A response from Steve Henton

A response from Steve Henton

Steve, the pastor who married Laureen and I, was kind enough to respond to my comments on the Disciples Heritage post. He posted his thoughts in a comment, and I wanted to bring them forth and hopefully respond. I have nothing but respect for Steve, so please consider this a dialog more than a debate or fight.
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I have been a part of Disciple Heritage Fellowship for about 15 years. My experience has been that these churches, pastors, and individuals do not have a preoccupation with gays, although they do believe it to be a questionable practice biblically as well as socially. Disagreeing with the homosexual lifestyle is not necessarily judging. As a Christian I’m to let the Bible judge, and if the Bible declares homosexuals to be in a destructive lifestyle, then I must concur. Nevertheless, in the meantime, I will love and pray for them, and have a good relationship with gay friends…some I know are gay, and some I might not know. I treat everyone the same, since God loves us all the same.
As far as the “inerrancy” issue goes…the problem is, is the meaning of the word. It means different things to different people…mostly that it’s a fundamentalist issue, arguing over this sentence or that sentence, and making the King James Bible the one that God wrote.
The way I like to put it, is like this. The Bible is reliable and trustworthy. It was written by truth tellers, not liars and myth makers. For instance, if the disciples say they saw Jesus alive, then I believe them. It couldn’t have been a made up story or they wouldn’t have endured torture and death because they wouldn’t stop preaching it. At some point every person needs to decide, do I believe it or don’t I. If I believe some of it and some of it not, then how do I defend the parts I do and don’t? I mean, which is which? If some of it is true, but the rest is lies, I’m not sure if I believe any of it. I don’t like the conservative/liberal label. When it comes to the Bible, you’re either a believer or not.
Well…
That’s just a few thoughts. Perhaps we can talk in person sometime about all this. I am able to disagree and still like the person I disagree with. I hope you are the same way. Love,
Steve

My thoughts/responses:
1. My comment on the preoccupation with gay/lesbian focus came after reading the disciples heritage website and the material in book form that my mom gave to me about them. Some background is necessary to understand disciples heritage and their place in the whole Stone-Campbell history:

The Disciples of Christ are a very interesting group of Christians. We have local churches, areas, regions, and head offices. However, every single issue that gets debated at a general assembly is ONLY in an advisory capacity. DoC churches retain a large amount of local control, so you’ll have some DoC churches who openly support homosexual people as ministers, etc., and others that won’t. The large majority, like Jesus himself, are silent on the matter. Now, for whatever reason (and it holds across all protestant religions) when you have people attending the general assemblies, they’re usually the ones to take the time and effort to make the trip themselves, and as a result they tend to be “liberal” on social activist issues. Representative of the whole body? Maybe, maybe not. However, they’re the ones that showed up and voted at the assemblies.

In response to this, Disciples Heritage was started as a voice for the more conservative churches, pastors, etc. of the DoC. When it came time for them to have booth space at the general assembly, they inevitably wound up stuck by groups with opposite opinions of theirs (such as GLAAD, or pro-choice positions, etc.) In that aspect, we can point to the DoC leadership making some bad choices, whether intentional or not. Thus, we have conservative groups feeling that their place at the table has been co-opted in a denomination that prides itself on serving “all who come to the table.” And when they can’t get their concerns on issues heard, or they’re overwhelmed by the activist majority at the assemblies, splits occur.

It’s my opinion that lately the leadership of Disciples Heritage has taken more conservative stances on issues. Whether that extends to individual churches or not, I don’t know. Perhaps they follow the DoC system of letting individual churches make their own rules. 🙂

So, there’s the nutshell background. As an example of a typical confusing area assembly, there were three resolutions proposed recently:

1. To allow openly homosexual people to be ordained.
2. To not allow openly homosexual people to be ordained.
3. To not let “1 single issue” be the reason why a person isn’t ordained.

1 failed. 2 and 3 passed, even thought they contradict each other. Such is the joy of a decentralized, advisory denomination.

Giong back to Steve’s comments, he mentions belief in the Bible in terms of inerrancy. There are several issues that I have with this, although I admire it as a simple test. The problem is that the Bible, although inspired by God, was written, edited, translated, paraphrased, etc. by men, each of them with different ideas about God, Jesus, and the world. We have two creation stories in Genesis. Which one am I to believe? We have the issue of when Jesus becomes divine being split among the four gospels: baptism, birth, or His being eternally divine. What am I to believe? Will God smite my enemies who aren’t Christians like He did for the Israelites? What words am I to believe? What about the aprocryphal books?

And on the subject of biblical authority regarding homosexuality (and other issues), this link goes into better detail about the issue than I can.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I’ve rambled a bit.