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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

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Reader Review #6: Listening Edition

"In God's Image, not invisible." —WeAreSDAs
“In God’s Image, not invisible.” —WeAreSDAs

Instead of my standard round-up of general news, articles, and media, this week’s Reader Review focuses on an international summit on sexuality and gender that the worldwide Seventh-day Adventist Church is hosting in Cape Town, South Africa.

The summit began this morning, and the Adventist Review quotes co-organizer Pardon Mwansa: “The quality of meetings is generally judged by who attends, and here you have all world division officers attending, along with pastors, teachers and human services personnel. The goal is to make sure that what is done here reflects the corporate thinking of the Church.”

That’s a worthy goal. Unfortunately, because most delegates are senior church officials, they are almost exclusively male and almost exclusively [presumed] heterosexual. Affirming church members, LGBTI people, teachers, psychologists, social workers, doctors, historians, lawyers, and pastors who have life experience and professional experience with the topics up for discussion have been excluded by design.

This is a week of meetings about LGBTI people and their families without LGBTI people or their families. The summit cannot “reflect the corporate thinking of the Church,” because “the Church” was explicitly and intentionally not invited.

Why the Adventist Denomination is Hosting This Kind of Summit In This Kind of Way

This summit perfectly illustrates the Adventist Church’s 40-year rejecting relationship with its LGBTI members. Neal Wilson, father of current church president Ted Wilson and General Conference president from 1979-1990, promoted and supported a sexual orientation “healing ministry” with General Conference funds and the on-the-ground support of the Pennsylvania Conference and the Columbia Union. That organization was Quest Learning Center.

The links below describe the impact of Quest and its allied ministries, Quest’s director, Colin Cook, and the Adventist denomination’s dogged promotion of Cook and people like him as models of “transformation” that LGBTI Adventists should draw inspiration from. The mentality that created Quest still persists in some departments of the General Conference—and in one office in particular.

Read more:

Adventist Church Officials’ Last 5 Years—Selections from the Public Record

December 2010
East-Central African field president quoted in Ugandan newspapers claiming that the Adventist church supports Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill. The legislation still includes execution as a penalty.

After some international Adventist concern, the GC distances itself from this church official, and the church official states he only intended to “disapprove”. Neither the official nor the General Conference disavow LGBTI criminalization or the assumptions and prejudices it’s based on.

March 2012
British Union Conference publicly encourages members to oppose a civil marriage initiative in England. SDA Kinship International publishes an open statement challenging the BUC’s failure to acknowledge or engage the LGBTI members in its own territory who will be directly affected by the passage or failure of the law.

BUC president Sam Davis tells Kinship that his administration views itself as the British government’s moral conscience and will continue to lobby against equal civil marriage. His article to British Adventists is a case study in fear-trafficking. (Go to page 6 for coverage of the UK government consultation and page 8 for Davis’ column).

October 2012
October 5: DC-metro young adult screening of the documentary Seventh-Gay Adventists and panel discussion at Capital Memorial Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Panelists included Jason Hines (Baylor University), Roy Gane (Andrew University), Nicholas Miller (Andrews University), Daneen Akers (Seventh-Gay Adventists), Paul Graham (Restoration Praise Center [SDA], Lanham, MD), and Richard James, Sr (Pennsylvania Avenue SDA Church, Capitol Heights, MD). PDF: Detailed notes on the 10/5/2012 post-screening discussion.

October 6: Pre-election forum at Spencerville Seventh-day Adventist Church: “Protecting Marriage: What is the Christian’s Role?”

Presenters included Roy Gane (Andrews University), Nicholas Miller (Andrews University), Bill Knott (Adventist Review), Claudio Consuegra (North American Division), and Harry R. Jackson (National Organization for Marriage [NOM]).

There were no female speakers at this forum. There were no [openly] non-heterosexual speakers. There was no diversity of opinion, no consciousness that non-heterosexuals might be present, no recognition that informed Christians might not share the same beliefs about how to vote on the state referendum. PDF: Detailed notes on the 10/6/2012 forum.

March 2014
Elder Ted Wilson keynotes the South African summit about LGBTI people and without LGBTI people. According to the Adventist News Network, this is what he tells delegates:

[Content Note: Insistent religious anti-LGBTI rhetoric. May take readers back to the misty early ’80s.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


No kidding.

 

 

 

 

 

This is the rhetoric that opened the summit and set the frame for the presentations that will follow it.

Other Members of the Adventist Community Speak Up

Listen Now. WeAreSDAs.comWeAreSDAs.com: We Are SDAs (SDA Kinship International, Seventh-Gay Adventists—A Documentary, and Intercollegiate Adventist GSA Coalition)

Three peer groups have launched a listening and narrative initiative that features LGBTI current and former Seventh-day Adventists—the very constituency of the church excluded from the General Conference summit next week.

Note: Initial videos are not yet captioned. I’ll update this post when they are.

“For whatever reason you are here, thank you. Listening is an act of love, and it’s where we must begin.

The story is told that in certain Jewish traditions, rabbis teach that angels hover over each person’s head with a sign that reads, ‘Behold the image of God.’ What if we leaned into our relationships with each person with that idea. What if we treated each other that way–that no matter if we agreed or disagreed, our sacred calling would be to treat each person with that respect and reverence for God’s image? How might that shift our church?

Please consider sharing these stories in your home, church, and community as well.”

Spectrum Magazine: “Sexuality and Human Developmental Identity Part 1” (Hans Gutierrez)
Gutierrez describes a grounded philosophical basis for listening to life experience and using our listening to improve any pre-observational, abstracted models we might otherwise impose on the realities we live in. 

“Without concrete human reality and suffering our theology becomes blind and bigoted… All persons, not only LGBT people, face the challenge of having to listen, to know, to accommodate and to orient our own sexuality in a human and shared experience… LGBT Adventists don’t represent a danger for heterosexual Adventists, but rather an opportunity to better understand ourselves.” —Hans Gutierrez

By Friday afternoon, Spectrum had also posted a news item on the We Are SDAs project: “We Are Seventh-day Adventists” Responds to GC “Alternative Sexualities” Summit.

ReconcileRestore: “We Are Seventh-day Adventists” (Todd Leonard)

Leonard pastors a US Adventist church and often shares devotional reflections with his readers. As he introduced the We Are SDAs webpage, he said:

“I am pleased to count dozens of LGBTQI Adventists as friends and am a better person because of them. I want everyone else in my church to know what they’re missing out on by not including and accepting them into their congregations and schools.”

Jonathan Cook: In God’s Image—Our Stories Matter
Jonathan Cook, a Pacific Union graduate and musician, wrote this open letter to the South African summit organizers and copied it to other senior church workers. He reports that one recipient has already replied: “Keep your courage and be willing to help your church look at this issue.”

“As this summit opens, many Adventists around the world are praying for the presence of the Holy Spirit, that He may guide your hearts. We are joining together in the South African spirit of Ubuntu: ‘I am what I am because of who we all are.’  It is especially appropriate to highlight this interconnectedness. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, ‘A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished.’
God’s love transcends our differences. We are all part of God’s diverse image, and our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.” —Jonathan Cook

Leonard Morris Taylor Memorial Site: An 83-year-old professor (emeritus) and father reflects through art on the life of his son. Morris Taylor’s son Leonard had participated in General Conference-sponsored “therapy,” experienced a mental breakdown, and committed suicide. Had he lived, he would have been 50 years old this month.

Pacific Union College Students on “In God’s Image”: A Tumblr website hosts hundreds of art pieces and messages from PUC students created on campus last week. These messages, the site says, are a “message of love” from students to the leaders of their church.

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“What Else Can I Do?”

If you’ve written letters lately or talked to church officials and faced the kind of response that the delegates heard earlier today, you may be wondering what else you can do. When someone asked me this question this weekend, here’s what I told her:

You’ve done a beautiful thing by sharing your story. Stay open to whoever might respond to you, whether they respond by sharing challenging stories of their own or react to you in a more closed way.

Even though you’ve already made yourself really vulnerable by speaking publicly, please try not to take any responses personally, whether they are positive or negative. No one can predict what about our stories might encourage or trigger another person. We can only be present with and for others no matter where they are in their own journey.

Hopefully your friends and relatives already know that you’re not here to judge them and you’re not here to be judged by them either. If they don’t know, this is a great time to tell them!

But none of us really knows what the responses will be like this week. Let’s just stay as open-hearted as we can.

Some of the people making pronouncements this week in Cape Town will hold the ideas and interpretations they’re bonded to until the day they die. So will some of the people who read Adventist News Network’s limited coverage of this week.

I wasn’t born to change their mind: I don’t live to persuade them. And if that is you too, I wasn’t born to change your mind. My life’s work isn’t to evangelize you.

I simply care deeply about my community of faith and its footprint in the world and in the lives of real people. I know the deep impact my denomination has had on my extended family and millions of families like ours over the last century and a half. I believe that each of us, as co-laborers in the faith, has the potential to help our faith grow up into a healthier future than it’s had at any time in its history.

Should I ever stop believing in our collective potential to experience more wholeness, less separation, more light, less shadow—that’s the day I’ll stop being a Seventh-day Adventist. But not a day before then.

It isn’t institutional or intellectual rigidity that will keep our denomination together. We are 40 years into a long walk in the wilderness and we don’t need to build fortresses of conviction out here.

At the core of our Adventist faith is the belief that we are a people in motion, headed for “a better country” and drawn into greater understanding by the guiding Spirit of God. Let’s start moving forward. We have to start listening.

Nothing else is sustainable.