June 11, 2012 issue
Let’s meet halfway
By Roger Martin Lawrence, Kan.Thank you for covering the gay/lesbian issue in depth. I was a delegate from Peace Mennonite Church in Lawrence, Kan., to last year’s Western District Conference. After 15 years at Peace, I’ve learned Mennonites have a regrettable tendency to schism. We need a vaccine against that. The pastor of a Houston church dropped a nugget of wisdom at the conference. The issue, he said, is not who follows Jesus or doesn’t, whether we trust Paul or Jesus more, whether congregations or denominations should have the last word. The conversation’s “about all of those things,” he said. “And we need to figure out how to dialogue and keep those values in tension with one another.”
Personal contact and the exchange of stories by congregants from Mennonite congregations at profound variance might be key ingredients of the vaccine I have in mind. Specifically, our church folks could meet with some from churches that opposed our pastor’s performing a same-sex covenant ceremony, and those on the fence. Mapquest says it’s 213 miles from Lawrence to Harper, Kan., and 191 from Hydro, Okla. (one of several towns with Mennonite churches that raised objections to our pastor’s decision) to Harper. Maybe the Mennonite church in Harper has a spare room we could use. If we hold peace dear, shouldn’t we be willing to meet halfway?
Comments
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My work as a marriage and family therapist is anchored in family systems concepts. A key concept holds that all families deal with tension between the connectedness and the separateness of members. Healthy families value the need for both connection and separation and manage this tension in positive ways. The adage about parents giving children both roots and wings is about managing this tension well. Too much emphasis on one of these forces gets a reaction in the other direction. For example, if our desire to have a strong family mistakenly leads us to insist that family members think, and feel, and act alike, our efforts will have the opposite, paradoxical effect. Members will be uncomfortable together and find ways to distance. This principle of family systems is equally true of a denominational family of congregations. Efforts to persuade others (whether church members, or congregations, or the denomination as a whole) to think, and feel, and act alike in regard to the homosexuality issues will inevitably lead to disrespect and division.
We would have a stronger, more viable denomination today if, as a denomination, our goal were to honor both the commonalities among congregations and also the differences among congregations. In a letter to the editor of the Mennonite Weekly Review many years ago, Richard Kauffman (currently book editor of Christian Century) made what I thought then and still think was a wise suggestion. If certain congregations desire to be inclusive, welcoming congregations, Kauffman wrote, let’s acknowledge this and give them our denominational blessing for being what they are called to be. -
Thanks, Phil. I agree 100%. June Thomsen
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