From "Open Hands" to "Open Doors"

By Peter L. DeGroote

It started well. The proposal for the publicity campaign was to be “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Hands.” Asserting that an openness to religious experience results in an openness in our thinking, which then leads to an openness in our behavior.

It was good, Wesleyan theology, and it was an organic metaphor equal to those of Paul. The clarity of its logic demonstrated the connections between the three stages while leaving us to meditate on how a change in one leads to changes in others.   

It may have started well, but as Wesley might have said, it ended in a shipwreck. The final result was “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.” What happened?  Bureaucracies are the same everywhere. Church agencies are like government agencies: they leak. The leaked details were a little fuzzy, but it seems that someone in the UMC bureaucracy noticed the magazine Open Hands, published by the Reconciling Congregation Program, the previous name of RMN.

This won't do! We need a substitute for “open hands!” The openness of our feelings to the Presence of God cannot lead to opening our minds to the acceptance of LGBT people and then to our reaching out our hands to welcome them! 

The decision was to replace “open hands” with “open doors,” thereby sabotaging purpose, clarity, and effectiveness.  Church doors were already open; the question was (and is) how people were treated once they got inside. “Open hands” dealt with human community, “open doors” with public access to a building (the corrupting influence of mixed metaphors!). 

The original theme of "open hands" would have been a gentle but effective challenge to the way local congregations greet, meet, and incorporate new and different people into their community. Instead, by substituting “open doors,” the theme became an after-the-fact theology of why nearly anyone could walk through our church doors, even if they are ignored. No longer a stimulus for change, the theme became a self-justifying explanation of the way things were. 

The rejection of “open hands” was also a rejection of Wesleyan tradition. The metaphor's origins lie in a verse from 2 Kings 10:15: "Is your heart as true to mine as mine is to yours? .... If it is, give me your hand" (NRSV).  Taken from a context of warfare, we might not use it in the same way today. However, it was the scripture for John Wesley’s seminal sermon The Catholic Spirit (Catholic meaning universal). The first line of that sermon states, "It is allowed even by those who do not pay this great debt that love is due to all mankind, the royal law."

It had already been determined that love was not due to those LGBT people who had already been invoking the Wesleyan tradition through the name of their magazine.  It then became "necessary" for the church--who was supposed to represent the Wesleyan tradition--to depart from it and to ingore what Wesley called "the royal law."  The result?  A hollow theme; a sound bite changing little.