PASTOR'S SUSPENSION SETS PRECEDENT FOR METHODISTS

PASTOR'S SUSPENSION SETS PRECEDENT FOR METHODISTS

By Steve Kloehn, Tribune Religion Writer.
Published: Sunday, March 28, 1999
Section: METRO CHICAGO

A shudder ran through the United Methodist Church on Saturday as members of the nation's second-largest Protestant denomination awoke to the news that a Chicago pastor had been removed from his job for blessing a homosexual union.

Shortly before midnight Friday, a jury of Chicago-area pastors suspended Rev. Gregory Dell from all ministerial duties, effective July 5. The suspension will be lifted only if Dell promises not to perform same-sex blessings in the future or if the church law banning such services is repealed.

Since Dell adamantly refuses to sign such a pledge, and since the majority opinion of the church continues to favor the law, the sentence essentially defrocks the popular pastor of Broadway United Methodist Church in Lakeview.

The severity of that penalty--a surprise coming out of the moderate-to-liberal Northern Illinois Conference of the church--has some Methodists wondering whether a new era of rigorous doctrinal enforcement has arrived.

"I have an idea that God isn't smiling tonight," Chicago Bishop C. Joseph Sprague said Friday, citing the time, energy and nearly $100,000 expended on Dell's grueling two-day church trial in Downers Grove.

The case creates a particularly important precedent for 69 Methodist ministers in northern California who were charged last week for jointly conducting a lesbian union service.

"If you remove me, you or others like you will have to remove others like me," Dell warned the jury in a final plea for leniency Friday evening. "Don't start the dynamic of denominational cleansing tonight."

For decades, the United Methodist Church has officially frowned on any church blessing of homosexual behavior, either through ordination of active gays and lesbians, or through marriagelike ceremonies for couples. And for decades, both practices have quietly taken place within the church.

But in 1996, the denomination's governing General Conference voted 2-1 to prohibit homosexual union services explicitly. In August 1998, after Nebraska Rev. Jimmy Creech won acquittal by arguing that prohibition was merely advisory, the highest Methodist judicial body ruled that the provision was binding church law.

Dell's is the first case under that new ruling.

He admitted performing the Sept. 19 union ceremony, and the jury voted 10-3 that in doing so Dell had violated church law.

Rev. Stephen Williams of Franklin Park, who presented the church's case against Dell, said the jury of nine men and four women showed courage and "the wisdom of Solomon" in devising Dell's penalty, which could have run from censure to expulsion from the church.

By making Dell's ministry contingent on his willingness to obey church law, Williams said, the penalty made it clear that the case was about pastoral accountability, not about homosexuality or Dell's record.

Rev. Philip Granger of Kokomo, Ind., chairman of the conservative Good News movement within the Methodist Church, said the result would strengthen the church by clarifying and emphasizing the duty that ministers have to the denomination and to one another.

"I believe that a decision the other way would have risked saying that there is little within the denomination that binds us together," Granger said.

But Sprague, who filed the original complaint against Dell last fall, even as he publicly praised Dell's abilities and disagreed with the prohibition of homosexual unions, found little to applaud in the outcome.

"Clearly there are no winners in a situation like this," Sprague said Friday night. "This is the stalking-horse issue in the church today. It haunts us."

When asked if he would file future complaints against pastors in the conference when presented with reports of homosexual unions, Sprague said he did not know.

He said he had a hard time justifying spending money on such trials that could otherwise be spent feeding the poor or providing ministry to needy people.

"I will have to stand before God someday and answer those questions if I sign another complaint," Sprague said. "The greater tragedy is what our divisions are doing to the world, which is crying out for the gospel."

And there were plenty of tears Friday night, as more than 100 of Dell's supporters gathered in the parking lot of First Methodist Church in Downers Grove for a chilly, midnight prayer service.

Though he said he has no plans to perform any homosexual union ceremonies during his three-month grace period, Dell told the crowd that he would continue preaching right up until his suspension begins. He said the title for his Palm Sunday sermon is "We've Only Just Begun."

He added that he would remain in the church during the suspension, working to overturn at the General Conference in 2000 the prohibition against homosexual unions.

Many believe that Dell's suspension could drive other individuals and congregations away from the United Methodist Church.

Rev. Neal Fisher, president of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, a Methodist institution, said the impulse to clarify and enforce doctrine stretches across denominations. It is part of a broader need for Christians in the 1990s to identify what separates them from secular society and one another, he said.

But he lamented the Dell trial as pitting righteousness and justice against compassion and mercy.

"Both are integral to what we believe about life and God," Fisher said. "Each side has an important perspective that we can't afford to do without."

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