In 1992 the Uniting Church in Australia's national Assembly appointed a task group to prepare a report on the way the Church should respond to changing patterns of human relationships and sexual activity in our society.Rev Alistair Macrae, as chairperson of the sexuality task force has received many phone calls. "Some just to say that this was the best news they'd ever heard from the church", he said. It could also mean restoration for some, such as a man who had been training to be a Salvation Army officer when he discovered he was gay. That had meant "no home any more". Six years later, the UC report made him think he really could find "a spiritual home in the church. How many thousands of others like him are there?" Another call was from a young Pentecostal Church member: "I'm gay. Every time I have a sexual thought, I have to screw down the lid," he said. Mr Macrae thought the young man sounded miserable. "The wide open spaces of God's love, as my dad used to say - there was none of that for him." |
Right relationshipsMacrae thinks the key to understanding the report on sexuality is to break away from prescriptive rules and seeing people in categories and to focus instead on right relationships. "Right relationships leave us much more able to respect the range of human experience as well as the will of God," he says. "Is our church a community where we are all accepted and called to shape our lives according to the gospel?" Rev Gregor Henderson, General Secretary of the Uniting Church national Assembly, said that, a presbytery could choose to ordain a gay person here and now. "The church has never said no. We have no policy in place that bans any category of person from applying to be a candidate for ministry." "In terms of ordination, the presbyteries already have the power to make their decisions as they wish. They treat every person who applies on their merits." "They assess everyone who applies to become a candidate for the ordained ministry on a case-by-case basis." "The Uniting Church understanding of the Bible is clearly declared in the Basis of Union. "I believe that the task group has been very faithful in approaching the Scriptures with the best of modern scholarship and in accord with our understanding that the Word of God, to whom we seek to be obedient, is the living Lord, Jesus Christ. "That's our understanding in the Basis of Union about the Scriptures.
|