Boyle Quote
Today I’m headed to the Rio Texas Conference session in Corpus Christi. Ironic, isn’t it—that there in City of Christ’s Body, we will give the risen Lord cause to say to us, “This is my body, broken by you.”
Divorces are always painful, provoking recriminations, but hopefully bringing relief from unbearable tensions.
I go to the potential dissolution of my beloved conference, carrying Father Gregory Boyle’s words in my heart. For those not familiar with Father Greg, he’s the founder of Homeboy Industries in LA, a ministry that creates a family of compassionate love for gang members which will be so accepting and attractive to them that they will want to leave gang life for good.
In his latest book, “The Whole Language,” Father Greg writes, “Authentic Christianity never circles the wagons. It always widens the circle.” How relevant to the great Methodist schism of 2023!
Those in the camp pursuing dissolution fervently believe they must “circle their wagons” against accommodation to the secular, on-its-ways-to-becoming-outright pagan, culture, which now dominates American society through the mainstream media and elite power institutions in America’s urban centers. For this camp, the spearpoint of secular culture’s subversive warfare against traditional Christianity is its anything-goes sexual ethos, epitomized by same-sex love and the acceptance of gender dysphoria as a genuine psychological phenomenon.
The other camp (my camp) fervently believes, as Father Boyle puts it, that authentic Christianity “always widens the circle” –that “what was treasonous about Jesus [in the eyes of the religionists] was his inclusivity. He ignored boundaries. He plowed right through them. . . Jesus lived, breathed, and embodied a boundary-subverting inclusion. . .Nothing is excluded except excluding.” Boyle even goes so far as to claim that “the gospel doesn’t know what a sexual ethic is; it only has an ethic of love that longs to include and foster belonging.” In other words, belonging and acceptance always trump moral purity codes.
I’m guessing that such a claim is anathema, if not unintelligible, to the “circle-the-wagons” faction now seeking to divorce the rest of us. They cannot seem to understand that they will never “win” the vast majority of the LGBTQ community to become disciples of Christ with their “love the sinner, but hate the sin” sexual ethic. Only an “ethic of love that longs to include and to foster belonging” can do that. Just as Father Boyle would never get to first base with his homies if he insisted on some up-tight, puritanical sexual ethic!
CONVICTED BY A CATHOLIC PRIEST
But if Father Boyle’s ethic challenges the exclusion camp, it also confronts me. You see, I want to “argue” this “circle-the-wagons” faction into seeing that their side is wrong and that my side is right. Yet, alas, no matter how much my heart, or my gut, says, “John, that ain’t going to happen,” my mind refuses to accept that.
Here at this annual conference session, after we vote to ratify the decisions of those churches wanting to disaffiliate, I suspect (and dread) that we will be called on to “bless” each other. But how can I in good conscience ask God to “bless” (in the sense of “prospering”) an ecclesial organization that practices discrimination and injustice against my LGBTQIA+ siblings?
Oh, I can acknowledge that the GMC will bring some to a “saving faith in Jesus Christ,” just as my own home church, though steeped in the old southern ethos of segregation and discrimination against my Black siblings, once did the same for me in the 1950s. So, I keep trying to convince myself that I can pray that God will empower the GMC to connect people with Christ’s saving grace. But, I can do so only on condition that I can go on to pray that God will lead these folks to the fullness of grace, where they come to see that a same-sex couple can be just as much a beautiful and faithful expression of covenantal marital love as an opposite-sex couple can be. And if they must ultimately leave the GMC for them to come to this insight, then I will pray for that, too.
But here’s where Father Boyle has convicted me. He writes, “Our demand that things change –that Jesus’ ‘politics of compassion’ (as opposed to the church’s politics of purity) become a reality—this demand must be born from our compassion and not from our contempt” (in my case, my contempt for the GMC). . .”I’ve written elsewhere that if I go to the margins ‘to make a difference,’ then I’m making it about me. If I’m angry with righteous indignation at the dominant, oppressive system, I’m afraid I still making it about me.” Rather, our effort to bring justice, he says, must start with the reality of BELONGING. We must accept that those whose views we seek to change ‘belong’ to us, and we to them.
“I’m writing this book,” Father Greg explains, “in the days after the 2020 election, and the camps, the tribes, and divisions are pronounced indeed. . .I just heard a woman on TV complaining bitterly that ‘we need to look into the thousands of ballots sent here by China.’ Or the homie who told me the day after the election, ‘I just couldn’t vote for Biden, cuz, you know, he’s a child molester.’ Or the homie who refused to wear a mask because he says, ‘I trust in God.’ . . . The task at hand is not to convince folks that China, in fact, didn’t deliver ballots to our shores, but to address the fear and the sadness undergirding such a belief. People don’t need to be levelled [by our arguments] but loved. Only love can tend to the severed belonging these views represent. Tenderness IS tending to the other.”
Okay, Father Greg, you convicted me! I’m guilty as charged. So, I’ve made up my mind to go to Corpus Christi committed to trying to rightly discern the Body of Christ and to figure out how I can tend to the “severed belonging” of those disaffiliating—how I can love them, instead of levelling them, even if that means just keeping my mouth shut!
John Alexander Wright
The Rev. John Alexander Wright is a retired clergy member of the San Antonio-based Rio Texas Annual Conference. He is a former superintendent of the Hill Country District of the Rio Texas Conference and former pastor of First UMC, Austin. To reproduce this content elsewhere, please contact the author via his Facebook page.