| Gods Word shouldnt be twisted to resolve transgender issue  By Stephen Andrew Tillett Upon my return from annual conference, I was asked by numerous people how conference had gone. The question was, however, not a general one. It was followed up with very specific inquiries about what we had decided about the transgender issue. I must say that interest in our annual conferences is not usually this high. I only wish the interest were for a reason like the one in Matthew 28:19-29 to go and make disciples ... baptizing ... and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. (Matthew 28:19-20) Instead, we have become more of a source of curiosity, amusement and scorn. Indeed, after the hours taken by the clergy to deliberate an issue that would have been a two-minute conversation in most growing denominations, we then didnt have (or take) the time to perform the scheduled street ministry in downtown Washington. Where are our priorities? While I hold no malice toward the child of God in question, I shudder at the contortions we make to be accepting, even at the expense of our spiritual authenticity in the eyes of the world weve been sent to help gbwc_superusere to salvation. A recent article I read, authored by one of my colleagues, quoted statistics naming the United Methodist Church as one of the most popular Christian denominations with the world. Thats scary. The world about which the Bible says, His (Gods) intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities, finds comfort in us the more we look and function like them. It seems to me that we are more and more abandoning the Scripture portion of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral Scripture, Tradition, Experience and Reason. I committed that process for decision-making and discernment to memory during my path to ordination and thought I understood that Scripture was supposed to be the primary, foundational ingredient. Yet, as the world infects our denomination more and more (rather than our denomination infecting the world making the manifold wisdom of God known) we fall prey to the political correctness of our day and we lose the saltiness Jesus spoke of in Matthew 5:13. When did the idea that God makes mistakes become a part of our understanding of God? To say that ones gender is a mistake and that one should have been born the other gender is to say that God made a mistake. Does Scripture speak specifically about gender reassignment surgery? Of course not. Nowhere in our foreparents imagination was there any idea that one day their descendants would possess technology that so far outpaced their wisdom, or that they would be playing God with reassignments, cloning and the like. Forgive me for being a fundamentalist (the condescending label aimed at anyone who would stand on the Word of God in the face of the worlds assault upon humankind and the church of Jesus Christ) but when we begin to try to bend the Word of God to conform to whatever the flavor of the month is, I get very concerned. In Revelation 3:15-16, Jesus speaks about a church that refused to stand and be counted. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm neither hot nor cold I am about to spit you out of my mouth. The more we, as a church, try to be all things to all people, the less we will become, for people or for God. The Rev. Stephen Andrew Tillett is pastor of Mt. Zion UMC in Baltimore. | 
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