Reconciling Ministries Network

Outsider

By David E Braden

I was struck by an exchange this morning between Bishop Clay Lee, the Presiding Officer of the church trial of Rev. Amy Delong, and Amy’s counsel, Rev. Scott Campbell:

Bishop Lee: Scott, you’re not from this annual conference, are you?
Rev. Campbell: No, I am not.
Bishop Lee: So you’re an outsider.
Rev. Campbell: Only in the same way you are, Bishop.

Bishop Lee was referring to the fact that Rev. Campbell hails from the New England Annual Conference and is not a clergyperson from the Wisconsin Annual Conference in which the trial is taking place. Bishop Lee is not from Wisconsin either. This exchange took place hardly five minutes into the opening proceedings. There were groans from the audience and people speaking out, “He’s not an outsider, he’s not an outsider.”

So, just who is an “outsider”? What are we supposed to infer when someone calls another person an “outsider” – even in jest?

As Christians, we have been given the Good News that there is nothing in heaven or on earth that can separate us from the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ. In Christ, we are one body and no individual part of the body can say to another, “I have no need of you,” or that you do not belong. No part is “outside” if we are one body.

This trial is not just about Rev. Amy DeLong. It is about whether The United Methodist Church will continue to discriminate and deny the full humanity and sacred worth of our gay and lesbian family members in Christ. This trial is about whether The United Methodist Church will reflect the inclusive gospel of Jesus Christ, who has torn down the barriers of insider and outsider.

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David E Braden was born, raised, baptized, and confirmed in the United Methodist Church and grew up in Northbrook, IL. When he left home for college, David also left the Church for three years because he did not feel welcome in the Church as an out gay man. However, after a deeply spiritual pilgrimage in Spain in 2003, David felt called by God back to the Church where he found Holy Covenant UMC in Chicago. He has felt welcome there to live fully as a child of God and is convicted by Christ's call to make disciples for the transformation of the world.

In 2007, David was elected as the first out, gay delegate to serve as an Alternate Lay Delegate to Jurisdictional Conference by the Northern Illinois Annual Conference. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago with his Masters in Social Work, and works at Reconciling Ministries Network as the Director of Development

Place in the Choir

By David E Braden

I love to sing.

I find myself humming in the middle of menial tasks. I belt out ballads by Celine Dion in the shower. With my headphones on, I audibly sing backup to Lady Gaga while walking down the street.

When I was younger, I was repeatedly told not to sing. Your voice is too high. You sound like a girl. Why is your voice so nasally? If you can’t sing like a man, then don’t sing at all. I still hear these voices just about every time I sing.

I don’t belong.

When I first realized that I was gay in middle school, I didn’t tell anyone. I was mortified of what people would think, say, or do to me.

Although my family accepted and loved me for me, not one Christian community to which I belonged was doing the same. My home Methodist church that baptized, mentored, and confirmed me was silent on the issue. My first boyfriend in high school was kicked out of his home because his father told him that his Christian faith prevented him from supporting his son if he chose to live a “sinful” life. In my own case, I remember all too clearly the pain of being asked out of a leadership position within my high school Christian youth group because I was dating another guy. Every Christian voice I heard was telling me silently or out loud that I did not belong.

Faith, Hope, and Love.

In 2007, I walked into a room at Vanderbilt University full of 20 somethings at RMN’s 9^th Convocation, Faith, Hope, and Love. They were discussing white privilege and power, heterosexism, and internalized oppression as well as how these things affect LGBTQ communities. They were discussing faith and sexuality – where the Church and Christians have suffocated queer people and where the Church has been a blessing and source of strength. This was my first experience with MOSAIC, Methodist Students, Seminarians, and Young Adults for an All Inclusive Church, an extension ministry of RMN. Before this convocation, I had never been in a place where hundreds of United Methodists from all across the country had gathered to build and model an all inclusive church. We worshiped, studied the Bible, attended workshops, ate meals together, and had conversations into the wee hours.

Sing a New Song.

I feel alive and most connected to God when I sing. I think I like going to church so much because it’s socially acceptable and even expected to sing. When I am at my church and get to sing, I feel at home.

Sing a New Song is an opportunity to feel at home and experience the grace and love of God in community. If you haven’t done so already, register for Sing a New Song and join hundreds of United Methodists from across the country and even the world – United Methodists who are passionate about drawing the circle wider still for you and me, the person we don’t particularly like or agree with, and the stranger we haven’t met yet.

All God's critters got a place in the choir
Some sing low, some sing higher
Some sing out loud on the telephone wire
And some just clap their hands, or paws
Or anything they got now.
- Bill Staines

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David E Braden was born, raised, baptized, and confirmed in the United Methodist Church and grew up in Northbrook, IL. When he left home for college, David also left the Church for three years because he did not feel welcome in the Church as an out gay man. However, after a deeply spiritual pilgrimage in Spain in 2003, David felt called by God back to the Church where he found Holy Covenant UMC in Chicago. He has felt welcome there to live fully as a child of God and is convicted by Christ's call to make disciples for the transformation of the world.

In 2007, David was elected as the first out, gay delegate to serve as an Alternate Lay Delegate to Jurisdictional Conference by the Northern Illinois Annual Conference. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago with his Masters in Social Work, lives on the Northside of Chicago, and works as the Director of Development for Reconciling Ministries Network.

God's Eye is on the Sparrow

By David E Braden

Last week, Northern Illinois met for its Annual Conference. This year, we had a focus on young people and there was a special worship service on Sunday night that involved young people in a significant way. What amazed me most about this service was watching the young people on the overhead screens, singing in the choir and reading from the pulpit, and seeing a sea of pink, "All Means All" buttons. We talk so much about young people experiencing the church as discriminatory and hateful. >From my own experience, I know this to be true http://www.rmnblog.org/2008/09/ex-gay-therapy.html. But on this night, here were the youth and young adults of Northern Illinois proudly wearing a sea of pink buttons. What a joy, what a witness!

We had seven petitions focused on inclusion of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities within The United Methodist Church. Many of these petitions included requests for Declaratory Decisions from the Judicial Council to overturn its discriminatory 1032 ruling and provided direction to our Conference Board of Ordained Ministry to prepare the present and future clergy of our Conference to welcome ALL people as members of Christ's church upon baptism and profession of faith. I was thrilled to see all seven petitions passed on the floor of Annual Conference with super-majority votes ranging from 87-97%.

In addition to the LGBTQ Inclusion petitions, we also passed petitions to support Comprehensive Immigration Reform and the end of discriminatory laws like those in the state of Arizona, to advance the peace process and normalization of relations in Korea, and the divestment of the Conference from companies that enable the continued occupation of Palestine and inhibit the peace process in Israel - Palestine. The passage of all these pieces reflects, in my opinion, the increased need and importance for us to work together in solidarity across lines of difference and across issues and populations. We never have to be alone in our efforts, and the more we work together, the more we will learn about one another, see the humanity of each other, and glorify God through our work and collaboration.

I am proud to be a lay member of Northern Illinois. We are a diverse annual conference, one that is progressive and conservative (whatever those terms mean anyway); urban, rural, and suburban; a people of immigrants; hearty Mid-westerners and transplants from the whole of Creation. We are a conference steeped in a tradition of social justice and welcome and were the first Annual Conference to declare itself a "Reconciling Annual Conference" back in the mid-1980s. We're also the home of the national office of RMN.

Yet, despite all of this history going for us, not many congregations in our Conference have become Reconciling - with a few exceptions - since the early 2000s. One might say that there is a level of complacency in Northern Illinois, one rooted in a belief that we are already a welcoming people, that "we've made it," and there's nothing left that we need to do.

By the grace of God, this is beginning to change! Since our Believe Out Loud training this spring, reconciling and non-reconciling congregations across Northern Illinois are engaged in Believe Out Loud events, exposing more and more people to one another's personal stories of Truth and the all-inclusive Gospel of Jesus Christ. We have more congregations reaching out to one other to learn and grow from each others experience. More than any legislation we could have and did pass this year, this is the work that is changing our church for the better. This is the work that will help us be the all-inclusive, inviting, welcoming, equipping, empowering, disciple-making, and world transforming Church that we are called to be.

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David E Braden was born, raised, baptized, and confirmed in the United Methodist Church and grew up in Northbrook, IL. When he left home for college, David also left the Church for three years because he did not feel welcome in the Church as an out gay man. However, after a deeply spiritual pilgrimage in Spain in 2003, David felt called by God back to the Church where he found Holy Covenant UMC in Chicago. He has felt welcome there to live fully as a child of God and is convicted by Christ's call to make disciples for the transformation of the world.

In 2007, David was elected as the first out, gay delegate to serve as an Alternate Lay Delegate to Jurisdictional Conference by the Northern Illinois Annual Conference. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago with his Masters in Social Work, lives on the Northside of Chicago, and works in the development office of a local nonprofit.

Marriage for All?

By David E Braden

There have been a lot of posts on marriage recently (Blessed Unions; Overcoming Serial Discrimination; The UMC and the Republican Party; and my good ol’ entry late last year on who should define marriage). 

I’m definitely still in denial about gay marriage in America. It still seems too hard to believe that after years of fighting and lobbying, we’ve seen three states allow gay marriage – not just civil unions, but marriage – within their jurisdictions in just one month’s time. Five states, that’s 10-percent of all the states in the Union, now have gay marriage. All of this news is extraordinarily exciting!

What’s the reality?

But then I think about the fact that, with the exception of Iowa, the five states that allow gay marriage are also some of the least religious in the country. In fact, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont all make the Top Ten list of least religious states in the country.¹

We’ve seen the studies of Prop 8 in California and know that people who attend worship at least once per week, regardless of religious tradition or race/ethnicity, were more likely to vote in favor of banning same-sex marriage than those who do not.² So although the progress in the Northeast is fantastic, I think if we’re honest with ourselves, gay marriage isn’t really going to go anywhere fast in the USA unless religious people – gay and straight – start to do something about it.

Christian Marriage for All?

At my church in Chicago, Holy Covenant UMC, we’ve been studying how we can bless couples of all sexual orientations with integrity as a community. Although gay marriage isn’t legal in Illinois (stay tuned for civil unions legislation that is in our state legislature), I think most of Holy Covenant would agree that the union of two souls in Christian marriage is a sacred union, blessed by God. In our studies the past few months, we have learned a few things.

We know that the Book of Discipline is clear: “Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches.”³

We know that there are churches across the Connexion with varying responses to this rule – some that celebrate holy unions outside of the church to remain within the Discipline, some that celebrate gay marriage with UM pastors and inside the church despite the Discipline, some that have ended celebrating any marriages in their church all together because of the inequity and injustice of the policy. Many churches haven’t even talked about the policy in the Discipline because it’s a difficult conversation to have. And for some, it never may have occurred to them even to have the conversation.

We know that the consequences of breaking the Discipline are real. Broadway UMC is just down the street from us and their former pastor, the Rev. Gregory Dell, was suspended for a year for celebrating gay marriage ten years ago. And that’s not counting the toll that experiencing a church trial has on a congregation, even one like Broadway that was/is overwhelmingly supportive of its pastor and the inclusion of queer people in its ministries.

So what?

At the end of the day, we have to make choices. What choices can we live with? What choices will make us proud as a community of faith? Are we ready to dive into waters that might be too deep for us to swim? What is just? What is right? What is honest and true? Where is God in this and what is the God of Grace calling us, asking us to do?

I know that I don’t have all the answers and I don’t think any policy or decision that we come up with at Holy Covenant will be nearly sufficient enough as changing the Book of Discipline and eradicating homophobia and heterosexism from our Church law, policies, and practices. But we have to start somewhere.

Notes
1. Steve Crabtree and Brett Pelham, “What Alabamians and Iranians Have in Common: A Global Perspective on Americans’ Religiosity Offers a Few Surprises,” Gallop.com, (Feb. 9, 2009), http://www.gallup.com/poll/114211/Alabamians-Iranians-Common.aspx
2. Patrick Egan and Kenneth Sherrill, California’s Proposition 8: What Happened and What Does the Future Hold? (New York: National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, January 2009), http://www.thetaskforce.org/press/releases/pr_1_06_09
3. ¶341.6 “Unauthorized Conduct,” The Book of Discipline 2008.

Let Go and Let God

By David E Braden

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
-- Agnes Repplier

I am depressed.

No one likes to utter those words. I've struggled with depression since I was in high school and it really has been a struggle. A struggle to feel feelings. To express emotions. To tell people how I really feel and what I really think. 

Depression is all too common in the United States and around the world.

• 15 million American adults, or about 7 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older suffers from some form of depression.¹ 
• 80% of people experiencing depression are not receiving treatment.²
• Depression will be the 2nd leading cause of death world-wide by the year 2020.³

Some of my depression springs from my experience as a gay man and my own deep-rooted internalized homophobia. But in my case, it's also about co-dependency and rarely putting myself first. I find it so hard and difficult to love and like myself that it's sometimes mind-boggling to believe that other people like me, love me even.

Church can be an especially difficult place to be truthful and honest about how I'm feeling. I don't want to bother anyone with my feeling lousy. I don't want to upset other people with my issues. Telling someone I’m depressed takes a lot of courage and a leap of faith. I know I spend so much time making choices for other people that I don't allow them to help me. It's so hard to feel that vulnerable - to open up and to be exposed.

But I think this is what Christian community is supposed to be about. Learning to "let go and let God" is so profoundly challenging. We can all use some help. It's taken me years of therapy to finally be in tune with what I'm feeling again. And I still have a ways to go.

But the Church should be – and for me often has been – a place of solace in the midst of brokenness. Singing hymns and praising God is one of the few things I do that makes me feel good about myself and life. So I plug along.

If you or someone you know is struggling with depression, there’s hope. There’s help.

• Depression Health Center - WebMD

A site that describes depression, its symptoms, and typical treatment options.

• The Trevor Project

866-4-U-TREVOR

The Trevor Project operates the only nationwide, around-the-clock crisis and suicide prevention helpline for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth. Every day, The Trevor Project saves lives through its free and confidential helpline, its website and its educational services.

• Center on Halsted

The Center on Halsted offers support networks and programming to meet the cultural, emotional, social, educational and recreational needs of the LGBT community and friends. Current services include support groups for youth and seniors, mental health services, an info line for LGBT individuals and a hotline for HIV and STD concerns, prevention, treatment, and advocacy related to domestic violence, community technology center providing internet access and technology training and a range of life-enrichment programs.

• Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring For Yourself by Melody Beattie

An awesome self-help book that talks from experience about being codependent and depressed and what you can do, including therapy, to walk a road to recovery.

References
1. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). “The Numbers Count: Mental Illness in America,” Science on Our Minds Fact Sheet Series. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/numbers.cfm
2. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, National Healthcare Quality Report
(Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2003). http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nhqr03/nhqr2003.pdf
3. BBC News, “Health Experts to Tackle Depression Deluge,” BBCNews.com, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/484938.stm

To Come Out or Not To Come Out

By David E Braden

In the film, Milk, Supervisor Harvey Milk portrayed by 2008 Academy Award Winner Sean Penn tells his followers that they need to come out to their families, their friends, their co-workers – to everyone. The more people who know “us” the more they accept us. Harvey’s long-time partner Scotty expresses concern about the safety of their constituents and friends if they come out of the closet.

I struggle with such insistence for people to come out. One reads stories in magazines like Out that call on one celebrity or another to come out of the closet. It makes me uncomfortable.

Calling All Gay Pastors

I remember hearing someone not too long ago in the reconciling movement question, “What if all of the queer pastors just came out? What if they just announced who they were, en mass? What would the Church do? Would they charge all of us?”

It is an intriguing scenario that relies on multiple ducks to queue up. But rather than discuss whether such a scenario is feasible, I want to talk about the tone that I so often hear during such discussions. I hear and feel so much pain that the Church has caused because it forbids queer pastors from living fully human lives. But rather than directing such pain and anger at the Church and our Discipline, I hear far too many people (in my opinion) pointing figures at our clergy, asking them why they have not come out? Why do they collude with the Institution by remaining silent? Why do they continue to preach in a Church that denies them their full being?

In one sense, these are fantastic questions to be asking but in another they seem to be attacking queer clergy and abusing them again. Are we blaming the oppressed? From where I stand, we have unjust laws in our Church and we need to change them. I am just concerned that when we get into debates on whether queer pastors should come out, we are missing opportunities to be talking about how we can change our current systems of being.

Questions That I Ponder from Time to Time

As a white, gay, young professional who has been openly gay for nearly 10 years, I wonder:

• Why do we privilege coming out?
• Do we look condescendingly on those who do not come out? If so, why?
• In what ways is “coming out” culturally, racially, ethnically, and/or generationally determined? In what ways is asking someone to “come out” another form of hegemony? When is it liberating?
• Where does self-determination fit into all of this?
• What would a world look like in which all people – heterosexual, homosexual, male, female, trans – had to decide whether to “declare” their sexuality and/or gender publicly?

More Questions For the Church Community

• What can we do to create an environment where pastors (and other LGBTQ folks) can make the decision on whether to come out without fearing the loss of their jobs, communities, and families?
• How can we support pastors who are in the closet without pressuring them to endanger themselves?
• How does our culture view coming out? How does our church view coming out?
• How does our church’s definition of “self-avowed, practicing homosexual” affect our denomination’s understanding of coming out?

When I was stumped …

By David E Braden

During a recent speaker’s panel of which I was a part at a local United Methodist Church, I was asked the following question:

When you were in high school and felt alienated from your church youth group and church family because of you are gay, what could the church have done to support you? What can I do for the youth in my youth group who might be gay or lesbian?

Do you know that I had never been asked that before? So I struggled to define an answer. I mean, I’ve worked “hard” the past few years to change our policies in the Book of Discipline but I hadn’t credibly thought about what individuals and what congregations could do to support queer youth and the LGBTQ population in general in quite a while. In that moment, I was able to mutter some coherent answers, but I felt like an idiot.

PRIDEYouth

When I was in high school, I was on the PRIDE Youth Speakers Panel composed of queer high school students that traveled to schools across the northern Chicagoland area in order to talk with teachers, administrators and students about our stories of growing up queer as well as suggest concrete things they could do to make their schools safer environments for queer youth. This was a pivotal time in my life because I was finally able to speak about me for me, to speak with authority, and to work with schools so that other queer youth might not have to experience what I did.

What can we do?

There is so much that individuals and congregations can do to make their churches more welcoming and inclusive of queer folks. Much of what my Pride Youth panel suggested to schools is translatable to churches. We should avoid making assumptions about people’s gender identities, sexual orientations, whether they are married or single, whether they want to be married or single, etc. We should be able to talk about sex and sexual relationships in church and how God might intend us to be in such relationships if we enter into them. We can be more intentional about our use of gendered pronouns. We can have discussions in our churches about becoming Reconciling congregations and taking an official policy of welcome. The RMN office is more than happy to help congregations walk through that process.

But most importantly, we can show God’s all inclusive love to our queer family in Christ by naming gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer children as beloved of God for all that they are from our pulpits, in our Sunday school classes, during the coffee hour, during youth group, etc.

The Bible is filled with stories of the grace of God’s love that we feel when we are called by name. I know that to be true in my own life. May we not forget to give our love to all God’s people, that they might hear their name being called through your grace and peace.

Pregnant with Possibilities

By David E Braden

In this period of transition – from one administration to another with an economy in shambles, multiple wars, religious and political conflict resulting in violence and death, etc. – it feels to me like we are in a pregnant state of anticipation. Although we’re now in Ordinary time, post-Epiphany, I can’t help but feel like I’m stuck in Advent – the pain of an unjust society, violence that bloodies our urban streets and boils our anger, a sense of deep longing for change, a hope that for me can only be described in the language of faith – that we believe despite everything that has happened we will be delivered from slavery and death.

I do not consider Obama to be the Second Coming and the man has probably far too high of expectations placed on him to change our current state of affairs in all the ways people might want him to. But I sense such a longing for change and hope for something new that for such a time as this we must be at the doorstep of change.

So as the inauguration, the first 100 days, and the following first four years of an Obama presidency happen, I wait in pregnant anticipation. I am excited to see what happens and for the hope of new possibilities. But I also think that I am called to do more than just wait. God calls us to act, to serve, to be light for the world so that the Love of God might be known to others not just through our words but also our actions.

I have to think and believe that we are an Easter people. We are people of hope, life, resurrection, and light. We are supposed to be a people of action and love. So at such a time as this, a time that seems so pregnant with hope, I wonder what God is calling me – us – to do? How can we be a brighter Light for the world and what is our role in making the desire for hope and change a reality?

In the midst of these general, lofty questions are the bitter, real challenges of what is our role and response as Christians to the economic crisis? To the war in Gaza where there are no easy answers or solutions? To genocides that continue to wreak havoc on multiple populations in Africa but that do not generate the concern or rage that conflicts in Israel/Palestine do? To urban warfare in our own country that has become too comfortable and acceptable? It makes arguments about whether Rick Warren is a good choice or not for the inauguration seem trivial and yet Obama’s pick still pisses me off. To me this signals that we have many problems and we need to deal with them and I think the Church should have a significant role in helping to offer solutions.

Ultimately, change is coming. The labor pains are only increasing. The question remains where the Church will be when it comes.

"I Have No Need of You"

By David E Braden

A recent article in the New York Times reads, “Conservatives Expected to Split Episcopal Church.” Honestly, the idea of this schism really frightens me. I mean, these people want to create their own denomination within the Anglican Communion claiming they are the rightful Church over the Episcopal Church in the USA. These same people want not only to bar queer people from the ministry but women as well. I look at the primary photo of this article and I wonder for whom these Bishops are "saving" their Church? Who will be leading it in 50 years when they're all dead? But that's morbid ...

Realities like the ones portrayed in this article make me wonder, “What is it like to be in the midst of such a rupture within the Body of Christ?”

All of the Protestants in their day and age had their reasons for doing what they did – godly and ungodly.

But what does it say when groups bid adieu to the Mother Church? What is a “good” reason to secede from the Church and form your own denomination?

My thoughts on this are really fixed on the image of the Body of Christ given to the Church in Corinth.

1 Corinthians 12

¹² For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. [...]
²¹The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ ²²On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, ²³and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; ²⁴whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, ²⁵that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. ²⁶If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.

I think this is really a discussion about what it means to be in community together. If we are to be a healthy community then we cannot be telling entire groups “I have no need of you.” This is when we invoke "dissension" within the body – when we fight against the Body itself instead of the Evil that plagues our world.

I am still vehemently concerned with what will happen to the Church Universal, the holy catholic Church, if we continue to segment ourselves apart from one another according to our individual beliefs and affinity groups. Are we really still the Body of Christ?

I’m worried about our own restructuring of our own United Methodist Church. Will our considerations of the world-wide nature of the Church reflect a restructuring that encourages dialogue, interaction, missions and having to work together across lines of difference – including lines of class, gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality and all the other human categories – something that truly encourages our uniquely Methodist Connexion?

Or will reorganize so that everyone is safe to worship in comfortable homogeneity? Gays with gays, whites with whites in one corner, people of color in another, and the Church outside of the USA all on its own?

We may save our denomination from schism in this fashion but I wonder how much of the Church we’d still really be … Are we really still the Body of Christ?

Marriage Should Be Defined by the Church

By David E Braden

Call me old fashioned, but I just don’t see marriage as a civil right. I think marriage should be defined by the Church.

We have beautiful language in our Scripture about the blessed nature of the marriage relationship. I love that in Genesis, God asserts that humans are relational creatures and that “It is not good that the man should be alone.” The description of Adam and Eve coming together as two individuals to “become one flesh” is powerful and sexy and actually quite intimidating (acknowledging that these stories are also very gendered in nature). What does it really mean to “become one flesh,” for two unique individuals to commit to one another and then somehow figure out how to work together as a cohesive unit, as an anointed team living out the rest of their lives together?

Marriage Isn't Easy

Although I do not know from personal experience, I do know that marriage is hard work. I look at my own parents who are divorced and my many friends who are married or in committed, monogamous relationships and I know that it is very difficult to constantly work at a relationship in order to stay healthy, mutually empowering, and in loving support of one another. With the constant coverage of sham Hollywood marriages, the glamorization of adultery, and the number of couples who get married because it seems like the natural next step, I just don’t think we give marriage the proper reverence and respect it deserves. And so, I think the Church should continue to play a significant role in defining marriage and cultivating covenanted, monogamous relationships.

Two Debates: The Church and Society

The problem with the marriage debate is that there are really two debates going on:

   1. The definition of Marriage in the Church and
   2. The definition of Marriage in Society

Far too often, I think we conflate these two debates. Personally, I believe that marriage is an institution ordained by God to bless the covenant partnership of two loving individuals. I see it as a responsibility of the Body of Christ to help gay and straight couples alike, united as One Flesh before God and the Church, to grow in their hunger for Christ and to grow in love and in covenant relationship to one another. If the Body of Christ can’t do this, what’s the point of being a community anyway?

In terms of secular society, it is just that. Not everyone in our country or the world knows God or the love of Christ. We thankfully live in a country, however, where our Constitution says that we have a right to be treated the same even if we believe different things. The problem arises in that we also live in a society that bases a significant portion of its tax system and hundreds of rights and privileges on a marriage certificate. To me, it seems innately unjust to claim that we have Separation of Church and State and then to define an institution, such as marriage, on religious terms and then deny access to the federal and state rights and privileges that such an institution affords, including tax benefits, rights of visitation, medical & legal protection, etc.

So What Do We Do?

If we want to be a country that treats all people the same and a country that continues to privilege couples in our tax code and elsewhere, then both straight and gay couples should be afforded the right to a civil union with all the rights and privileges that come with it. Give us all Civil Unions and leave the fight to define Marriage with our Churches.