How do I feel at the end of another very long and exhausting day?
The first General Assembly
that I attended as a commissioner was shortly after I was ordained and was held
in Charlottetown Prince Edward Island. Sometime before that, there was a church
in Lachine QC in my Presbytery of Montreal that had knowingly called as their
minister a gay man who was in a committed relationship with another man. (They
were not married, as this was not legal in Canada at the time.) Because the
support of that congregation for that particular minister was so clear, the
Presbytery had sustained that call – had basically said that it should be
permitted to go forward. I agreed, not because I had entirely made up my mind
on such matters at that point in time, but because I felt that it was only
right to honour the choice and will of the congregation.
That
action of Presbytery had been appealed. So, when I went to that General
Assembly, the decision of our Presbytery to sustain the call was being judged
by the Assembly.
Knowing
full well that the doctrine of the church at that time did not permit that man
to be ordained as a minister, we, as commissioners, argued that the
compassionate and loving thing would be, nevertheless, to allow that
congregation to have the minister that they wanted. Surely, we could make an
exception for extraordinary circumstances! The answer, at that Assembly, was a
clear no. There was no room for any compromise.
I
must say that in all my years as a Presbyterian minister since that time, the answer has remained a very clear and exclusionary one. In those years, the
numbers of clergy and members of the church who were quite okay with the idea
of calling an LGBT+ minister or participating in a same-sex marriage (since
legalized of course) has only grown and if this year’s Assembly is an
indication of the makeup of the whole church, grown to form a significant
majority.
And
yet, in all those years, was there any space for compromise? It was officially
and continually stated that there could be no compromise in the courts of the
church, though I certainly have observed that the courts of the church have
been happy enough to look the other way and not notice many things during those
years.
And
really, that is what I have experienced right up until the beginning of this Assembly.
Just a month ago, I went to my Presbytery with a plea to recognize that there
are some congregations in our Presbytery who are quite happy to fully include LGBTQ
people in their congregations, so why not just let them do what they believe
God has called them to do? Why not just compromise and create policies within
the Presbytery that would just allow them to go ahead? I tried to speak of this
possibility to Presbytery but I was not even allowed to so much as put forward
such an idea for the discussion. The doctrine of the church was clear, I was
told, and therefore there could be no compromise for particular congregations,
it seemed.
Today,
only a month later, at General Assembly, we have spent a goodly amount of time
listening to people who now suddenly found themselves in the minority calling
for compassion and compromise. They have asked us to please find some way for
them to continue to have only the ministers that they want and to participate
only in the marriages that they want to participate in, even though the majority
will of the church seems to have shifted.
And
I heard their hurt and their pain. They felt as if they and their churches were
being excluded much like that church in Lachine had been excluded those many
years before. (Except, of course, the Church in Lachine was literally kicked
out and nobody was talking about kicking anybody out today.)
I
wondered a lot today about how that made me feel. There were a couple of times
when I will admit that I was tempted to say to myself, isn’t it a little bit
late now to be talking about compromise? Isn’t it a little bit late to be
talking about making space for the minority view?
I
will admit that the thought did cross my mind. Maybe, in all those years, if
the church had been willing to put some compromise workarounds in place, it
would be so easy now to extend that same spirit of compromise to them. But, as
I said, the answer had always been no.
But,
though the thought did occur to me, I need to say at the end of another long
and very tiring day, that I have absolutely no desire for that to be how I
respond or how the church responds. It is my hope and prayer that tomorrow, as
the General Assembly gives final shape to what will be sent down from this Assembly
to the church, that we do create a generous space to compromise and to make it
clear the congregations will be able to continue to believe what they believe
and practice how they choose to practice and that they will continue, in the
long-term, to be able to call the ministers that they choose and who believe in
practice the faith as they desire.
I
have no doubt that there are many people drafting amendments tonight that will
make space for such compromise. I won’t take a shot at drafting one myself, but
I will seek to support proposals that give to congregations, sessions and their
ministers full freedom of conscience and belief. I want congregations to be
able to have the ministers that they choose. I just wish we had been practicing
such compromise before now.
It
is kind of all that I ever wanted.
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