Paragraph 304.3
“The practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church
My least favorite class, the one Methodist students were required to take two semesters of, was United Methodism itself. My worst grade of my entire seminary career was in the first installment. I found it boring and dry and John Wesley, the 16th Century British cleric, theologian, evangelist, and founder of the denomination, interested me very little.
The second semester of Methodism brought us up to modern times with a focus on current church belief and ecclesiastical polity1. The Book of Discipline is the name for the publication that contains the law and doctrine of the United Methodist Church. I remember the day we covered paragraph 304.3, a group of words that have inhabited the Discipline since 1972 and reads, “The practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. Therefore, self-avowed practicing homosexuals are not to be certified as candidates, ordained as ministers, or appointed to serve in The United Methodist Church.”
I knew this was the stance of the UMC but had never considered it so publicly and objectively before. I experienced chills, clamminess, and other strange bodily sensations akin to anxiety as we discussed this topic, in broad daylight, that I was working hard to keep in the dark. It felt as if a bright spotlight was being aimed right at me, revealing my deeper truth like an X-ray machine exposes layers of tissue, bone, and other organs. In retrospect, I doubt that any of my fellow classmates in the large class were thinking about me as we considered this controversial issue of church and society.
Our professor, a thoughtful and caring retired bishop, shared a personal and somewhat humanizing story about having been approached, before he was a bishop, by a good friend and colleague on a car ride home from a church meeting one evening. His friend shared with him that he was gay, and even more that he was physically attracted to him. This future bishop non-judgmentally received the news of this man’s sexual orientation, showing compassion, yet he also did not reciprocate the guy’s romantic feelings for him, stating that he was in a committed relationship with his wife.
I felt a sadness and loneliness as I imagined this gay man getting out of the car and heading back out into the cloak of night and a life isolated from the rest of the world. Of course, this was only my projection onto the experience of this man and may not have been his reality at all. But this transference is revealing of what I thought and felt about the “homosexual lifestyle” at this time in my own life, therefore accepting the stance of “incompatibility” not only within United Methodist doctrine but in keeping with my current understanding of larger universal truths of how God intended things to be.
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The government of a church. There are local (congregational) forms of organization as well as denominational. Wikipedia