Source: UMC report, Soulforce, Ledger, GLAAD
Two veterans of the civil rights struggle told a rally held during a major worldwide meeting of the United Methodist Church that there are parallels between the struggles of blacks in the 1960s and those of gays and lesbians working for full inclusion in the church today.

At a rally held Sunday outside the Fort Worth Convention Center where the denomination’s 2008 General Conference is meeting through May 2, retired United Methodist clergy the Rev. James Lawson and the Rev. Gil Caldwell spoke of the connection between racism and “heterosexism.”

The General Conference is the only body that can set policy for the 7.9-million member denomination. 992 delegates from the church's 63 U.S. regional conferences and seven overseas conferences are faced with more than 1,500 petitions to modify the church's policies, contained in its Book of Discipline.

Liberals and conservatives are likely to continue their tug-of-war over the same issues that have proved contentious over the last several meetings.

Sunday's rally was organized by the national, gay advocacy organization Soulforce to take place on the 40th anniversary of The United Methodist Church’s dissolution of its Central Jurisdiction.

The Central Jurisdiction was a race-based, non-geographical unit within the UMC that formalized the exclusion of African Americans from white Methodist congregations and the exclusion of African American leaders from the governance of the denomination. It was abolished in 1968 -- 14 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate is inherently unequal.

Caldwell called for black clergy and laity to stand alongside gay and lesbian Christians, saying, "None of us are free until all of us are free.

"I wonder if those of us who have been wounded by being placed outside the gate have an even greater mandate to be healers of our sick society."

Caldwell, former chairperson of Black Methodists for Church Renewal and former co-convener of United Methodists of Color for a Fully Inclusive Church, recalled at Sunday's rally how his Methodist pastor father came home “with a sense of despair” from the 1939 General Conference that established the Central Jurisdiction. He remembers his father telling him, “We are exchanging slavery for segregation.”

“How do we get at the fact that we have not walked our talk?” Caldwell asked. “What was the operative theology that allowed these apparent contradictions?”

Caldwell said that attitudes of some within the church today toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are similar to those that allowed for the church's long history of exclusion of black people.

In 2005, the supreme court of the United Methodist Church granted local pastors sole authority to deny church membership to lesbian and gay applicants, effectively authorizing a new form of segregation. Prior to that decision, existing church policies already excluded gays and lesbians from the full life of the church by forbidding the celebration of same-sex unions and barring gays and lesbians from sharing their gifts as ordained ministers.

"There is a great need for us to link the 'isms': anti-Semitism, racism, sexism and now heterosexism," Caldwell said at Sunday's rally. "They come from the same kind of place."

Even as the denomination worked toward eliminating the Central Jurisdiction, attitudes were slow to change, Caldwell recalled. In 1964, United Methodist bishops – black and white together – were turned away at the door of a United Methodist church in Mississippi, he said. That church argued it was “not un-Christian” for them to remain an all-white congregation.

After thirty years of non-inclusive policies, the Church again will vote at this year's convention on whether LGBT people will be officially treated by the denomination as equal members.  

Those in favor of an inclusive church have tried unsuccessfully for years to change the church's official position in its Book of Discipline, which states, "The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers this practice incompatible with Christian teaching." Petitions are under consideration again this year to alter or remove the policy.

Every four years, the vote moves closer towards a majority in favor of inclusive policies, though the complexities of the issues involved increased and the number of protest on either side multiply with each conference.

Lawson, former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and one of the architects of the civil rights movement, recalled at Sunday's rally the long and difficult struggle to remove official racial discrimination from the church's rules.

Black United Methodists who worked for change within the denomination, Lawson said, experienced a history of frustration. He recalled when delegates at the 1964 General Conference in Pittsburgh rejected “a blueprint for change” that had been developed by members of the Central Jurisdiction.

“I wept in that conference,” he said. “The proposals that the Central Jurisdiction brought in were summarily dismissed and turned down by the General Conference.”

Lawson said that even though the church dissolved denominational structures of segregation in 1968, that action didn’t automatically change the attitudes of some United Methodists "who proclaimed the Bible promotes racial segregation. It did not stop them from marginalizing some people in the church."

That attitude was present even among United Methodist leadership, said Lawson. “There were some bishops – and I could name them for you – who did not speak up boldly then for change and who are not standing up now against the poison of marginalizing some people within the church,” he said.

The official change was adopted at the 1968 General Conference, Lawson said, because black clergy had become better organized. In the opening worship service, many black Methodists walked out before Communion was served. "That sent a shock wave across General Conference – sort of our warning shot that things had to change."

Lawson said he stayed up late in 1968 to write the proposal to establish the Commission on Religion and Race. "We were met with a fair amount of animosity, though we were children of The United Methodist Church, and had been raised in the church. They thought we were among the most disloyal people possible."

And that kind of "spiritual poison" is what comes to mind now when he hears about discrimination against gays and lesbian United Methodists, a sense that "there are some people who are not worthy of the grace of God," he said.

Full article: General Conference 2008 - Feature - UMC.org
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