I’ve been a longtime reader of Rev. Taylor Walters Denyer and her father Bob Walters, both of whom are United Methodist Missiologists in Africa (meaning missionaries who reflect on missions even as they are participating in missions). They are fascinating people and challenge my conceptions of what missions work ought to look like through their non-profit Friendly Planet Missiology.
Missionaries tend to be neutral in their politics, but that doesn’t mean they can’t push back against misconceptions. Taylor got wind of a workshop at Reconciling Ministries Convo entitled “Will Africa always be Anti-LGBTQ?” The workshop sought to push back against the idea that all of Africa was against LGBT folks, but to Taylor it didn’t go far enough in its treatment of the issue. Taylor posted a response that is a mixture of bullet points and prose on her blog, seeking to offer an “on the ground” perspective.
This is a helpful contribution to the United Methodist conversations about the Worldwide nature of the church and how the United Methodist Church might better live together in its great diversity. Africa is a diverse place and when opposing sides disagree, they run the risk not of being voted out of office, but rather killed. To hear stories of reconciliation and of unity takes on a completely different dimension than US-centric concepts of those terms.
I’d like to post Taylor’s final paragraph as it challenges church thinkers on both sides of the LGBT issue:
Instead of thinking of the African General Conference delegates as pawns in a political game that need to be manipulated, educated or won-over to your team, consider that they have more to offer you than just a vote every four years. Consider what they could teach you about confessing and reconciling strategies when the stakes are life or death. Many of the delegates from North Katanga, for example, know quite a bit about helping people confess their truly heinous sins against humanity and reconcile them back into the community, and they’d be happy if you came to visit them so that they may have a chance to teach you and perhaps even win you over to their movement.
Want to answer the question of “Will Africa always be anti-LGBTQ?” Go there and ask. Or give support to teams from your church that go there and ask. Or better yet, send them to serve and in the serving and supporting, perhaps the answer will be made known.
Thoughts?
(Photo credit: Bob Walters at FPM)
Thanks for linking through to this Jeremy. I was at the workshop with you of course and this should have been the starting point for that workshop’s conversation in my opinion.
As I said after the workshop in lunch with you and others, what absolutely CANNOT happen is for Africa to, once again, become the battleground where the ideological wars of the West play out.
That is a challenge to all invested into these issues and the church as a whole. While we cannot build the global church on the backs of LGBT people, neither can we build ‘reconciling’ or ‘confessing’ on the backs of African people.
Wow, that was a great response. I wish I could have been at the workshop (and at Convo at all). I hope we continue to converse with her and her experience as we go towards GC 2016.
I think the challenge on this issue is that African UMs (and Anglicans) are colonizing America with their super-fundamentalist beliefs: planting churches (Anglicans) or voting on policy that only effects the “American” church (Since the BoD allows for its application to be different due to social/cultural differences outside of the US). It’s not a matter of wooing them over to ‘our’ side” but a matter of life and death of LGBTQ people in Africa and in the US.
Thank you for your lucid and insightful statements. We need to first seek to understand before seeking to be understood. I was a Legislative Coordinator for the Love Your Neighbor Coalition (which included the Reconciling Ministries Network) to the Global Ministries Committee. I surged with pride when an African delegate in that Committee spoke in favor of voting down anti-LGBT legislation because he believed we needed to be in ministry to everyone. He was proclaiming the Gospel in his words and actions. I know better than to paint anyone with a broad brush. You link to Rev. Denyer’s blog has even further convinced me of that.
LGBTQ would you mind telling me what it is?
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer persons.
Thanks for asking!
Taylor that’s not very reconciling, all that name calling, disappointed
It’s not anti-LGBTQ to insist that the church continue to teach traditional Biblical morality. I have many gay friends, and I maintain that the church should not perform gay marriages nor admit my gay friends into holy communion unless they repent.