MIND is organizing a series of four regional gatherings for Covenant of Conscience signers in January and February (dates, details, directions on the calendar page). We invite all members of the covenant community to come to one of these, but especially encourage clergy members to attend. We wish to provide covenant signers with important resources and information as they live out their commitment to equality, including the specifics of the Book of Discipline as regards same-sex ceremonies and the processes by which clergy actions may be judged. We have put in place resources – from our legal advisory document to our First Response Team and our Spiritual Care Team – and we want to make sure clergy in particular know what these resources are and how to access them.

It has been two months since MIND launched the We do! Methodists Living Marriage Equality project. We began by publishing all the names of the covenant signers and reaching out to LGBT communities. The response has been overwhelming, with LGBT people across the country expressing their gratitude and amazement at our simple but powerful decision to stand with them in solidarity and minister to them as we do to straight people.

In that time, there have also been threats from members of our own annual conference, threats to bring charges against clergy, as well as the bureaucratic response of the Council of Bishops pledging to “uphold the Discipline.”

It is shocking that anyone’s response to this growing pastoral movement is to threaten retribution, to divide the church through charges and trials and legalism, and to divert its resources away from ministry to some latter-day Salem witch trial. It is particularly troubling to see such a response within the New York Annual Conference, which has for decades declared its conviction that LGBT people ought to be fully included in the life of the church, and has specifically opposed the UMC’s ban on same-sex weddings and explicitly urged conference members to exercise restraint in filing charges in light of the conference’s position.

But despite the threats and the institutional pledge to enforce the discrimination, our movement continues to grow.  LGBT people are finding welcoming places in the United Methodist Church; they are finding clergy, laity, and congregations embracing them joyfully as members of the body of Christ, as United Methodists in good standing and as gifted children of God entitled equally to all the ministries, ceremonies and sacraments of the church.  This welcoming spirit represents the future of the United Methodist Church. 

We urge all of the covenant signers to continue to spread the word, to share A Covenant of Conscience with others, and to invite others to commit themselves to equality.

We also wish to provide covenant signers with important resources and information as they live out their commitment to equality.  It is particularly important that every clergy covenant signer has a clear understanding of what it means to minister equally to all.  The regional inspiration and information gatherings have been designed for exactly this purpose.

Each session will begin with worship.  We need continually to ground ourselves in God's good news for all people and to be strengthened for the struggle.  There will then be presentations about church law and procedure, developments in our own annual conference and other annual conferences around marriage equality and discussion about ways that our covenant community can provide a network of mutual support and care.

Please join us at one of the following times and locations (see the calendar page for directions). Each session will begin at 10am with worship, and the formal presentations will conclude at noon.  From noon to 1pm there will be a Q&A time over a brownbag lunch.

• Tuesday, January 31: Christ Church United Methodist (520 Park Ave., New York, NY)
• Wednesday, February 8: Central Valley UMC (12 Smith Clove Rd., Central Valley, NY)
• Thursday, February 16: UMC of Babylon (21 James St., Babylon, NY)
• Wednesday, February 29: Mary Taylor Memorial UMC (168 – 176 Broad Street, Milford, CT)

PRESS RELEASE -- Contact: Dorothee Benz 718-314-4432

A group of 900 United Methodists in New York and Connecticut today announced their intention to make weddings available to all people, gay and straight, in spite of their denomination’s ban on gay marriage. The announcement marks the kick-off of a project called We do! Methodists Living Marriage Equality. In an unprecedented move in any major religious denomination, We do! is not only bypassing the formal rules of the church, but also reaching out directly to LGBT groups in New York and Connecticut to let them know about the new network. This morning the group published a list of all its members: clergy members who will perform weddings for gay couples, lay members of the denomination who support them, and congregations who have adopted policies to formally make weddings available to all couples.

“We refuse to discriminate against any of God’s children and pledge to make marriage equality a lived reality within the New York Annual Conference, regardless of sexual orientation or gender expression,” the group declared in statement called A Covenant of Conscience and signed by 164 clergy members, 732 lay people and six entire congregations. In all, 74 congregations within the New York Annual Conference (NYAC) are represented among the signers. NYAC is the regional church body representing United Methodist congregations from Long Island to the Catskills and in southern Connecticut. The full list of signers, as well as the text of the covenant is here: www.mindny.org/mind-initiatives/marriage-initiative/covenant-of-conscience.

“My ordination vows require me to minister to all people in my congregation,” said Rev. Sara Lamar-Sterling, the minister at First and Summerfield United Methodist Church in New Haven, CT. “This is about pastoral care, about welcoming all people, but especially the marginalized and the oppressed, like Jesus did.” Lamar-Sterling and her clergy colleagues are risking their jobs and their careers by taking this stand, but they say their integrity as pastors leaves them no choice but to refuse the church’s mandate to discriminate. Over the years, many individual United Methodist clergy have defied the church’s ban, but the We do! project marks the first time an organized network of clergy has done so, and done so with the support of many hundreds of lay members of the church.

“The recognition of the full humanity, sacred worth, and equal rights of gay and lesbian people is crucial to the civil rights struggle of our time. Gay, lesbian, and straight United Methodist laity and clergy are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” the Covenant of Conscience states, citing Martin Luther King’s famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.  “The continuing denial of full access to all the rights and privileges of church membership in the United Methodist Church is causing deep spiritual harm to our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and is a threat to us all.” 

The United Methodist Church Book of Discipline, the rulebook that governs the country’s third largest Christian denomination, states “Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches.” It is one of several anti-gay provisions of the church, which since 1972 has declared “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” The church General Conference meets quadrennially to revise the Discipline and the issue of LGBT exclusion has been hotly debated at each General Conference in the last 40 years. The next General Conference will be April 24 through May 4, 2012, in Tampa, Florida.  

The We do! project has been over a year in the making and has been followed by similar efforts in 11 other conferences within the UMC. All told, over 1,000 clergy in 19 states and the District of Columbia have signed a pledge vowing to extend their ministry to all couples seeking the church’s blessing for their relationships. The growing pastoral movement has caused a stir within the church and is expected to have reverberations at the upcoming General Conference.

We do! Methodists Living Marriage Equality is sponsored by Methodists in New Directions (MIND), a grassroots organization working in the New York Annual Conference of the UMC dedicated to ending the church’s prejudice and discrimination against LGBT people. It is co-sponsored by the NY Chapter of the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA), an organization bringing people together to work for peace and justice in the church and the world. Both organizations are independent of the United Methodist Church. More information on the initiative is available on the MIND website at www.mindny.org. 

Jody Cross-Hansen

My grown children, who still find their mom and dad an embarrassment in so many ways, literally groan when I wax about how much I loved divinity school and tell them we actually enjoyed denominational jokes. Only their mother, a nerd and a religious one on top of it, could get her chuckles out of a denominational joke. How many Methodists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  Answer: At least ten. One black, one white, one Hispanic, one male, one female, one handicapped, one old, one young…  The joke takes off on a very real aspect of our church – that we bend over backwards to make sure that everyone is included, that no  one is left out or left behind.  We learn it as children singing “Jesus Loves the Little Children”; we learn it growing up when we have district or conference get-togethers and see all the different colors and cultures that make us up.  We see it in denominational events that celebrate cultural heritages and cultural diversity.  Our founder John Wesley was a pastor for all people, black and white and poor as well as rich. When nobody else was there for everybody, John Wesley was there for everybody, and since I was a child I was taught that being a Methodist is about worshipping together and including everybody.  Now we’re including everybody except gay people and I’m not sure who we are anymore.

You can order the study guide packet online, or download an order form to mail in. The resource materials from the event and links to online resources are also available on the My Brother’s Keeper webpage. 

Immigration forum builds on My Brother’s Keeper success

What the November 2010 symposium made to clear to all who participated was that the event itself was only the beginning. We need to take what we learned back to our congregations and communities, to continue to build relationships across communities and to challenge ourselves and our conference to speak out and witness against hate, intolerance and all forms of violence.

Symposium organizers have acted on this realization in a number of ways. One was to produce the video and study guide. Another was to introduce a resolution at this year’s annual conference that encourages local congregations “to study and discuss the problem of hate crimes together as a community” and that requires to the conference to help provide appropriate study materials, specifically naming the My Brother’s Keeper study guide.

A third outgrowth of the My Brother’s Keeper symposium was in encouraging activists who were just beginning to consider a similar forum on immigration issues. Many of the key organizers of My Brother’s Keeper have gone on to be instrumental in pulling together the upcoming Know your neighbor, know yourself forum on immigration. The lead group is the NYAC Task Force on Immigration. MIND is proud to be a part of the coalition organizing the forum.

The Saturday, October 22 all-day event will held at Memorial UMC/Central Korean UMC in White Plains and will address the crisis faced by our immigrant communities in the face of ongoing political hostility, prejudice and unjust immigration policies. The day will focus on countering myths and misinformation about immigrants, grounding ourselves in the Biblical basis for solidarity with immigrant communities and giving ourselves the tools to move our congregations into action.

The trial outcome is being widely hailed as a victory for those seeking to change the UMC’s unjust doctrine and discrimination against gays and lesbians. But the very fact that someone can even be brought to a church trial simply for being gay or for marrying a gay couple is still an outrage. As the Committee on Investigation in the Wisconsin Annual Conference that reluctantly brought the charges against DeLong in December 2010 put it, “these charges present a fundamentally unjust circumstance.”

The charges and trial came about as a result of DeLong disclosing to church officials in early 2010 the facts that she had performed a 2009 holy union ceremony for a lesbian couple and had registered her own domestic partnership with another woman in November of that year. She refused to lie, by omission or otherwise, about who she is and the ministry to which she is called.

The church’s case on the “self-avowed practicing homosexual” charge ran aground on its inability to prove that DeLong is a “practicing” homosexual. UMC jurisprudence – which has tied itself in knots trying to reconcile the indisputable reality that gay and lesbian clergy are faithful Christians and gifted ministers with its bigoted doctrine asserting that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching” – requires proof that “genital sexual acts” have been taken place in order to convict someone as a practicing homosexual. On the stand during the trial, the church’s counsel, Tom Lambrecht, asked DeLong, “Does your relationship with your partner include genital contact?” (Is it us or does this question just feel like it belongs in Salem ca. 1692?)

“There is no way, when are you trying to do me harm, that I am going to answer that question,” DeLong responded, as reported by postcresent.com reporter Michael Louis Vinson. She went on to say, “you’re fishing for facts that should have been established (before the trial).”

The outcome on this charge appears to signal that it’s possible for gay and lesbian clergy to be out about their sexual orientation, as DeLong is, and not be prosecutable under the Incompatibility Clause as long as neither they nor anyone else documents the details of their sex lives. While a long way from justice, this circumstance does create breathing room for LGBT clergy in the meantime while the fight to abolish the underlying doctrine continues.

The facts surrounding the holy union that DeLong performed were not in question; hence the guilty verdict on the second charge. But the UMC Book of Discipline is full of self-contradictions on the issue of sexuality. While declaring that “ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches,” it also says “sexuality is God’s good gift to all persons. We believe persons may be fully human only when that gift is acknowledged and affirmed by themselves, the church, and society.” Moreover, clergy vow at their ordination to “seek peace, justice, and freedom for all people.” Within these conflicting mandates, DeLong chose to honor the need to minister to all people. “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” Martin Luther King famously wrote from his jail cell in Birmingham in 1963. Including unjust church laws.

The 20-day suspension is a relatively light penalty, and the discernment and writing requirement is a creative response that can potentially be used to move the church forward by addressing the real dilemmas of the clergy covenant under the present unjust circumstances. As RMN Executive Director Troy Plummer put it, "So Amy is tasked with writing a transformational resource for clergy to better understand their covenant with one another? I can't think of anyone else more up to the task.”

The verdict and the potential of the discernment document combined with the national groundswell of clergy defiance of the ban on same-sex weddings – some 740 clergy in seven annual conferences have pledged to marry all couples as part of the spreading marriage initiative movement, and several other conferences are organizing similar efforts – are a great sign of hope in the UMC. The church can change – the church is changing – even if the rule book isn’t.