June 10, 2015
I am not saying that my church needs to change its teaching on marriage, but it might need to change its approach to how it speaks about marriage to those who disagree. Telling people they are wrong goes nowhere. That is not a teaching methodology. Telling people that the present definition has been around forever won’t sway anyone. We believed the world was flat. Then we believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Change for my Church in one area, such as cosmology, meant that other things connected to old ways would fall, too. People’s experience is beginning to vary from church proofs about the definition of marriage. The church says that a child needs a father and mother, as in man and woman. People’s experience is that this is not necessarily so. In the postmodern world people are going more with their experience and less with authoritative pronouncements. I believe that my Church needs to address experience if the Church hopes to get people to listen. When the Reformation came, we at first ignored it and then denounced it. We did not dialogue with this profound shift in the way people thought. Everyone took sides, became entrenched, and the split is still with us.