TITLE: Call to Church for Justice, Rights
011 {2875} April 18, 1996
General Conference
DENVER (UMNS) -- A special service of witness and prayer called United Methodists to look backward and move forward in the areas of justice and human rights here today.
In a service of more than 90 minutes, the Rev. F. Belton Joyner of Raleigh, N.C., observed the service grew out of a controversy that followed the passage in Colorado of Amendment 2.
He said some United Methodists saw the amendment as an effort to deny basic human rights to homosexuals and other United Methodists saw it as an extension of the church's policy that homosexual practice is "incompatible with Christian teaching." The idea of special service was put forth at a time when some members of the denomination wanted to move the planned General Conference out of the state.
The amendment is in the court system, and United Methodists were urged by Belton to "enjoy the God who comes into history and won't let go."
Many other voices carried the messages, including a meditation, five witnesses, Scripture, prayer and music.
In the meditation, the Rev. William J. Abraham, an Irish Methodist and professor of Wesley studies at United Methodist- related Perkins Theological Seminary, noted that Methodism's history on social justice and civil rights is a mixed one.
"We have wobbled and wavered," he said. "No doubt we will wobble and waver again."
Abraham, whose first church was located across the street from a terrorist hangout, said he learned there "how important it is to make uncompromising disciples."
Church members will not have a deep impact on the world if they restrict their faith to the private sphere nor will they change the world by proclamations and demonstrations, he said. Instead, disciples should be taught the faith, so that in obedience to God in Jesus Christ, they will gladly "be spent in the service of justice and peace in the world."
Andrei Kim, a witness from Moscow, Russia, told of the danger to denominations other than the Russian Orthodox from that church and from some politicians who would take advantage of the present uncertainties there.
A second witness, Dorothy Yeoman of Elgin, Ill., spoke of her commitment as a United Methodist woman to a prison ministry with women and to the elimination of capital punishment.
Randy Miller of San Francisco, the third witness, said that he had faced discrimination as an African-American and as a gay man, but that he is a child of God. Too often, he commented, the church has been silent when it should have spoken for justice. "Now is the moment to heal our church," he urged, by casting down walls and being one.
The Rev. Minerva Carcano, Albuquerque, N.M., the fourth witness, said of the church, "Our racism, our sexism and our homophobia are symptoms to our acquiescence to a darkness within." She challenged United Methodists to be "true defenders of human and civil rights."
Francisco de Castro Maria, the fifth witness, a student from Angola, spoke of the 400 years of oppression his country experienced at the hands of a colonial power and its present "lack of development caused by external forces." He asked the conference to pray for Angola, a country with one of the greatest refugee problems in world.
Retired Bishop Rueben Job led the gathering in prayers. Others who participated in the service included the Rev. William Quick, vice chair of the Commission on the General Conference; Mary Silva, a delegate from San Antonio, Texas; and the Rev. S. T. Kimbrough and Cynthia Wilson-Felder, co-directors of music for the General Conference.
Almost 1,000 delegates from around the world have gathered April 16-26 in Denver for the General Conference, a legislative assembly held every four years by the denomination.
-- Joretta Purdue
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