The front-page of Wednesday’s local section in The Washington Post featured a large photo and glowing article touting a United Methodist Church pastor’s nationwide protest by camping out in front of churches ahead of the UMC global conference that will feature a vote to support gay marriages.
Topping out well over 1,200 words, reporter Julie Zauzmer’s sympathetic piece set the scene ahead of the conference next month that could change the church’s stance on gay marriage but be stymied in the end by the UMC’s African delegation’s more conservative beliefs.
“Around the time the Rev. Michael Tupper found himself chasing his windblown tent across half a mile of Iowa grain fields, he might have started questioning his mission from God. God called him, he believes, to sleep in a tent for 175 days to protest the fact that his church does not allow him to perform gay marriages,” Zauzmer began.
Lamenting that the weather outside his tent has been freezing cold throughout his 175 days, Zauzmer explained how the benefit of Tupper’s tent protester could come to fruition:
Next month, the United States’ second-largest Protestant denomination will consider legislation at its General Conference that would allow all clergy members to perform same-sex weddings if they choose and would allow openly gay men and women to serve as clergy members themselves. That legislation would reverse the long-held positions that have led the church to discipline and even defrock ministers in the past for performing gay weddings and for coming out as gay.
Instead of quoting those in the UMC church that are against a change in church policy, Zauzmer touted how Tupper’s daughter is a married lesbian thanks to him officiating her homosexual marriage ceremony (which led to him needing to reach “a sort of court-of-court settlement” with the UMC to ward off being defrocked).
After seeing situations like his arise with pro-gay marriage pastors getting into hot water with the UMC’s judicial system, Tupper came up with his idea of sleeping in a tent outside conference offices to protest gay Christians being left “out in the cold.”
Zauzmer spent the latter portions of the gushing profile fretting about possible obstacles such as a split in the UMC with churches leaving the denomination and any change in church policy being blocked by conservatives from Africa:
Tupper hopes the General Conference will make space in the United Methodist Church. The conference votes on hundreds of proposals sent in by members worldwide. This year, many of them relate to homosexuality.
Some want to open the church to allowing gay marriages and gay ministers. Others want to enforce the current prohibitions even more strictly, such as automatically defrocking any minister who performs two gay marriages.
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Ministers say that representatives of the United Methodists in Africa, who will make up 30 percent of the voters at the global conference, are most likely to block the proposal.
Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Kansas pastor, has been leading the push for that compromise position, but fears it will not pass. More than half the American delegates will vote for it, he expects, but most likely not enough to get it through.
“When you add the African delegations, you end up with gridlock. It will be interesting to see where there will be enough votes to allow the compromise to go forward or not,” Hamilton said. “It will be close, I think. I don’t have a clear prediction.”
