinating thing (one of the fascinating things) about this hymn is the tension it presents between the now and the not-yet, the present indicative and future subjunctive moods. We Christians are one in God, insists the hymn (four times, in fact), but we pray that our unity may one day be restored, implying that in fact such unity does not at present exist.

In this tension I find the truest and most poignant picture of temporal Christian community. We are one, but we are as yet disunited. I have even had occasion to see this paradox manifested in performance.

In the fall of 1999, the then-Rev. Jimmy Creech, a United Methodist minister in the Nebraska Conference, was tried before an ecclesiastical court for violating United Methodist prohibitions against performing a holy union ceremony for a same-sex couple. This was the second time he had been tried. The first time, the court refused to convict, insisting that the sections of the Book of Discipline (the authoritative rules for Methodist polity) regarding homosexuality were meant as recommendations rather than as full-fledged rules.

The UM General Conference subsequently established that those sections, a part of the Discipline known as the Social Principles, were in fact regulative. Furthermore, the Church added formal prohibitions against the performance of same-sex holy unions by its pastors or on its properties. Creech, in an act of civil-ecclesiastical disobedience, defied these rules by solemnizing the union of a lesbian couple. Members of the Nebraska conference filed charges, and Creech was brought to trial.

I had met Pastor Creech the summer before at a gathering of GLBT-affirmative Methodists. There he asked if I would attend the trial and devise/produce some sort of theatrical commentary or protest. Eager beaver that I was, I said "of course." The trial coincided with my first semester in graduate school (PhD program in Theatre History), during which time I took a a class called "Performance and Social Change." One of our projects required that we team with a local group or organization that used performance in the service of its social change mission. I chose the United Methodist Church.

I prepped my little street theatre protest, found a ride to Nebraska from one of the Twin Cities' many liberal-progressive UM churches, and arrived at Grand Island, NE, to find that my best-laid plans for dramatic commentary were upstaged by the larger drama that was the trial itself.

This church trial had sent ripples throughout the UMC. Conservatives, fearing a decline of biblical standards, pushed for Creech to be punished, his ordination stripped. Liberals, of course, wanted to see Creech's role as pro-inclusion activist validated, perhaps through the court's rendering of a "no verdict" verdict or a hung jury. The trial as media event attracted reporters, gawkers, and activists from around the country. The Rev. Fred Phelps was there with his small band of sign-wielders ("God Hates Fags," "UMC=Fag Church," etc.). Other sign-bearers set up displays next to him (verses from Leviticus), though they declared that they had nothing to do with Phelps's display.

The event also marked one of the first public displays by Soulforce, a pro-inclusion ecumenical group founded by the Rev. Mel White. White had been a former activist/ghostwriter for the religious right working closely with Jerry Falwell. He subsequently defected, becoming a minister in the GLBT-affirming Metropolitan Community Church. Soulforce sought to use nonviolent protest techniques to advocate within various Christian denominations for LGBT inclusion and nondiscrimination. "Stop Spiritual Violence," read their T-shirts. Soulforce planned (and implemented) a mass-arrest, first blocking the doors of the church with their bodies and then being peacefully led away by a police officer to be booked and fined--all arranged in advance with the police in question (standard nonviolent protest technique). Close to one hundred Soulforce volunteers, all wearing "Stop Spiritual Violence" T-shirts spent the morning standing in line to be booked at a makeshift processing table staffed by local police officers. They sang civil rights-era standards ("We Shall Overcome," etc.)

Already, then, anything theatrical I could do paled in comparison with the multiple and conflicting performances happening all around me.

The biggest performance of all, though, took place within the Methodist Church assigned to host the trial itself. It was there, most of all, that I saw firsthand the unity/division tension I value in the "We Are One" hymn.

More tomorrow,

JF