This is only one step on the long journey to fully including and affirming LGBTQI+ people in the church, but it is a big step in the right direction. Well done to the Methodist Church of Southern Africa for this bold move.
Johannesburg, South Africa (08 October 2020) – The LGBTQI+ welcoming revival within Christian churches is expanding at a rapid rate, and the Methodist Church of Southern Africa has joined this incredible movement!
In 1946, Archbishop George Hyde of the Eucharistic Catholic Communion (a small denomination not in union with the Roman Catholic Church) celebrated mass for gay men in Atlanta; this is one of the first accounts on record where a church welcomed the LGBTQI+ community with love and open arms.
Over the years there has been a global continuation at a ‘grassroots’ level which propels the leading edge of this revival: individual pastors, congregants, families, friends, and countless others who are at the heart of this movement. They are what makes it personal, gives the revival traction, and who are willing to do the heavy lifting required to open hearts, minds and eventually – church doors.
Most recently, the Methodist Church of Southern Africa announced that they too would be welcoming the LGBTQI+ to their churches.
The Methodist Church of Southern Africa is a large Wesleyan Methodist denomination, with local churches across South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and a more limited presence in Mozambique. It is a member church of the World Methodist Council. The church is the largest Mainline Protestant denomination in South Africa – 7.3% of the South African population recorded their religious affiliation as ‘Methodist’ in the last national census. The denomination has nearly 2 million members.
Graeme Codrington – a South African author, futurist and strategy consultant – posted the good news with a snippet of their release. You may remember Codrington as the man that put out a call from his Church for Christians to stand along the Johannesburg PRIDE route in 2019 to offer love, support and apologies for the way Churches have treated the LGBTIQ+ community.
This is what Codrington had to say:
“My heart could not be more filled with joy…
The Methodist Church of Southern Africa yesterday officially changed its stance on gay marriage and announced that effective immediately the Methodist church recognises and affirms the rights of LGBTQI+ people to be married. Officially, this also means that LGBTQI+ people are to be welcomed and affirmed in Methodist churches.
I know that this will take some time to be felt and embraced by South African Christians and that sadly there is still a lot of homophobia in the church, but this is a huge step forward.
I first engaged with the Methodist church as a consultant to their very first official discussion document on this issue about 15 years ago. It was such a contentious issue then that the clergy who authored the discussion paper did not even put their names on it. For the past few years, I have been part of the leadership of the first South African Methodist church to be openly LGBTQI+ affirming, Melrose Methodist. As a minister of that church, my wife Jane put her name to the resolution that was submitted to Synod a few years ago officially requesting this change in policy, and I supported and defended it through the various stages of its acceptance.
This is only one step on the long journey to fully including and affirming LGBTQI+ people in the church, but it is a big step in the right direction. Well done to the Methodist Church of Southern Africa for this bold move.
Well done to everyone involved.
This has made me so happy.
This is a historical day in South Africa and we feel like this Youtube video celebrating marriage equality and LGBTQI+ rights is pretty apt to share with this good news (get the tissues ready):
**Update – 24 hours after the initial statement, the Methodist Church of Southern Africa put out another statement, retracting what they had said before.
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