I'm not a member if a United Methodist Church, but my family does have multiple ties to the UMC denomination. UMCs vary widely from place to place. For example, my wife grew up in a UMC in California, and she doesn't recall ever hearing presentation or explanation of the core Gospel until she was attending a university and went to a Christian event with a classmate. She was a bit embarrassed that she'd grown up in a church and yet has missed the central point of Christianity: a proper relationship with Jesus Christ.
The LGBTQQAICDEFGHJKMNOPRSUVWXYZ activists within the denomination are trying to move the organization away from applying what has traditionally been understood as the Biblical teachings of there being men and women, marriage uniting a man and a woman, and reserving sex for marriage.
Remember when the activists said that marriage neutering wouldn't have any effect on churches?
There was a conference in February that address this. If you want the bottom line, skip down to my comments at the end.
Here's what Katherine Jackson reported for Reuters, as I found at Yahoo News (which really got crappy after the most recent corporate acquisition).
The United Methodist Church voted on Tuesday to uphold and strengthen its ban on same-sex marriage and LGBT clergy in a move likely to alienate large numbers of followers who had pushed for reform.
Ban. Ban is loaded language. We're not talking about secular law here. This is a supposedly Christian organization. There's no more a van on "same-sex marriage" than a ban on squared circles or kosher shrimp.
Also, as we'll see, there is no ban on LGBT clergy.
