Responsible listening

As one who spent some ten years in our Presbyterian world-wide mission, specifically in Indonesia, I have been struck by the concerns raised by The Layman, and by Gene TeSelle's thoughtful response.

I just want to add three points:

Those of us who seek a more open and affirming (and just!) church do so not as some kind of compromise with moral evil. We do this rather in response to what we understand to be the imperatives of scripture and the Gospel: to proclaim and to embody the inclusive, gracious love of God for all people.

We also act in faithfulness to our Reformed tradition, which teaches us to respect and learn from human wisdom and science. Over the past few decades we have learned much from psychology and biology and the social sciences, that leads us to understand sexuality and same-sex relationships in new ways. To learn is not a matter of compromise, but of growth.

Parker Williamson is right: We should listen with respect and attention to what we hear from sister churches around the world. But Gene TeSelle is quite right in pointing to the "selective listening" represented in Williamson's article.

We need to listen also to the experience of many churches, especially in Africa, that have dealt with questions of marriage and sexuality with sensitivity to their own cultures. After early European missionaries imposed Western standards of monogamy on many African communities, church leaders saw the destructive impact this was having on traditionally polygamous families. Women were suddenly made single, with no way to survive outside the marriages in which they had been living. Children were suddenly removed from the families which had nurtured them.

Thus many churches came to accept polygamous marriages as the most responsible way to affirm committed family relations in their situation.

I'm not aware of any African churches urging us to follow their way, but they have asked us to respect it, as they followed Christ and the scriptures in their own circumstances.

It is appropriate for us to do the same thing. We don't need to hold ourselves up as an example for the rest of the world. (Though it may be hard for us to break that habit.) But we may quite properly claim the right and the responsibility to follow the calling of our God, and the teachings of scripture as we interpret them, in our own setting.

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An index of our reports from

BECOMING NEIGHBORS:
An Invitation
to Global Discipleship

A Witherspoon conference
on global mission and justice

September 16 - 19, 2007
Louisville, Kentucky

Check out our report from the Conference
on
Terror, Torture,
and Security