Emergent Village
Last weekend an important gathering, the Reformation Project’s 2014 Regional Training Conference, was held in Washington D.C. The Reformation Project is Matthew Vines’s organization that advocates for LGBTQ equality in evangelical Christianity. Though I was unable to attend, a few of my friends were there and enjoyed a number of impressive presentations.
Two of these presentations are now available on the web, and I’d like to bring them to your attention. I think you’ll find both of them interesting and thought-provoking, no matter where you find yourself standing on the issue of LGBTQ equality.
Allyson Dylan Robinson, an ordained Baptist minister and transgender woman who attended West Point before her transition, was one of the presenters. Her talk has been posted on the web, and is well worth reading. It’s a “where do we go from here” kind of thing, deftly integrated with her vision of how scripture might inform the near term future of the affirming Church.
Although the talk is rooted in the presupposition that there is a fundamental duality underlying human experience (a viewpoint I do not espouse), I still find her words to be informative, inspiring, and— though only time will tell— likely presciently cautionary. Here are a few lines:
“Just as Jesus was tempted to make use of his own divine power to create what he had so sorely lacked, it is within our power today to abandon the churches of our childhood and the churches of our conviction – the communities that blessed us as babies and taught us as children and encouraged us as adolescents and called us as adults – and to create for ourselves new churches and new denominations to sustain us.
“I believe this is the wrong path for us here and now.”
David Gushee also spoke. A draft of his presentation was leaked prior to the conference, causing a bit of a stir. A well-known evangelical and professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, he’s never been a part of the LGBTQ affirming movement before, but with this talk he makes it clear his views have changed and he has become an ally.
The speech is beautifully crafted, beginning with a discussion of the pervasive anti-Semitism of Christianity for almost its entire history. He notes how this anti-Semitism continued unchallenged for almost 2000 years, and only after the horror of the Holocaust, when an estimated 1/3 of the Jewish people in the world were murdered, did Christian teaching begin to change.
He then draws an apt comparison to the “damaging and ultimately unchristlike body of Christian tradition, amounting to what can be fairly described as a teaching of contempt, against sexual minorities…” (emphasis his).
I found especially moving the following description of what this looked like:
“The church’s anti-gay teaching was comprehensive. The Church taught a disdain for LGBT people as a whole and all individuals in the group. The Church taught that LGBT people are morally inferior. The Church sometimes taught that LGBT people are evil. Certainly it taught and sometimes still teaches that LGBT people are by definition excluded from heaven. The Church warned its adherents about associating with LGBT people. The Church at various times ascribed particular vices to LGBT people, including sexual degeneracy, especially against children.”
There’s much more, and I hope you will take the time to read his presentation, published on the Reformation Project’s website. Gushee’s talk, grounded in history, shows how the Church can change its mind on issues of justice and offers hope for a future in which compassion replaces contempt.
* * *
To read about why Gushee’s “change of sight” and his new book, Changing Our Mind: A Call for Full Acceptance of LGBT Christians in the Church, might be a game-changer in the evangelical world, read “This is a big deal: David Gushee’s Changing Our Mind” and “A radically un-radical, conservative call for ‘full acceptance of LGBT Christians in the church’” on Fred Clark’s excellent Slacktivist blog.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In