At the recent “All Means All” convocation in eastern Carolina where we were instructed how to make our personal stories more effective in promoting the issue of inclusion within the Methodist Church, one of the participants apologized that her story was one of exclusion because of gender rather than a specific GLBT issue. What she apparently did not understand that the Reconciling Movement is not about promoting acceptance of homosexuality. It is about making the church more inclusive of all minorities or of people who have been discriminated against historically by the church hierarchy.

We are proposing that the North Carolina Conference affirm the resolution passed at the 2008 General Conference that changes the wording of the Methodist Church’s Constitution to eliminate the delineation of categories of people who cannot be excluded from church membership. Although it originally was proposed by people who felt excluded from the church on the basis of their gender, which is not currently listed in the various categories, it has come to be understood to include GLBTQ persons.

The rationale has been that only if homosexuals would repent of their “sin” they could be accepted into the church needs to be stood on its head. For it is the church hierarchy that needs to repent of its hypocrisy of accepting known homosexuals into the clergy as long has they lied about their true selves. They need to repent for all of the damage they have done to innocent lives and for turning people away from the church into eternal damnation because of their assuming the role of judge and jury. How can they live with the guilt of knowing that they have directly caused people to turn away from the church because the church first rejected them? Did not Jesus enjoin us to go into all the world preaching the good news that salvation was open to all? Even if we forget all the damage that has been done to millions of people because of the church’s discrimination against minorities of every kind throughout history, we cannot also overlook the loss to the church of the talents and abilities of these people and what they could have contributed to the mission of the church if they had but been given the opportunity to participate with full inclusion and acceptance.

The proposal to strip the detailed listing of categories with the implication that “all means all” simplifies the wording so that we don’t have to also include “gender, gender identify, sexual orientation, physical ability, citizenship,” and a dozen other categories that have been used as the basis of excluding persons from full participation in church membership. We’re either inclusive, or exclusive --- there can be no halfway road to evangelism. God will be the judge, not us.