Buzzwords and the "Gay Issue" in the Church

Buzzwords, and the “Gay Issue” in the Church

The following editorial was written for a church newsletter in November of 2003:

I have a love/hate relationship with buzzwords – those little sound-bytes that conjure up images and associations that are probably deceptive in their simplicity. They work well at accomplishing political goals, but they muddy the waters of informational conversation.
We use buzz-words when we talk about our church as a “welcoming” place whose “doors are open to all.” We want to convey the message that Trinity Church does not exclude people on the basis of sexual orientation and to succinctly distinguish our church in a positive way from those who practice such exclusion.
Well, that’s fine, but buzzwords can be manipulated to serve many purposes. Conservative Evangelical churches will call themselves “welcoming” and “open to all.” They mean it too. They mean, “come in and be converted.” They practice acceptance with a view toward personal change and transformation. For them it means coming to understand substitutionary atonement and then adopting a value system that closely resembles American values circa 1945. The details are a matter of scriptural selection and interpretation.
But wait. Let’s not shout, “Ah ha!” too quickly. We do this as well. Take, for example, the kleptomaniac or the obnoxious drunk who might wander through our church doors – how accepting are we at that time? We will welcome them in much the same way that Conservative Evangelicals welcome a homosexual, i.e. with a view toward personal change or transformation. In the Episcopal Church we are more likely to couch it all in terms of “healing” and “wholeness” – rather than as if we were expecting some kind of miraculous zapping by the Holy Spirit.
The difference between “us” and “them” is not in the way that we practice welcome or acceptance, even though the parameters might be different. The real differences lie in the ways that we understand conversion toward and faith in Christ.
It isn’t a simple matter of who is more Biblical. The same Pauline literature that declares that gender differences are irrelevant in Christ also declares that women must shut up in church because they are more easily deceived than males and because they were created for men, not the other way around. I should add that there is plenty of scriptural basis for reinstating the institution of human slavery. Did you know that “nature teaches” that it is shameful for a man to have long hair? Hey, Paul says so.
The point is that our Canon of scripture is not a unified coherent single stream of thought. The job of Christian prudence is something like creating such a stream of thinking out of our scriptural witness. The job is to put it all together in the light of Christ – to find the overarching themes and principles and prioritize ideas and passages.
When Jesus said that the Son of Man would be lifted up in order to draw the world to Himself, I don’t think that physical arousal for members of the opposite sex was implied as an inherent result of this drawing process. Conservative Evangelicals disagree. We need to show them that their interpretive priorities are wrong. In order to do that, we need to get beyond buzzwords.