Affirming All God’s People into Full Membership
By Dr. Ravi K. Perry, 2nd Episcopal District
God commands we love all. God commands we do justice. God commands we genuinely embrace and take care of the least among us. God desires all to experience love with another human being insofar as God is the center of their commitment. Sadly, church policy impacting LGBTQ persons does not reflect Jesus’s life, witness, and message.
The church’s silence on whether or not to openly and fully embrace members of the LGBTQ+ community is not just or loving. Such silence only contributes to the millions of examples of mental health challenges, tragedies, and deaths associated with Black children and adults in the United States. Does the church want to continue to be complicit in the indirect subjugation, isolation, violation, abuse, neglect, and murder going on in the Black LGBTQ community in the name of God?
Marriage is a civil right shared between two human beings. However, the AME Church has chosen to actively oppress members of the Black diaspora LGBTQ community simply for being who they are and how God made them.
For consideration at the General Conference in 2020, I have proposed that the AME Church delete Section XV, Part B of The Doctrine and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church 2016. This text is antithetical to the church’s mission, founding, and its future. By deleting the section, the AME Church would be signaling it permits what said section now bans, thereby permitting local churches and pastors to genuinely welcome LGBTQ parishioners into full membership in God’s house.
Our church, the first Black Christian denomination to permit women to preach, revised its prior Disciplines to allow women into ministry and eventually to be eligible to become bishops. This church, despite 1 Corinthians 14:34, rightly sought to ordain women as preachers, ministers, pastors, presiding elders, and bishops, not only allowing them to speak but to hold leadership posts. This was and is fair and just.
Holy Scriptures do not explicitly support or reject this action concerning gender and church leadership. Likewise, neither does the Holy Scriptures explicitly forbid same-sex attraction, companionship, love, and marriage—particularly, not as it is practiced in monogamous partnerships and is understood as today, entering the third decade of the 21st century.
As the only Black Christian denomination founded because of oppression, our spirituality began as a society of volunteers that provided free social services to the needy. Our spiritual legacy is about inclusion, the act of embracing all people that seek a close relationship with God. The AME Church is not ours. It is God’s church and God welcomes everybody and wants all to experience the fullness of joy.
If the Section XV Part B deletion is adopted, the Church will no longer be complicit in the subjugation, oppression, discrimination, and—in some cases—death, of God’s people. I invite the Church toward redemption, to once again be a beacon of light to the left out and to turn toward healing and love.
