Transgender pastor may erode Methodist rules of stone.

August 8, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Among the various Christian denominations, the United Methodist Church is pretty intransigent about sexual morals.  They don’t want homosexual relationships in their clergy ranks or same-sex blessings occuring in their sanctuaries. They have chewed up and spit out pastors for presiding over same-sex commitment ceremonies no matter how carefully crafted not to resemble holy wedlock.

But, according to a UMNS Report August 7, Methodist Bishop John Schol of Baltimore-Washington has reappointed a pastor to his church position which he has already held for five years as a female. The pastor has undergone surgery and hormone therapy during the last year. (Methodist ministers are appointed to serve at the discretion of their bishops, not called to serve by their congregations.)

Schol has been asked to make a bishop’s “decision of law” about the appointment of transgender clergy, and such a decision of law must automatically be reviewed by the UMC’s highest judicial authority.   The Judicial Council meets in October and will review the implications of a pastoral sex change.

One cannot help wondering if matters such as these (which are presently not even mentioned in the UMC’s almighty “Book of Discipline”) will sooner or later crack the rules of stone. Will the Judicial Council recommend that the regulations be amended to cover matters of transgenderism?

If the newly-male pastor of a congregation later chooses to marry a female, for example, is this transgender pastor to be regarded as a heterosexual, or removed for being in a lesbian relationship? How long, how thoroughly, how rigidly do Christian denominations believe that they must legislate and control the overwhelming diversity of human sexual understanding and expression? How irrelevant to the lives of real people are they willing to become in order to maintain a complex, consistent, rule-oriented organization, a well-oiled religious machine?

Or is it time to ask, “Who would Jesus regulate?”

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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