same-sex marriage

It began when I realized the church has always had a process for changing its mind.

The UMC, a global church, prides itself on its democratic and decentralized polity. All this shapes its response to LGBTQ couples and clergy.

The UMC's response to declining membership is to spend millions deciding who else we can exclude. 

John Corvino, Ryan Anderson, and Sherif Girgis agree: religious liberty is good, discrimination is bad, and the clash between these values is complicated.

Like many legal and moral disputes, the case involving a Colorado bakery and a same-sex couple hinges on finding the right analogy.

Many Americans have gone from being squeamish about same-sex marriage to being squeamish about telling their gay friends that their relationships are less than valid.

The Episcopal Church was and is right to affirm same-sex marriage. Now we should be willing to face the costs.

Insisting that a government office answer to the law rather than to a given official’s religious beliefs isn’t de-prioritizing religious freedom in favor of something else. It is religious freedom. 

The aftermath of the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision included some thoughtful responses from evangelicals who don’t support it. Mark Galli’s is pretty good. So is this piece by Carey Nieuwhof, a useful list of things for anti-SSM church leaders to keep in mind.

I do think Nieuwhof oversells his first point, “the church has always been countercultural.”

I have carried the burden of knowing that our church contributed to a man's death when we refused him the open acceptance, love, and support that he needed.

Did you hear about the for-profit wedding chapel owners in Idaho who are claiming a constitutional right (pdf) to refuse services to same-sex couples? From Marci Glass's entertaining post:

I hate to be the one to point this out to the Reverends Knapp, but they are not, in fact, pastors of a church. They own a wedding mill.

It's often said that in a tolerance-obsessed culture, everything is tolerated—except intolerance. Actually, this gets said a lot more often than perhaps it should, because being intolerant is not the same sort of thing as being black or female or gay or Muslim. Tolerating people is more fundamental than tolerating their ideas.

Yet tolerating ideas matters, too.

A growing number of UMC clergy are performing same-sex weddings in open defiance of the Book of Discipline. What happens next?

A few years ago, my family started sponsoring a child through World Vision. I knew that the organization was generally evangelical, and that we are generally not. But this massive parachurch organization does good work, and I trusted them enough for a minuscule portion of that good work to be on our behalf. For 35 dollars a month, we’ve been contributing to the health, education, and general welfare of a little girl in Haiti, who was born the same day as our older daughter. Whatever theological differences I have with World Vision seem immaterial to this.

Theological differences may be slightly more material for some of the organization’s conservative supporters.

I used to read Ephesians 4 and get that vague, warm glow we Mennonites feel when we see the word peace. Now the passage stops me cold.

I sometimes envy my colleagues whose denominations have already fought this issue out, voted and moved on. We Disciples don't work that way.

On Tuesday, the general assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) approved a resolution calling on the church in all its expressions to affirm the faith, baptism, and spiritual gifts of everyone, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. This was timely, given the Defense of Marriage Act decision, though the resolution doesn’t specifically mention same-sex marriage. Nor does it mention ordination—the other hot-button issue around sexuality in the church—though it does affirm that neither sexual orientation nor gender identity is “grounds for exclusion from fellowship or service within the church.”