The Disciples of Christ Resolution No One Opposed

The Receipts and the Redline That Was Never Drawn

A plumb line needs a wall. Hang it beside a house with no walls and it still hangs true — it simply has nothing to touch. That is not the line’s failure. It is the builder’s, and it is the harder verdict, because a leaning wall can be shored up. A house that was never framed has nothing to shore.

This is the sixth denomination examined in Measured and Found Wanting, the Virginia Christian Alliance series that lays God’s Word against the published record of the mainline churches. We have walked the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the United Church of Christ. We come now to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and the Disciples of Christ resolution at the center of this study is unlike any vote we have yet examined — because when it came to the floor, no one rose against it.

Three things govern what follows:

In 2013 the General Assembly adopted a resolution affirming that sexual orientation and gender identity are no grounds for exclusion from fellowship or service. No tally was recorded. No competing resolution was filed.
Twenty-six years earlier, one congregation had asked the church to say what the Bible says. The Assembly declined to adopt it, and allotted twelve minutes to the question.
Between those two dates the denomination adopted a method: that the question could not be settled by debate and vote at all, but by listening to one another to discern the Spirit.

First, the Concession — and We Make It in Their Words

A reader could dismiss this entire article in one sentence, so we will make that sentence ourselves before he does.

The Disciples of Christ resolution adopted in 2013 binds nobody. It is what the denomination calls a Sense-of-the-Assembly resolution. Following its adoption, the denomination’s own communication stated that the General Assembly speaks only for the people gathered for the event, that it speaks to congregations, regions, and general ministries rather than for them, that the resolution does not constitute a stance on an issue for the entire denomination, and that it is not a policy change.

Every word of that is true. No ordination standard was amended. No liturgy was authorized. No congregation was compelled to do anything at all. A Disciples congregation that rejected the resolution on the day it passed stood in exactly the same relation to its denomination the following morning.

So what is there to measure?

Why the Concession Becomes the Charge

This movement was born insisting on precisely that freedom. Its watchword was no creed but Christ — no human document standing between a believer and Scripture, no confession binding a congregation’s conscience. It was a noble instinct, and it was aimed at a real abuse.

But a principle meant to keep Scripture supreme can end by leaving nothing fixed enough to appeal to. In the Episcopal Church a canon had to be struck. In the Presbyterian Church a constitutional standard had to be amended and ratified by presbyteries. In the ELCA a two-thirds threshold had to be removed before the vote could carry. Each of those bodies had a wall, and the record of the falling is the record of the wall coming down.

The Disciples had no wall. There was nothing to strike, nothing to amend, nothing to ratify. And here is the part that should trouble a reader most: because no rule was broken, no alarm sounded. The Episcopal Church tore something. The Disciples did not have to.

That is not a lighter charge. A house that cannot be measured cannot be corrected.

The Road Began in 1977

Nothing about the 2013 Disciples of Christ resolution was sudden. The denomination’s own Historical Society dates the beginning to 1977, and describes the four decades that followed as significant progress. We take them at their word about the sequence; we differ only about whether it was progress.

In 1977 four resolutions on homosexuality came before the General Assembly. One of them, a study document, concluded that God’s grace does not exclude persons of differing lifestyles or sexual preferences, and that homosexuals may be included in the fellowship and membership of the community of faith, where their gifts of ministry are to be welcomed.

Then this, recorded by the Society itself: the committee acknowledged that the issue would require time, education, and meditation before broad acceptance and adaptation could be reached within the church.

Read that again. In 1977 a committee wrote down that the church was not yet ready to accept its conclusion — and treated the church’s unreadiness as a scheduling problem. Not as evidence that the conclusion might be wrong. As a delay.

Two years later a task force reported that it was not convinced ordaining persons engaged in homosexual practices aligned with God’s will, and left ordination standards to the regions. That was the high-water mark of resistance, and it was already a retreat: the question was not answered but distributed.

1987: They Were Asked Once, Plainly

In October 1987 the General Assembly met in Louisville. Before it came a resolution submitted by the General Board of a single congregation — First Christian Church of Lake Worth, Florida.

It said that Scripture is the guide to Christian life-style, and quoted Paul that we are not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation. It said the church seeks to follow the teachings of the Bible and to call sin what the Bible calls sin. It cited Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26–27, and 1 Corinthians 6:9–10.

It asked the Assembly to state two things: that homosexuality is one of the sins listed in the Bible, and that it is an unacceptable life-style for Christians.

And then it asked a third thing, which is almost never mentioned when this resolution is described. It asked that all sinners be treated in the manner and spirit in which Jesus counseled the woman caught in adultery — quoting John 8:11 directly: Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.

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Both halves of Christ’s sentence. No condemnation, and no permission. That is the balance this entire series has argued for, and it was sitting in the document the Assembly was asked to adopt.

The General Board recommended that the Assembly not adopt it. Debate time allotted: twelve minutes. It was not adopted.

The Part We Will Not Hide

Honesty costs something here, and we will pay it.

The archived document prints the arguments made for and against the resolution during the General Board’s consideration that July. Two of the five arguments listed in favor are indefensible. One asserted that a cure for homosexuality exists and has simply not been found. The other said that if such a cure had been found, society would not now be dealing with AIDS.

That is not a biblical argument. It is cruelty wearing Scripture’s clothing, and it stands in the denomination’s own record under the heading of arguments for the resolution. Any reader can open the same file we have linked and find it in ninety seconds.

So we say it plainly: the resolution’s text was sound, and the case made for it on that floor was in part disgraceful. A true thing was argued badly by some who supported it, and that gave the Assembly an easy reason to refuse a thing that was true.

The objections raised against it deserve an answer too, not a sneer. The strongest was this: why select one sin from Scripture, when there is no resolution on greed? It is a fair question, and it has an answer. No one in 1987 was proposing that the church bless greed. A church addresses the sin its own moment is pressing it to approve.

Another objection said that homosexuals are persons God created, loves, and redeems, and are to be included in the fellowship to love and be loved. We affirm every word of it. So, in its third resolve, did the resolution.

Discernment Replaces Decision

After 1987 the shape of the thing changed. The road to the Disciples of Christ resolution of 2013 runs through this stretch, and along it the question was no longer answered. It was processed.

In 1991 the Assembly called for deliberate and intensive research rather than a simple yes-or-no vote. In 1997, meeting in Denver, it committed the church to a process of discernment — reflection, research, and prayer in the next biennium and beyond. In 1998 a Discernment Committee was appointed. It met for years, in five cities, and reported to the General Assembly at Kansas City in 2001.

That report is the hinge of this arc, and it states the method in its own words:

The committee is convinced that the issue cannot be resolved by debates and votes. It believes that God is calling the church to a different way of facing issues, and that is listening to each other as a way of discerning what the Holy Spirit is doing in our midst.

Weigh what that sentence does. It does not answer the question. It relocates the authority that would answer it — out of the text, and into the room. The Spirit is no longer heard chiefly in what God has said, but in what the gathered are saying to one another.

And notice what the formula forecloses. A question that cannot be resolved by debate and vote cannot be resolved against the new position either. The door swings one way.

A Process That Assumes No Outcome

The committee designed a seven-stage process of worship, Bible study, shared stories, and the Lord’s Supper. The report says the process assumes no specific outcome, but provides a means for listening to the Holy Spirit at work in the Christian community.

Set that beside the next thing the report announces: a workshop at the Assembly on the use of the process, with emphasis on how to deal with difficult passages of scripture.

A process that assumes no outcome, arriving with instruction on managing the passages that resist it. We will let the reader weigh that himself.

The report also discloses its own composition, and we print it because they did. Fourteen members. Seven men and seven women. Two lesbians and one gay man. And three members who identified themselves as conservative on the issue, seeing homosexuality as a sin in violation of Scripture. Three of fourteen, charged with building the process by which an entire denomination would decide.

One more disclosure belongs here, and it complicates the picture in a way that honesty requires. The committee records that it attempted to meet with representatives of the denomination’s African-American and Hispanic churches in the Northeast Region and was unsuccessful; that it was likewise unsuccessful at the National Convocation and at a Black Ministers’ Retreat; and that the Hispanic Assembly, which two members did meet, had taken a strong stand against homosexuality.

A process built on listening records that several constituencies would not be listened to, and that one of them had already decided. We do not know their reasons and will not guess at them.

What Scripture Says About a Church That Listens to Itself

The method adopted in 2001 is not new, and Scripture named it long before any committee met.

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. — 2 Timothy 4:3–4, ESV

Paul’s warning is not about a church that stops listening. It is about a church that listens to the wrong voice. Notice the mechanism he describes: the drift is not announced, and it is not forced. The people gather teachers who suit them. The turning away from truth and the wandering into myth happen in the same motion as the listening.

Scripture is not opposed to discernment. It commands it. But biblical discernment always has an external standard: to the teaching and to the testimony, Isaiah says, and if they do not speak according to this word, there is no dawn in them. The Bereans were commended not for listening to one another but for searching the Scriptures daily to see whether the things Paul told them were so.

A discernment with no fixed text to check against is not discernment. It is consensus, and consensus follows whoever is most patient.

The Disciples of Christ Resolution No One Opposed

The Disciples of Christ resolution reached the floor in Orlando in July 2013. The General Assembly adopted GA-1327, calling the church to affirm the faith, baptism, and spiritual gifts of all Christians regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, and declaring that neither is grounds for exclusion from fellowship or service.

The Assembly archive records it as adopted. No vote count appears. Press accounts describe it as passing overwhelmingly, and we cite that as reporting, not as record.

The complete business docket for that Assembly lists twenty-one items. Wage theft. Drone warfare. Torture. Incarceration. Parental leave. A change of regional boundaries in South Idaho.

Nothing defending marriage. Nothing on the authority of Scripture. Nothing asking the Assembly to wait, to study further, or to reconsider. Not submitted and defeated — never submitted at all.

In every other denomination in this series, somebody stood up. A bishop’s amendment lost 432 to 566. A resolution titled Marriage is Between One Man and One Woman was brought and killed. Here, no one.

Why the Chair Was Empty

The reason is in the record, and it is the saddest sentence in this study.

It had already been tried. In 1987 one congregation asked, and was refused in twelve minutes. Between that refusal and 2013 the denomination lost the greater part of its membership — a collapse we will document in the second half of this study. The congregations that would have filed such a resolution had, in large numbers, already gone.

By the time the vote came, there was no one left to draw the line.

That is what makes this denomination’s story different from the five before it. Elsewhere we have watched a wall come down. Here we watch a room slowly empty until the question could be settled by the people who remained.

And Still the Line Hangs Straight

We have brought no charge against the Disciples of Christ resolution that the denomination has not published over its own name. The trajectory is recorded by its own Historical Society. The refused resolution sits on its own server. The method is stated in its own committee’s report. The docket is its own.

We take no pleasure in it. There are believers in those congregations who love the Lord Jesus Christ, who were never asked and never consented, and who have watched their churches thin out around them. Our grief is for them, and our warning is for the house, not for the sheep inside it.

The second installment hangs the plumb line against what was built here — the verdict of Scripture, and the cost, which in this denomination is steeper than in any of the five before it.

And we say now what we say at the close of every one of these studies, because it is the only thing that has ever changed a soul. No docket has converted anyone. No argument, however sound, has raised the dead. The Holy Spirit alone draws a man to God — and He does it through the Word He Himself breathed out, not through the consensus of a room. We lay out the record because we are commanded to watch and to warn. Then we ask Him to open eyes, in that denomination, and in our own.

Next in this series: “Weighed and Found Wanting: The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)” — the verdict of Scripture, and a decline steeper than any of the six before it.