Stay Up And Fight

I am reading such grief from my Methodist friends, and from others who know the pain of rejection from church because of their identity. As a person who has spent her adult life in a denomination that rejected her for being female in 1984, I would hold up my favorite quote from the great theologian, Phyllis Diller: "Never go to bed angry; stay up and fight." I would alter it in this way: "Never leave your denomination; stay in and piss everyone off." Tell everyone that they can have your church when they pry it from your cold, dead hands. Play the long game. Wait them out.

I was born a Baptist. In 1984, when I was representing Baptists as a summer missionary, traveling to churches all over Virginia with five of the most wonderful young people on the planet (four other young women and one brave young man), The Southern Baptist Convention put out a policy that said women could not be ministers because of Eve. I remember the day we got that news. I can picture us together, reading those words with incredulity. I have a vivid recollection from a couple of years later, when I had served a church all summer, caring for its youth. The young man who had also served the church was given a large check and elevated in front of the congregation. I was given a plaque. A few weeks later, the minister of that church told the congregation, from the pulpit, that he thought it would be ok for a woman to be a minister, but only if you could not find a man. So, in a world where all the men died, or were somehow hidden away and could not be found, a woman could be a minister. I left that church, although the truth of that is that they left me.

I see the grief of my Methodist friends, but I am realizing that I am so used to feeling betrayed by my denomination that I don't think I feel it that strongly any more. For most of us who are Christians in America, coming to terms with the ways our institutions of faith have bent to culture and have based their deepest convictions on fear of change, fear of not fitting in, is a painful business. We didn't know this about ourselves, that we were running on a diet of conformity and intimidation, but it is good news for us that we are seeing it at last. It is good news that we know what the actual problem is: that posing, as we have been, as bastions of cultural rightness is our weakness. That instead of being a beacon of light to those in need, we have been a blinding searchlight of exclusion and judgment. It is good news to figure that out, because then we have a shot at changing it.

I tell people all the time that the way you know whether or not you are really Baptist is if you've been thrown out. Historically, that is our identity: we're thrown out of countries, colonies, organizations, buildings--you name it. Generally, we were running, two steps ahead of the law, because we could not shut up and behave the way we were supposed to. Really, this is Christian identity--to be a Jesus follower is to get thrown out of places, all the time. Whether we are Methodist or Catholic or Presbyterian or Church of God or whatever else we come up with to mean "Jesus follower," we should pay attention to the fact that Jesus got in trouble everywhere he went. As did Peter. As did Paul. To be a Jesus follower is to get in trouble. To piss everyone off because what you care about are the priorities of God (namely, care of others, love of God) and not the priorities of anyone or anything else. To be a Jesus follower is to make enemies of those who would exclude people by going to lunch with the people they would exclude; to be a Jesus follower is to then also go to lunch with those same enemies.

And so I encourage my Methodist friends to stay up and fight. Don't leave your church; stay right where you are and never stop talking about inclusion. Never let them gloss over their exclusion, or pretend like it doesn't hurt people. Stay where you are and keep advocating, keep talking. Be brave, and remember that many of our biblical stories are about battles. Why, then, would we expect that we will not be called on to fight? Be obnoxious and vocal and ornery and pointy--be salty and fractious and disagreeable until you get your way. Because we are right about this one. Inclusion is always the right answer. And we know that fighting for inclusion always comes at a cost. We are ready to pay it. Because we wear the symbol of a lynched man around our necks. And we are not children--we do not place that symbol around our necks without knowing that our faith has a cost. We have weighed the cost against the enormous rewards and have chosen to pay whatever we have to pay in order to receive the blessings of community, the blessings of grace, the blessings of mercy, the blessings of love.