I sure hope Glenn Beck never decides to start a controversy about any church I attend. I don't think he is careful with facts. I think he likes to stoke outrage. I think people who know little about these churches get caught up spreading rumors about them.Ken wrote:Here's a news article by the Slate Religion reporter who interviewed the pastors involved.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/0 ... mbers.html
If they had simply closed their doors, would there be any controversy? That has happened to so many aging United Methodist churches. If you want to report on something like this, you really need to carefully interview everyone involved, and if you do that, there's a lot less controversy. Really, we need to reel in the outrage and rumor mongering about this stuff.
Making a local congregation into national news is not going to help them. We don't help these churches or their senior citizens by using them in the predefined outrage narratives surrounding gay marriage. And we don't help conservative Methodist churches by doing that either. We just add more fire to the daily outrage about things we know little about, spreading more rumors and gossip.
I just took at look at the Facebook pages and website for these churches. This does not seem to be motivated by disagreements about gay marriage. These two congregations are both liberal, and the older people who are still there are there because of or despite that. Both campuses are on the progressive side of gay marriage, and have been since at least early 2018, according to their web page. And there just doesn't seem to be a whole lot of outrage on their Facebook pages:
Here is a snapshot from February 3, 2018, the earliest snapshot in archive.org:
Come as you are—you’ll be welcomed.
We strive to reflect God’s love to all.
Be who you are—you’ll be celebrated.
We honor the sacred worth and dignity of persons
of every age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity,
physical and mental capacity, education, economic, and marital status.
Explore where you are—we’ll walk alongside you.
We recognize that faith is a journey of trust and transformation,
where beliefs are formed and reformed in community.