I’ve been listening to my siblings in the United Methodist community and reconnecting with my siblings from the Adventist community this weekend.
On Friday, while I was offline, the UMC’s Judicial Council ruled that the bishops of the Western Jurisdiction (five states from Wyoming down to Colorado) had violated church teachings by electing and consecrating Rev. Karen Oliveto to serve as their bishop.
While some commentators have clarified that Bishop Oliveto was in fact duly elected, LGBTQIA people have heard loud and clear that their place in the church and in ministry is again up for debate.
And they’re tired, but undeterred.
M Barclay, communications director at Reconciling Ministries Network, asked allies yesterday to reflect on “what they will do” now that their church’s disciplinary machine is trundling toward them.
Last I heard, the Western Jurisdiction was meeting today to figure that out. But it remains a question for all of us who still participate in whatever ways in hostile religious traditions.
I turned the same question over with my Adventist peers today, too: What will we do? Our answers varied.
Most of us have lots of stories from our formative years in the denomination; its practices shaped both our subculture and us, and some of that conditioning persists even as we’ve grown, changed, or moved away.
What many of us have kept is a principle from R. Abraham Heschel: “My tradition,” Heschel once said, “not only gives me the right to speak in its name, but the duty.”
Defining that duty in ways that honor our wholeness without requiring us to swallow abusive rhetoric along the way is fundamental to our ability to move forward together and to keep engaging when there are very good reasons for us to stop.