The Rev. Jeff Kersey looks out over his massive church complex — 70 acres in all — and calls it The Promised Land.
Every Friday morning, the senior pastor of South Carolina's largest United Methodist church walks the property with a group of men to pray over Mt. Horeb, its leaders, its message and its people.
Those prayers could soon put Kersey and his church — a thriving congregation with a $5 million annual budget — at odds with the nation's second-largest Protestant denomination.
Later this month in St. Louis, a special session of the United Methodist Church's legislative assembly may vote on whether to drop language in its rulebook that bars "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" from being ordained as ministers and forbids ministers from officiating at same-sex weddings.
