December 18, 2007
Closets
There’s a Baptist church over in Ft Worth, Texas, celebrating its 125th anniversary. A part of the celebration is to make a pictorial directory. You’d think that’s simple enough, but the elders are struggling with what has become for them a monumental question. It has to do with photographs and whether to include them.
It seems to be an inclusive church, and as such sets an example. But they’re debating whether the directory should go ahead and include pictures of gay couples, or gay people individually, but not as couples, or even as families, or just whether to avoid the problem altogether by leaving out individual and family photos entirely. I suppose it’s as it should be that they aren’t so much closing the door on anybody, but they aren’t all that specially proud about it and apparently don’t want anybody to know all about it.
So, what if they do include photos of everybody? How will they know who’s who? And what if they prove to be wrong about somebody? Actually, they just might be overlooking a good thing.
All would surely agree that church can be said to be just one big prayer meeting, especially on Sundays. And remember what Jesus said about when you pray, not to stand around carrying on in public on the street corners, but pray, instead, in a convenient closet. If you try to decide how to make a big church more like a closet so you could pray there like Jesus said, it would seem to me that gays and lesbians would be of considerable help. Imagine the experience they could bring to bear on this rather well-known Jesus requirement. And in the doing, just think about how much they could learn about closets if only they asked. As for photographs, Jesus never said much about that either.
1 Comment »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos
Another very fine one, Lane! Your sense of humor and irony here is delicious. I may have to blog this one.
Thanks, my brother.
Comment by Lisa Fox — December 18, 2007 @ 6:08 pm