"imagining and constructing a church that incoporates the whole human family"

"Until white people recognize their own ethnicity, they will continue to be trapped in a taken-for-granted world in which they think of their own ways as normative and everyone else as an aberration. They thus will have no perspective from which to tell their own story or name their cultural strengths and needs. This unreflective condition not only drains away the vitality of their congregational life, it also makes them poor partners in imagining and constructing a church that incoporates the whole human family."

Frank, Thomas Edward. "Polity, Practice and the Mission of the United Methodist Church", Abingdon, 2007 p. 96

I was reading this book as I catch up on overdue work for Dr. Crain. Don't worry Dr Crain! I'm making progress on my paper!!! And don't worry Dr. Hogue, I'm getting to your stuff too!!! ;-)

This quote caught my eye. It is a powerful reminder that white people have a heritage too. The world is not made up of us and everybody else. When we forget this it is not only a detriment to those against whom we discriminate, but it is a detriment to our story as well.

I recently had a brief and somewhat heated discussion (on Facebook) with a high school classmate who is now a UMC Elder serving a church downstate. He was displeased with ELCA's recent decision allowing homosexual people in long term relationships to be ordained. He passionately believes that homosexuality is a sin. Ergo those living unrepentantly in a condition of sin should not be ordained. This conversation unnerved me quite a bit (until I was soothed by three amazing women, thanks Elaine, Alex and Mary!) But I've still been thinking about it. Now I've come across the quotation above and I started to wonder, would the above quotation apply if we changed to language from ethnicity to sexuality? With apologies to Professor Frank, it might read something like this:
"Until -straight- people recognize their own -sexuality-, they will continue to be trapped in a taken-for-granted world in which they think of their own ways as normative and everyone else as an aberration."
I'm not sure I'm willing to say that opposition to ordination of LGBTQ people is an "unreflective condition." But I am sure that it "makes them poor partners in imagining and constructing a church that incoporates the whole human family."

Thoughts?

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