Supreme Court Debates Same-Sex Marriage – Should We?

I was raised in a household that was openly affirming of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered folks long before that was commonplace in American society. In the early 1990s, I joined my parents in gay rights rallies and parades in Wichita, Kansas. I grew up with GLBT folks in my community, and my parents encouraged me to watch movies and read books about the devastation that was being caused by a deadly combination of a virulent AIDS virus, and an equally virulent homophobia that permeated much of our culture. I was raised to be an ally.

Marriage equality has always been a no-brainer for me. As a child, I got to see my father and another important leader in my church have their ministerial credentials revoked by the Quaker Church because of their openly expressed conviction that gay relationships were not inherently sinful. The fact that they came to this conclusion out of a process of prayer and serious engagement with what the Bible says (and does not say) about homosexuality did not seem to matter. They were run out of my childhood church like heretics.

So why do I feel so conflicted about the current debate happening at (and outside of) the Supreme court?

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Pastor? Community Organizer!

As long as I have been a Christian, I have been skeptical of the pastoral system. Though I am not critical of pastors themselves, I do have a fair amount of discomfort with the idea that one person should be singled out as "the minister," with the rest of the church relegated to support roles. You could say that I am especially committed to the concept of the priesthood of all believers, the responsibility that each one of us has for living as disciples of Jesus.

Though there are certainly dangers in the single-pastor model, I have also observed that when leadership is everyone's job, it often becomes no one's job. In my experience, a lack of explicitly recognized leadership can be a mask for hidden and informal structures that, when dysfunctional, cannot be questioned. It is extremely difficult to critique faulty leadership in a community that does not admit to having leaders! I have been part of communities where the refusal or inability to recognize and empower Spirit-led leadership has resulted in conflict, dysfunction and stagnation.

In spite of the risks that I see in the traditional pastoral model, I cannot deny the advantages of designating particular individuals as leaders within the community. At the same time, the single-pastor pattern of many churches just does not seem to work very well in our present situation, if it ever did. The work of the church is simply too great a burden for any one person to carry.

I am increasingly convinced that we need a way forward that is trapped neither in the informal power structures that can suffocate and stagnate our communities, nor in a pastoral system in which all responsibility and decision-making is vested in one person. What might an alternative model look like?

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A Church In Recovery

I just read a really solid blog post from James Tower, a seminary student at George Fox Evangelical Seminary in Oregon. He writes about his lifelong experience of recovery from addiction, and gives us a glimpse into his journey through Alcoholics Anonymous, Celebrate Recovery (Rick Warren’s version of AA), and the Quaker Church. He takes a look at the strengths and weaknesses of both AA and the Christian Church, and he provides some perspective on how we as followers of Jesus could learn from the guiding principles of the recovery community.

For me, Jame’s post comes as a lighting strike. Just a couple days ago, I had a long conversation with folks from Capitol Hill Friends about AA and how we might incorporate some of its principles into our life together. We felt that the 12 Steps of AAwere deeply resonant the Christian faith, encouraging real confession and practical transformation. I began to think about what it might look like to use the 12 Steps as a basis for our group’s curriculum. I wondered if there was a way to bring the powerful principles of AA back into the Church.

How amazing that less than 48 hours later Jame’s post shows up in my RSS feed! Just as I begin consider what it might look like to engage with AA principles from an explicitly Christ-centered perspective, I am handed this seasoned set of reflections grounded in an experience of both the recovery community and the Quaker Church.

I will not try to re-hash Jame’s post here. I encourage you to read it for yourself. Having read it, I would like us to engage in a conversation about how we might move forward together asa people in recovery, with Jesus as our Higher Power. Could we come to a place where we recognize the need of every person to be freed from addiction, “turning our lives and wills over to the care of God”? Could we have the courage to “make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves,” and “admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”? What power might be released into our lives if we “humbly asked God to remove all our shortcomings” and “made direct amends [to those whom we have harmed] whenever possible.”?

What a compelling and life-giving gospel that would be! Of course we would want to “carry this message to others and practice these principles in all our affairs”!