Guardians of the Gospel
For a faith based on repentance and confession, Christians really struggle with saying, “I’m sorry.”
Today my denomination will decide our future together, or more likely, apart. Yesterday, The United Methodist Church voted down it’s best hope for a peaceful Way Forward as the One Church Plan (OCP) lost by a tiny margin of 47%-53%, while the Traditional Plan passed. If you’ve not been keeping up, the Traditional Plan seeks to keep harmful language in our Discipline that calls an entire people group (LGBTQ) as “incompatible with Christian teaching,” and this plan will give me the option to either publicly certify that I agree and will enforce this or I will have to turn in my credentials as a United Methodist pastor. And I will have to say good-bye to the church that raised me to believe in a God of love. It’s possible the decisions will be reached by the time you’re reading this, but for now, I wait, I pray, and I draw comics…
As a youth pastor and huge fan of Chris Pratt (Star Lord in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies!), I thought it was super cool when the actor started becoming public about his Christian faith. So I was a little surprised when actress Ellen Page (Kitty Pryde in the X-Men movies!) challenged Pratt’s alignment with Zoe Church on Twitter, asking him to talk about how his church is “infamously anti LGBTQ.” Page continued: “If you are a famous actor and you belong to an organization that hates a certain group of people, don’t be surprised if someone wonders why it’s not addressed.”
Pratt’s reply to Page was…predictable: What? We’re not hateful! We love everyone! Pratt listed ways he had seen his church help him through divorce and walk alongside people regardless of sexual orientation. Pratt then said that while he believes a person can love whomever they want, he is not a spokesman for his church.
To me, the brief spat between Chris Pratt and Ellen Page felt like a microcosm of my denomination…a cartoon of huge events that will impact millions around the world.
Here we have an LGBTQ person (Page) who has experienced real fear and marginalization, challenging a peer to be open about how the church has harmed gay people. Pratt seems affirming, an ally of sorts, and does not hold a traditional Christian mentality that would respond with words like “sin,” “scripture is plain,” or “abomination.” He’s just your average fun, nice Christian. His church has been good to him, and from all appearances, his church feels welcome and affirming to gay people. He seems genuinely affronted and surprised by Page’s comments. It would have been nice if Page would have footnoted what she meant by “infamously anti LGBTQ” because let’s face it, Zoe Church is not exactly Westboro Baptist.
The truth is, we’ve come to a time in history when our church’s silence or ambivalence over LGBTQ issues causes more harm than good. If your church is unwilling to hire gay people or put them in leadership, you have to be clear why: it is because you believe that an LGBTQ person is unrepentant and uncommitted to the Christian faith…a sinner. But not just a sinner, because we’re all sinners. Somehow, more of a sinner than straight people who are unrepentant of greed or gluttony or whatever “brokenness” we all have. I think what Page is getting at is this: Zoe Church comes out of Hillsong Church, which is a wonderful and welcoming community that publicly refused leadership to a gay couple because they were gay. For many it is just as bad, if not worse than openly anti-gay communities, to make a gay kid feel welcome and accepted only to let them know years later what the limits are to their pursuit of God in your community. After all (PLOT TWIST!), Proverbs 11:1 and 20:23 call dishonesty an abomination unto God.
During the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, Martin Luther King, Jr. was most frustrated by the overwhelming silence from the vast majority of white churches. These were nice churches, not anti-black, not pro-segregation, just opting to stay out of all these politics. This is called complicity, and it’s silence like this that allows the folks that are openly hateful to get away with it. It allows structures to remain in place that harm individuals. We’ve been in the midst of a new Civil Rights movement, and the church continues the same patterns as before, either silence or self-defense…anything other than what the world really needs.
We say the world needs Jesus, but we refuse to model repentance and practice blessing towards people we have harmed. And we have harmed just about every marginalized group that’s out there. As my denomination argues over pensions and strictly enforcing anti-gay legislation, Westboro Baptist folk stand outside openly telling gay people that God hates them, and a Vice President stands in office who supports harmful gay conversion therapy for minors.
So whatever the outcome for The United Methodist Church today, I repent. I am sorry. You’re right, Ms. Page. Full stop.
Diverting P.S. > Now, it takes a next-level geek to notice that Kitty Pryde and Star Lord get married in the comics, though due to Fox/Disney deals, it’s unlikely X-Men and Guardians will ever be in the same movie. They have a rocky relationship, so it felt natural to do a sort of fan fiction about the real life actors behind the comic characters.
When not drawing the Wesley Bros cartoon, the Rev. Charlie Baber, a United Methodist deacon, serves as youth minister at University United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, N.C. His cartoon appears on United Methodist Insight by special arrangement.