WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT INCLUSION IN 70 YEARS AS A PREACHER [Sa. 10-3-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Preacher—WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT INCLUSION IN 70 YEARS AS A PREACHER [Sa. 10-3-26]

 

My 70 years in the ministry were the same 70 years that the church and America became inclusive. My next 70 years will be dealing with the backlash against being inclusive—in church and nation and world.

I’m going to use American Methodism as representative for what happened in the whole nation. How the Methodists went from a church that kept women out of the pulpit by keeping them in the kitchen, how we kept black churches in the back pews of the organization, how we kept gay folks out of everything while claiming that they were “persons of sacred worth,” how we went from a church of exclusion to a church that actually practiced “Open Doors, Open Minds, Open Hearts.” And how we paid an institutional price for that.

I started preaching in 1956. That was the year the Methodist Church agreed that it would be okay for women to be preachers. This year, my Conference is presided over by a woman bishop, and my District Superintendent is a woman, and my congregation has a woman preacher. [It also has a man preacher.] Open Doors.  

When the Methodist Episcopal [ME] Church, and The ME Church South and the Meth Protestant Ch reunited in 1939, we agreed to let black congregations be part of the denomination, but not of the regional conferences. They were segregated organizationally into what was called The Central Jurisdiction [CJ]. White Methodists, from bishops on down, didn’t have to go to meetings with black Methodists. The CJ was a denomination within a denomination. When Brown v Board of Education was passed in 1954, some Methodists said it was time to abolish the CJ. In 1972, the CJ was finally abolished and black congregations became parts of regular annual conferences. Open Minds.

That same year, 1972, a couple of boys in my Wesley Foundation told me they were going to go to a gay bar to find out if they were gay. I advised against it, for a lot of good reasons [safety, including from police who liked to go there to beat up on gays], and for a bad reason. Like almost all the rest of society, I thought homosexuality was a choice. I told them they should not make up their minds too soon about whether they were gay.

Who was I to disagree with The American Medical Assn and the American Psychological Assn? They both claimed that being gay was some sort of mental illness.

A lot of research was done from 1972 to 2024, when we finally realized that being gay is not a choice but simply the way you are born, and there is no reason for gay folk to be kept out of any part of the church. Open Hearts.

A lot of good people are scared of things that are not easy to understand. Gender and race and sex are areas where our views are almost entirely emotional. Every time the Methodist Church became more inclusive, we lost folks who don’t feel comfortable with open doors and minds and hearts. That loss is important, not because the organized denomination is smaller and less powerful now, but because it is always a grief when the Body of Christ is broken for any reason other than sharing the body in communion.

The story of Jesus is a story of inclusion—women, Samaritans, prodigal sons, tax collectors, lepers, sinners… For 70 years, we’ve tried to be better followers of Jesus. We’re a smaller church, but we’re a better church.

John Robert McFarland