Session votes to allow pastor to conduct same-sex unions
The Layman Online, May 21, 2001
The session of a Presbyterian congregation has interpreted the national vote on same-sex unions in the Presbyterian Church (USA) as a green light to begin conducting the ceremonies.
But even if the results of the referendum had turned out otherwise, the Rev. Thomas Schmid, pastor of Falls Church Presbyterian Church in Virginia, said he was prepared to be “ecclesiastically disobedient” and conduct services to bless homosexual couples.
The issue of same-sex unions is one of the contentions that gave birth to the rapidly growing Confessing Church Movement that has spread to 32 states and Puerto Rico. The resolutions adopted by Confessing Churches explicitly affirm Biblical and confessional standards: that the acceptable “union” is marriage between a man and a woman.
After a majority of the denomination’s 173 presbyteries voted against prohibiting ministers from performing homosexual unions, the session of the Virginia congregation voted 17-3 to allow Schmid to conduct such services at Falls Church Presbyterian Church.
Falls Church is a fast-growing city on the perimeter of the District of Columbia. The 732-member Presbyterian congregation has lost 107 members – 12.7 percent – since 1994.
Schmid’s views about same-sex unions and his session’s vote were reported in the Falls Church News-Press on May 17.
Schmid told a reporter that consideration of the issue came after two homosexual members of the congregation requested that the congregation affirm their relationship in such a ceremony.
“I’ve prayed for many years about this matter,” Schmid told the reporter. “I determined at a certain point that I’d perform such a union even if it was in violation of the official mandates of my denomination.”
Alan Wisdom, executive director of an evangelical organization called Presbyterian Action, a think-tank on theological and social issues, is a resident of Falls Church. He read the newspaper account and concluded:
“The psychology of the proponents of same-sex unions has changed, as this article suggests. No longer are they furtively performing ceremonies that they know the denomination disapproves. Instead, they feel they have permission to go public and full-steam ahead in offering their blessings to extra-marital relationships.”
Wisdom recalled the arguments against Amendment O, which would have prohibited same-sex unions, by Robert Bullock and William Stacy Johnson in The Presbyterian Outlook.
They argued that same-sex unions “were rare and isolated events – hardly worthy of attention, let alone a constitutional provision to deal with them,” Wisdom said. “If our local case is any indication, and if other churches besides the one in Falls Church are emboldened to see the defeat of Amendment O as a green light for same-sex unions, perhaps those unions won’t be so rare any more.”