Updated 2 years ago
I know Protestants just love to splinter, but damn it, I’m gonna weigh into this.
To Methodists facing the gay question in a major church split…
This is very hard for small towns and I empathize. This feels like the Boy Scouts all over again.
One by one the old (well, old for America) institutions are crumbling.
I know it sounds like a complicated question, with culture wars inflaming the whole shebang.

Just ask a simple question: What would Jesus do?
You know deep in your heart what he would do.
He would do way more than that. He’d get Mary Magdalene on the horn, and homeless people.
Growing up, after I became a born again Christian, I noticed something at youth camps and going every Sunday, Methodists weren’t really that spiritual. It was more of a social thing like the Lions. Like Russians under Putin, they were inherently trained to be agnostic, apolitical, disengaged, and uninvolved with difficult questions. More a community organization than anything else. But underneath it all, a vague whiff of a very human, backyard gossip kind of judgement, lack of kindness, and meanness *without* the counter-salve of strong faith in Jesus. Humans left to themselves can get pretty vile. And, like the Russians under Putin, the chickens finally, FINALLY came home to roost.
Much later, in college, I converted to Episcopalian. It just felt honest, accepting, and most of all, realistic. We don’t care what people do in their bedrooms. Why should anyone, really, if it’s between consenting adults?
What business is that of ours?

Yes, outside of the Old Testament, where all manner of arbitrary things like picking up sticks on the Sabbath can incur the death penalty, one can point to a few passages proscribing homosexuality in the New Testament (notably, not attributed to Jesus per se, but his disciples)…
But really, who are we to judge anyone?
None are righteous, no not one.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
I personally think a live and let live, “don’t ask don’t tell” attitude should be an acceptable compromise – but this is 2023, and that era is long gone. So suck it up. There have always been LGBTQ+ all around us, in our Boy Scout troops and our churches. You can love them, hate them, or judge them, but that is all on you.
A final thought: which side do you think will experience the most growth in the U.S. in the next 50 years – the side that accepts gays, or rejects them? I wonder how young people feel about this…
