Local congregations hope General Assembly’s actions will raise awareness of oppression in the church

Local Presbyterians who back full inclusion of LGBT people in the church said this week they hope a vote by the church’s General Assembly last weekend will lead to discussion of the issue and will raise awareness of the church’s oppression of LGBT people.

Meeting in San Jose, Calif., the General Assembly voted 54 percent to 46 percent to drop from the Book of Order the requirement that ministers, deacons and elders live in “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.”

The proposed change, which would in essence allow for the ordination of non-celibate LGBT people, must be approved by a majority of the denomination’s 173 presbyteries — or regional church bodies — before it could actually take effect. The presbyteries now have a year to vote on the proposal.

The General Assembly also voted to remove the word homosexual from a church catechism, where it was inserted in 1962 as an “objectionable behavior,” and to revise an “authoritative interpretation” issued in the 1970s declaring homosexuality was “not God’s good intention,” according to one North Texas church member.

Because those votes do not change the Book of Order, they do not have to be ratified by a vote of the presbyteries.

On the flip side of the LGBT coin, the assembly voted, by an overwhelming 77 percent to 33 percent margin, to retain the denomination’s definition of marriage as a covenant between “a man and a woman” instead of changing it to a covenant between “two people,” as had been proposed.

The new language proposed for the Book of Order would require candidates for ordination “pledge themselves to live lives obedient to Jesus Christ the Head of the Church, striving to follow where he leads through the witness of the Scriptures and to understand through the instruction of the Congressions.”

This wording, instead of banning the ordination of gays and lesbians outright, would leave the decision up to the individual presbytery or church council.

Similar proposals were defeated by a vote of the presbyteries in 1997 and 2001, but those who support the change hope for a different outcome this time around.

Rob Allen, director of communications services for the presbytery that includes North Texas, said Tuesday that officials in Grace Presbytery have not yet set a date for the vote here. He said Grace Presbytery has in the past voted on proposed changes to the Book of Order at its March meeting, “but that’s not set in stone.”

The North Texas region voted against the change in both 1997 and 2001.

But North Texas Presbyterian Betsy Winters said she thinks the outcome of the vote is far from set in stone itself this time around.

“What will happen in Grace Presbytery? I wish I knew,” Winters said this week by phone from California where she is vacationing. “For it to pass, it is going to take a lot of education.”

Winters is a member of That All May Freely Serve, an organization formed to fight for full inclusion of LGBT people in the Presbyterian Church, including ordination of LGBT clergy.

Jean Martin of Fort Worth, who has a gay son, said the General Assembly’s votes last weekend were “historic and pretty exciting. This has been a long road. The church’s first task force [on gays and lesbians in the church] was formed in 1976. It’s been a long path to this vote.”

Grace Presbytery includes 180 congregations with more than 45,000 members in 53 Texas counties, ranging south from the Red River almost to Austin, and from just west of Fort Worth to the Texas-Louisiana border.

Winters explained that unlike in other denominations, Presbyterian congregations do not send “delegates” to these meetings that are required to vote a specific way to represent the choice of the majority of their home congregation. Instead, Presbyterian congregations send commissioners who “go to the meeting and wait for the Holy Spirit to guide them, and then they vote their heart and their conscience.”

She said she hopes, this time around, that vote goes the other way.

“I think Grace Presbytery is considered moderate by other parts of the country, but I’m not sure that’s a really accurate description,” Winters said. “I think we pretty much represent the nation. We have a good chunk of middle-of-the-road Presbyterians. We have a couple of very large and very powerful congregations that consider themselves conservative, and we have a couple of large congregations that consider themselves to be much further to the left.

“But I like to the think the middle is, overall, moving toward a stand for inclusion and hospitality,” Winters said, adding that she believes the mood of the General Assembly last weekend is a good indication that she is right.

“The feel of the General Assembly this year was much different. The whole week felt much calmer. There was still recognition of our very conservative brothers and sisters, but there was also a great deal of respect for the broad spectrum of beliefs.”

Martin, too, believes that “most people in Grace Presbytery are somewhere in the middle.” But, she said, “the problem is, most people don’t know enough about the issue.

“For my part, I think what would be really helpful would be a program that creates some awareness so this gets on people’s radar screens,” Martin said. “I hope we can raise the education level so people will learn more about it than just what they think they knew from what they heard in their childhood.”

Martin was active in the now-more-or-less-defunct Grace Presbytery chapter of the More Light movement, a national effort to educate congregations on LGBT issues and inclusiveness. She said she hopes the months leading up to the presbytery’s vote on changing the Book of Order will help re-ignite the local More Light effort.

However the vote by the presbyteries turns out, Winters said she doesn’t think the issue will lead to a schism within the denomination, as has happened with other denominations debating the role of LGBT people in the church.

“I don’t know if there will be a backlash from conservatives, or if the vote will be a recognition that the time has come to move forward. But either way, I don’t think the church will break apart,” she said.

“Presbyterians agree to disagree. That is one of our tenets,” Winters continued. “We have to find common ground to live together in the church. I would like to think that we can take a year for some discussion and for getting to know one another, and that will lead toward a way of living with this. And if the General Assembly this year is any indication, I don’t see a schism happening.”

She concluded, “This church will find the middle way, and I would like to think that Grace Presbytery will follow that model. There are a lot of young people, new people in the church, and I think we have figured out that we have got to make room at the table for everyone. No denomination is going to live forever on its old people.”

But Martin said the church would hurt itself if it continues to marginalize its LGBT members.

“Justice is a curious thing. It is always obvious that someone who is marginalized will suffer. But it is much less obvious that those who oppress, and even those who just remain silent and allow oppression to happen, are also diminished,” Martin said.

Martin said that she graduated from high school in Western Pennsylvania some 40 years ago, but only recently learned than one of her high school friends was a gay man.

“He has carried this secret for more than 40 years. He tried everything to rid himself of what his Lutheran church had taught him was sinful and wrong. He tried marriage. He tried children. He even tried suicide,” Martin said. “And the language he uses is still from that early training in the church that he was somehow sinful and perverted and not God’s good intention.

“It is just so sad for the church and for society that someone so gifted and talented would still, 40 years later, not be able to accept and be the person God created him to be,” Martin added. “I just hope that the Presbyterian church can, from this point forward, teach children that it is OK to be themselves and that they are all part of God’s good intention. This vote can be part of that.”