Gut Checks about Gay Debates and Women's Ordination

One of the tensest moments at the Louisiana Methodist Annual Conference came up on Tuesday during a debate about "Petition One." This petition, written by brave layperson Andrew Smith, called for the Louisiana Conference to denounce the passage of the Traditional Plan, to apologize to LGBTQ+ people (and their friends, family, and the Church as a whole) for the harm the plan did, and to reaffirm opposition to injustice and oppression.

Our "Big Tent" coalition of progressive and centrist folk prepped like mad to ensure the petition got a thorough hearing and a fair vote. We knew some traditionalist-minded folk would move to "postpone indefinitely" this petition (effectively killing it). Thanks to the brilliance of Rev. Donnie Wilkinson, we responded with what amounts to a "postpone definitely" motion that (according to fine print rules in subparagraph X of codicil Y of paragraph Z) superseded the kill motion.

Then we had a debate. Mikie AndrePont and Adam Philley had been preparing for just such a time as this. Each gave poignant, superbly crafted, and deeply moving stories of their own struggles with exclusion. Traditionalist voices responded with Expected Gambit #1: "But Scripture Says..." Andrew's petition contained a "Whereas" clause that nodded to the fact that it's hard to justify the Traditional Plan's fixation on homosexuality with the Bible, as scripture contains few references to same-sex behavior at all and zero references to a modern understanding of sexuality. All true.

Still, the mention of scripture opened a door to speakers to bring up once more the "clobber passages" as well as the fact--also true enough, technically--that little in scripture seems to affirm long-term, sexual, same-gender relationships. (Of course, little in scripture explicitly affirms abolishing slavery, fighting sexism, or using the internet, but whatevs.) Responses to the clobber passages--and responses to those responses--circulate regularly in this struggle.

I'm not a fan of this particular debate, or of any debate involving verse-by-verse interpretive differences. It's a rabbit hole traversed largely by people already convinced of the rightness of their interpretation. Everyone usually knows each other's responses already.

As the debate was playing out, though, I got a blast of déjà vu. In the rhetoric of the traditionalists I heard echoes of arguments my mother and other women in the Southern Baptist Church endured--and still endure-- they defend their call to ordained ministry as pastors.

As it happens, the NPR show 1A had a segment about the Southern Baptist debate about women's ordiantion yesterday. I listened to it as I drove back to Baton Rouge. Host Joshua Johnson invited onto his show two (male) SBC pastors, each of whom staked out different interpretive territory about how this or that scripture passage restricts the role of women or not. Their debate had the same rabbit-hole, we've-all-heard-these-arguments-before feel as the UMC's homosexuality debate. It's tiring and not especially productive.

The episode's best moment, though, came from Johnson's other guest, the Rev. Dr. Jerusha Matson Neal, professor of homiletics and ordained American Baptist minister. Her response to the debate, I thought, captures about as well as anyone could my view of the debate about the clobber passages and about sexuality in scripture generally. The show lacks a formal transcript, so I type a bit of her response here:

One of the most interesting books for me in the New Testament is the book of Acts because there you see an early Christian community doing its best to discern, with new data on the ground, how to interpret texts that they thought they knew. They thought they understood: black and white, clear codes. What's in, what's out, what's allowed,  what's clean, what's unclean, all of it. And here they were having to rethink because of the evidence of the Spirit on the ground, that perhaps their interpretation of those texts was incorrect. And so I would not simply say yes, scripture interprets scripture. But I also think that the Holy Spirit, the Living God, helps us interpret scripture, given what God is presently doing.

One of the questions that was asked to me--I was speaking to a room of about fifty women who were discerning whether to come to seminary or not, many of whom were in denominations where their call to preach, their call to leadership was dismissed or diminished in some way. And one of them said, well can you please explain what should I say when someone asks, "Why should the church ordain women?" My answer was not that submission is bad or that somehow we kind of have to "follow the culture" or something like that. My answer was because God is calling women!

And if God is calling women, we have this whole room full of people who are feeling God's calling in their lives. There has to be a gut check in us which says perhaps we have interpreted these scriptures incorrectly. Perhaps we need to be responding to what the current need is on the ground and how this is getting lived out in communities. 

I love that gut check. What do you do when the authority of the written word smacks into the reality of the Spirit's movement? It's a gut check, a rich phrase that suggests some uncomfortable combination of Is this right? and What the heck did I eat?

Eventually, the Conference voted the petition down The tally was 360-340, which for Louisiana was amazing but which for LGBTQ+ folk was still dispiriting. More on that later.

But perhaps that petition, like Andrew's petition and Adam's and Mickie's stories, was less about winning a point and more about provoking a gut check in the conference.

I like that: the movement of the Spirit experienced less as divine breath and more as, well, holy gas, a tummy rumbling of productive discomfort. Something's changing in the church. We're checking our guts.