According to Professor Mark Smith of the University of Washington, "from the beginning of the twentieth century up to 1968, no Christian denomination in America passed a resolution or released a report that directly addressed homosexuality." In the church today it's all we talk about. The smart money was on the bet that the United Methodist Church would be the first to topple, to be conquered by American culture in this area, and yet to date that has not formally happened. Judging from the results of recent annual conferences it may never happen. What has been surprising, however, is the number of supposedly conservative Methodists, some of them even John Wesley fellows, who have publicly embraced the LGBTQ agenda.
This brief essay is directed to all those church leaders, Methodist or otherwise, who now advocate ordaining practicing homosexuals and who contend that the practice of homosexuality is fully compatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ. We traditionalists, who argue otherwise, deeply regret the animated polemics of late as well as the tone of the conversation on this "presenting issue." We affirm, as the UM Book of Discipline clearly states, our homosexual brothers and sisters are "people of sacred worth." Our desire then is to listen and to understand, to reason and to think theologically about a matter that requires our best efforts. We, of course, have many questions and some of them are no doubt uncomfortable ones but they must be raised. Getting to the heart of the matter requires such labor. To date we have yet to read a coherent argument that can make the case convincingly by those who seek to revise (henceforth known as revisionists) books of discipline, church practices and traditions, and even Scripture itself in accordance with a particular, and judging from Professor Smith's observations, most recent agenda.
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