A major dispute over same-sex weddings has cause great disunity in the United Methodist Church. The row has pitted liberal clergy who have presided over gay weddings in defiance of church law against those who support traditional marriage.
Methodist gay marriage activists have been recruiting liberal clergy to openly officiate at same-sex ceremonies. The church has been debating the issue since the 1970s.
The debate has reached a high level of intensity over the last few months as the church tried, convicted and defrocked a Pennsylvania pastor who presided over the wedding of his son and another gay man. Several other cases are pending.
Advocates for gay marriage say they are going to continue to aggressively press for change in church law to allow the marriages.
“Most folks, after 40 years of trying legislative solutions, realize they won’t work. The way forward is to claim what we know to be true. And we’re going to continue doing it in an aggressive way,” said one advocate of same-sex marriage.
Both sides continue to organize for the ongoing fight, including a new organization designed to keep conservatives from leaving the denomination. “The present atmosphere is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said the Rev. Maxie Dunnam, a retired president of Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky. “We are a divided church already.”
Advocates for same-sex marriage say that the church trials are divisive. But the Methodist Book of Discipline says that same-gender relationships are “incompatible with Christian teaching,” and bans clergy from performing ordinations of openly practicing homosexuals or same-gender marriages. The disunity therefore comes from those who deliberately break those laws, particularly with the purpose to break them down.
The struggle has gone on for four decades until “frustration with the lack of change fueled the new movement to openly defy church law…”
In the spring of 2012 during the last day of their General Conference gathering, there was a meeting of those in support of gay marriage. One of the leaders of the movement declared “the time for talking is over,” and called on more than 1,100 ministers who had signed a petition to the General Conference to permit same-sex marriages to start performing them in defiance of church law.
“But before they lay down, the men of the city, [even] the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter…” Genesis 19:4
Perhaps the men of Sodom have begun to encompass the United Methodist house.