Wouldn’t expect people to respond after nine whole days, but my inbox keeps proving me wrong. This response comes from the pastor of an ELCA Lutheran congregation, verdict: indeterminate.
It’s possible to interpret this one as a positive, but I have some reservations. Hope to hear y’all’s input after you take a look.
This post is a summary/breakdown of the results from Round 1 and Round 2 of the church email project, in which I asked 118 Christian churches for a statement on asexuality, celibacy, and nonsexual marriages.
I don’t expect to get any more replies after this, but if I do, they’ll be put up and this post will be updated accordingly. Note that, in categorizing responses, I refer to some of them as “anti-LGBT” despite, in most cases, the absence of any reference to the T. This is because I assume (perhaps wrongly) that Christians who are morally opposed to homosexuality would also be morally opposed to transitioning.
Links to each response are provided so that you may make your own judgements.
Here are the latest few replies, all of them pretty short. One Catholic, verdict: indeterminate; two Reconciling Methodists, verdict: both positive; one Baptist, verdict: positive; and some non-denominational people want to schedule a meeting.
Winning the award for most repulsive response so far, a Baptist pastor from Round 2 has responded to my email. Although what I asked about was asexuality, a sexual orientation, what I got back was a mess of anti-gayness and cissexism, particularly focused on non-binary people and little trans girls. Oh, and some rape culture and allonormativity thrown in to boot, to answer my original question. Consider this a big content warning for all of that.
Verdict: negative.
Let the record show that a Catholic church and a Presbyterian church have given two more indeterminate non-responses, and a different Presbyterian church got back to me with a brief actual response. Verdict: positive.
This is the second reply from a Church of the Nazarene. Verdict: negative.
So far, I haven’t emailed back any of the people who have replied. But in this case… I’m tempted to. I’d like y’all’s help in deciding how to handle this one.
LCMS Lutheran, verdict: tentative negative.
This next response comes from a pastor who leads a Reconciling Methodist church, and he indicated in his message that he had found this blog, which simultaneously almost gave me a heart attack and left me impressed, since he seems to be the first of anyone so far to bother to do that. Verdict: positive.
The church email project continues today with another batch of replies. Two Baptists, verdict: both indeterminate. Two Episcopalians, verdict: one indeterminate, one positive. One Lutheran, verdict: positive.
