At the moment, both my present church and larger Baptist denominational fellowship (The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship) have initiated processes of deliberative dialogue around difficult areas of discernment in our life together. Though not directly meant to address convictions and practices around gay, lesbian and bisexual Christians, the CBF’s “Illumination Project” will surely address these concerns with an aim toward maintaining a unity of fellowship in the midst of differing convictions.
In both our church and larger fellowship, everyone seems interested in “The Conversation.” I take the “The Conversation” to be one in which we listen for what we ought to do together in light of God’s calling of discipleship to gay, lesbian and bisexual people. (I am aware that concerns and convictions regarding people who are transgender and queer often coincide with matters of sexuality. I am only tabling them here to try to gain some sense of clarity about what we talk about when talking about and with LGB persons and their role in the life of the church.)
What I have noticed about “The Conversation” regarding lesbian, gay and bisexual Christians and what form discipleship takes for them is that often we Baptists talk past one another. We have not spent the time clarifying what it is we are even talking about. “The Conversation” ends up cluttered with accusations of cultural accommodation or silencing of voices. Beliefs in human rights get pitted against trust in Scripture’s authority.
With our congregational lives guided by the voice and movement of the Spirit in the life of each individual believer, some dissent must be inherent to Baptist life together. And yet, along with the gift of prophecy, Scripture also calls us to collective discernment and translation. With all of that in mind, here are a few things I hope that we can talk about when we have “The Conversation.”
1. When talking about the “issue” of same-sex marriage, we are talking about people’s sexual lives and how that part of their humanity relates to an ultimate desire for God.
God created us as sexual creatures. We desire one another and desire to be desired by one another. Sex is an act in which we might discover a place for that desire to mean something beautiful and loving, and, tragically, it often comes to mean the opposite. We learn that we can be pleasurable and enjoyable to another person or at other times we learn to be shamed or unpleasing. The good fulfillment of sexual desire serves to teach us that we might also be desired by and desirable to God, especially as sexuality reaches deep into who we are. It is a meaning-making desire in that it compels us to look outside of ourselves for the people who will satisfy us and who we may satisfy.
To put it as plainly as possible: let’s talk about sex.
We ought to acknowledge that our sexual desires are a gift from God to be channeled, disciplined and nurtured in such a way that draws us deeper into the love and desire of God. Through the power of Christ our desire and longing might be transformed into a means of God’s grace. The question that follows is what kind of practices best help all Christians to discover themselves as loved, encounter the grace of God, and live more deeply into a life of discipleship that transforms them into loving creatures through the power of Jesus Christ.
Often people use the word “issue” during conversations about sexuality, same-sex couples, and the Church. This language only works to obscure what it is we’re actually discussing: one another’s sex lives. It devalues sex, turning its ethical, theological and emotional dimensions into something to be figured out and answered correctly. The Bible, sex and God are far too interesting and beautiful to be boiled down to an “issue.” Sex and sexual desire run deep to the core of who we are and how we relate to God. We need to resist the urge to turn sex into “an issue” to be discussed rather than a portion of our humanity that can be a source of both healing and pain. All of us need to be aware that when we speak about sex, we are speaking of a place of joy, hurt, despair and redemption for all people.
At some point, we as congregations and fellowships need to have conversations about chastity, marriage and celibacy and what their practice embodies in relation to God’s love. Further, as a fellowship we will need to discover what those practices look like across congregations and how we might learn from the multiple beautiful ways they help us to see God’s Kingdom.
2. Marriage is a sacramental practice that God uses to take two people’s love for one another and transform it into a deeper, richer, more Christ-like imaging of God’s own love for us.
If you ask a married couple to list the most significant aspects of their marriage, how far down the list do you think they would have to go before they said, “My spouse’s gender is the right one according to Scripture.” Fifteen? Twenty? It seems that often in our preoccupation with the gender of those practicing marriage in our churches we miss out on articulating what a good, Christian marriage is for. Marriage is not about “getting it right,” but a practice for two people learning to love one another in a committed relationship that finds its guiding principle of service in Christ’s relation to the church. In marriage, two people give their sexual and romantic desires to each other so that they may learn to love a particular person more fully and in turn love their other neighbors with the love of God.
The question I hope we can discuss is whether or not that practice can be entered into by persons of the same sex in a way that maintains the integrity of communal discipleship and allows for their marriage to image the love of Christ for the church in humble service to one another. Some congregations will answer “Yes,” and others “No.” But by framing the conversation around what a Christian marriage is for, we might hopefully agree or disagree over whether or not its goods can be preserved, nurtured and enjoyed by same-sex couples. This will hopefully give us a space to avoid the temptation to “get it right.”
From a denominational standpoint, we need to think deeply and speak clearly about what the differences in our understanding of marriage mean for our maintained or discontinued fellowship with one another. At the very least, we should be able to describe why and how we disagree.
3. The Bible provides the story within which we find ourselves.
Scripture is authoritative not by providing a set of timeless rules to which we adhere, but by telling us about the world within which we live. This world is one that includes God’s action from creation through the people of Israel to the work of Jesus to expand that people to include the Gentiles. We read the Bible because it tells us the story of Jesus. The life of Baptist Christians is a continual reaching back to the life and work of Jesus Christ. Thus, we read Scripture as the account of fellow brothers and sisters on the journey toward Jesus in Israel and after Jesus in the church.
I hope we keep in mind that the early churches did not have what would later be called “The New Testament.” Most of their members were illiterate and would not have had full copies of either the Hebrew Scriptures, the Gospels or the Epistles. Yet, we believe they were able to faithfully follow Jesus and maintain the kind of community called “church.” Lately, I have been putting it this way: After the last apostle to see Jesus died, we have all been in the same boat. All Christians begin from the same conviction that Jesus lived, died and rose again. Scripture and theology, praise and service, shared meals and communal discernment are all means by which we are guided in response to the assertion that Christ is Lord. They form the communal life out of which we attempt to make sense of sexual desire and its relation to our redemption in God.
Scripture, then, is our guide not because it offers a set of timeless principles that are either obeyed with strict adherence or dismissed as historically problematic. It is our guiding book because it tells us of people who encountered a God who loved them, moved them and spoke to them. It is the same God we encounter in church and the same God who speaks, guides and loves all of us.
4. I hope we pay attention to how we approach one another. I hope that in our posture toward one another is humility, trusting that our friends in our congregations and denominations earnestly seek to love the Lord and follow Christ.
Our understanding is always limited by our created nature and our sinful ignorance. In light of this, we all hope to have within us the attitude of Christ: we do not consider equality in our knowledge of the right or good to be equal to God’s. Because all have fallen, we remain susceptible to believing our convictions to be truthful expressions of God’s love, though they may in fact be false. We should never forget the sentences we say that begin with “I used to believe ….” Also, as Christians saved by grace, each member of the body is capable of hearing the direction of the Spirit. These two basic facts of our current state ought to encourage generous and open conversation with one another — not only as a necessary step to guard against the trap of harmful self-deception but as gift of the Holy Spirit’s movement to draw us further into the life of God.
I hope that as our Baptist congregations and larger denominational groupings begin this process of discernment we come together with the good faith assumption that the people with whom we speak and live are attempting as best they know how to follow and respond to the call of the gospel, to live more fully into the conviction that Jesus is lord of all life.
I look forward to what we might discover together and what we might hear as we listen to the voice of the Spirit during the conversations that are ahead.