By David Gushee
One reason to register now is because we are planning “covenant community groups” as our means of organizing conversations after each plenary session. These small groups will be led by trained facilitators. We need to know as soon as possible how many such groups there will be, and therefore how many facilitators to invite and train.
Since the last time I wrote about this conference, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship has released the detailed program. It is hard to describe just how much prayer, conversation and study went into the development of exactly this program and the invitation of exactly these speakers. Let’s just say it was a whole bunch. There are no accidents or mistakes in this program. It accurately communicates what we are trying to say and what kind of meeting we are trying to organize.
And what exactly are we trying to say?
We are trying to say that we believe many Baptists, Christians and churches have been avoiding a serious conversation about sexuality and what norms ought to govern the Christian expression of sexuality in our contemporary context. Some have been avoiding the conversation because they are already sure of their answers. Others have been avoiding the conversation because they are afraid of conflict. Perhaps others fear the exposure of what might prove to be an insuperable gap between what they think Christian sexual morality should look like and what Christians are actually doing with their sexuality. We think that avoiding the subject is irresponsible and should not continue.
We are trying to say that Baptist Christians need a context for “faithful listening” in a quest to hear what God would say to us today about how disciples of Jesus Christ live in responsible sexuality. To whom are we listening? To God, ultimately. But how do we hear God’s voice? We listen to Scripture, certainly. We attend to Christian tradition as well as contemporary theology, undoubtedly. We engage contemporary scientific research and theory, definitely. We pay attention to what is happening in our congregations, assuredly. And we enter into community with our fellow Christians, absolutely. In all of these ways we dare to hope that the living Spirit of God will blow among us and leads us into all truth, as Jesus promised.
We are trying to say that everyone in the Baptist family gets a place at the table for this conversation. We will listen together to one another, wide open to what God wants to teach us. Close study of the program and a bit of educated surmising reveals that the conference speaker list is not always the “usual suspects.” We Baptists will hear from a few helpful non-Baptists (gasp!). We will hear from speakers of various ages, regions, educational backgrounds, races, theological perspectives, marital and family histories and, yes, sexual orientations. That latter category may worry a few people. It is perhaps a bit bold. But we simply concluded that we could not have a family conversation about sexuality if some parts of this Baptist family were excluded in advance. We are not willing to host a conversation where we talk about people, but instead one in which we talk with people.
We are not hiding an advocacy agenda behind the cloak of conversation. There is no hidden agenda here. We think that our explicit, open agenda is demanding enough — to have a conversation within a willing part of the Baptist family about what it means to live in responsible sexuality in a context in which our traditional sexual ethic is being challenged and quite often abandoned, and not just by secular folks. We think this is a moment of collective Christian discernment, and we want to facilitate some aspect of that discernment.
We are trying to say that we suspect a recovery of and recommitment to the norm of covenant fidelity offers at least part of the answer as to how congregations and individual Christians should move ahead in sexual ethics. I will explore that theme in my own talk, and I am sure others will as well.
This is what we are trying to say, and to do, with the sexuality and covenant conference scheduled for April 19-21, 2012. All who are interested in contributing constructively to this kind of conversation are warmly invited. It is a rare opportunity.