Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyPosts Tagged As: Sojourners
May 12th, 2011
A lovely ad, isn’t it? A very simple message. The only spoken words in it are from the pastor: “Welcome, everyone.”
It’s a message that many mainline churches have offered for quite some time. Including Presbyterians, Reformed Jews, Episcopalians, United Church of Christers (?)… this is hardly radical stuff. Just about every progressive religious organization believes in welcoming gay members and families.
To be clear, not all welcoming churches have gay marriage. Not all welcoming churches allow ordination of openly gay people who are not celibate. But all welcoming churches are, by definition, welcoming.
“Welcome, everyone.” If there is a minimum entry criteria for what constitutes “welcoming of diversity,” then it should at least start with that, don’t you think?
At the very minimum?
No so, with so-called Jim Wallis. His organization, Sojourners — ostensibly the leading “progressive” Christian organization — has rejected this ad. An ad that says nothing more than “welcome, everyone.”
Why? Because Wallis said that Sojourners doesn’t want to take any “sides.” Rev. Robert Chase, whose organization Intersections International sponsored the Believe Out Loud project, reacts:
Taking sides? What are the sides here? That young children who have same-gender parents are not welcome in our churches? That “welcome, everyone” (the only two words spoken in the ad) is a controversial greeting from our pulpits? That the stares the young boy and his moms get while walking down the aisle are justified? I can’t imagine Sojourners turning down an ad that called for welcome of poor children into our churches. So why is this boy different?
I called the folks at Sojourners and asked what the problem was, what the “sides” in question might be. The first response was that Sojourners has not taken a stance on gay marriage (the ad is not about gay marriage); or on ordination of homosexuals (the ad is about welcome, not ordination); that the decision, made by “the folks in executive” (why such a high level decision?) was made quickly because of the Mother’s Day deadline. The rationale kept shifting. The reasoning made no sense.
Sojourners claims that “We believe that unity in diversity is not only desirable, but essential to fulfilling God’s ultimate desire for God’s people.” (emphasis in the original.) What’s more, in Wallis’s book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It 
“”The church is going to have to learn to stay together and talk about these things until we find some resolutions together. Many feel that legal protections can and should be extended to same-sex couples, without necessarily changing our whole definition of marriage. But one could argue that gay civil marriage is necessary under “equal protection.” One could also argue for church blessings of gay unions. I think all those are strong points, even if the churches are unlikely to change their whole theology and sacrament of marriage itself. But this is the good and necessary dialogue. And in the meantime, the church must stand up for gay and lesbian people under attack and must welcome them into the community of faith.” [page 334, emphasis added.]
It seems that Wallis has forgotten the words that he wrote in the very book that established his reputation as “welcoming.” What he said in his book is the same thing portrayed in the ad.
I think it’s time for Wallis to go ahead and surrender the title of “welcoming” to someone who can actually live up to the minimum requirements for entry into the club.
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