Categories: uncategorized
Date: 13 April 2011 09:32:58
It appears that the Baptist Missionary Society has decided that enough is enough and is dragging the debate which needs to occur both into the open and into the 21st century. The current issue of their magazine Mission Catalyst is focusing on mission and sexuality. It contains articles on a range of issues including cohabitation and homosexuality amongst other things.
I was struck by a couple of quotes which illustrate the positive movement going on in the UK.
The first was
" Let me say a word about the church and gay people. In the Lausanne Commitment, in a key paragraph on what it refers to as ‘disordered sexuality’ the ‘Commitment’ issues a call “to resist the multiple forms of disordered sexuality in our surrounding cultures, including pornography, adultery and promiscuity”. No disagreement there, I imagine.
But in the following paragraph there is evidence of real pastoral sensitivity with a further call “to seek to understand and address the deep heart issues of identity and experience which draw some people into homosexual practice; to reach out with the love, compassion and justice of Christ, and to reject and condemn all forms of hatred, verbal or physical abuse, and victimization of homosexual people.” Not that long ago, homosexuality might have been named in the first paragraph, not the second."
The other quote which really got me was, "My own ethics are fairly traditional so I don’t underestimate the difficulty in looking at these areas. But I want us to hear from those whose choices challenge us, whose plea is not even ‘will you change your mind?’ but ‘will you show us love?’ This isn’t an exercise in biblical interpretation either – I am well aware of the need for that but rushing for texts avoids the contexts. It avoids people. Jesus never did that.And finally, bear in mind that historically, the church has been shameful in its theologically-justified prejudice against women, has defended slavery by quoting chapter and verse, and is still woefully selective in matters such as wealthy Christians in a world of poverty. We have every need to approach this subject humbly."