Every issue deserves civil consideration




Another General Conference is drawing nearer, and leaders in the Southwest Texas Conference are making known their feelings about various issues each deems important enough to speak out on.
The cacophony of debate can cause a variety of responses.
Our bishop and our ordained elders have shared with us in recent weeks some thoughts about how best to structure such debate so that both speakers and listeners will gain from the experience.
Bishop Joel N. Martinez and I have agreed that we will ask all involved in either speaking or listening to avoid acrimony while seeking to broaden understanding of the issues being debated.
Chair Jane McFarland and the Board of Church and Society deserve our thanks and congratulations for their work toward just such an end, with their event at Coker UMC April 20-21 entitled “Finding Common Ground.”
The board invited Professor Ron Kraybill, a longtime member of the board of the JustPeace Center for Mediation and Conflict Transformation and widely known practitioner of conflict transformation, to lead the event. That was an aggressive action to help Southwest Texas United Methodists “learn by doing” in principled debate of sensitive issues such as homosexuality, immigration, the death penalty and war or peace.
We live in the midst of instant communication of opinions from many directions and viewpoints. Many of those opinions are calculated to improve the position of the speaker rather than improve the debate.
It is up to each of us to police our responses to hyperbole and sophistry, where such is intended only to stampede us toward someone’s desired result.
But just as important is the need for each of us to have the patience to listen and sort out whatever wisdom there may be in arguments made about subjects, such as homosexuality, which many of us might want to ignore and walk away from out of exasperation with either the subject or the speakers.
Every issue, when it becomes that, deserves our attention and thought about what each of us believes, especially in the context of our Christian belief system. Our belief system begins with the Great Commandment to love God and love each other and the Great Commission to go and make disciples of all nations.
I urge you to remember that context and to keep your passion focused there, rather than on any issue of our time.
Every era has its issues, and those issues serve to mold and test the belief systems of those-who-would-be-saints.
Let us not fail that test!
Jay Brim is Southwest Texas Conference lay leader.