Homosexuality and the Church
We miss the forest for the weeds when we church leaders spend our energy drawing lines around who can be in our club.
posted by Jake at 3:41 PM
at•tend \e-‘tend\ vi 3 a: to be ready for service b: to be present syn see accompany – at•ten•dant n – at•ten•ding adj
posted by Jake at 3:41 PM
2 Comments:
It's not a question of who can come or not, it's a question of who can lead and what those qualifications are. Clearly scritpure advocates a higher standard. I don't see how you can have openly homosexual clergy without doing violence to traditional understandings of Scripture.
But yes, if people are excluding homosexuals from church, shame on them.
I guess I didn't mean to bring up the whole church leadership issue, just that churches sometimes seem more interested in their Holy Huddle than in their mission in the world. Shame on them, I agree.
But you bring up an interesting point about leadership in the church that I'm still trying to work out. I'm not settled on the issue, I'm still struggling to listen to the Spirit on this one. The rub for me centers around a few things:
1. Why must this particular sin exclude people from leadership even as other issues that Jesus actually talked about -- remarriage, for example -- not be excluding factors for leadership in many congregations?
2. Just what is a church leader? Where's the line between "leader" and ... "follower?" Aren't we all called to some form of ministry? As a "professional church leader" (ie my salary is someone else's offering) I'm more and more convinced that my role is just as another part of the body, not the head or the brain or the mouthpiece, just another part that must work with all the other parts to make the body function well.
In what I think would be an ideal Christian community, there should be a fuzzy line between a community's "leaders" and the rest of the group. Certainly there must be prophets and preachers but aren't we all apostles?
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