A Presbyterian Church (USA) committee approved a proposal Tuesday that calls for removing the denomination's 25-year prohibition on allowing non-celibate gays and lesbians to serve as ministers, elders and deacons.
The committee's recommendation will be considered by the full General Assembly later this week as its meeting in Denver continues.
If the assembly signs off on the proposal, presbyteries, or church districts, across the nation will have the final say on whether to lift the controversial prohibition.
The 35-29 committee vote, with two abstentions, took some observers by surprise.
Many Presbyterians are weary of the debate - two other efforts to repeal the ban have failed in recent years by increasingly wider margins. In addition, the newly elected moderator of the assembly and a prominent pro-gay ordination lobby group, the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, have said it is too soon after the unsuccessful votes to try again.
Instead, the measure heads to the full assembly with momentum.
"It's a step forward," said Bill Moss, co-moderator of More Light Presbyterians, which is working for the full participation of homosexuals in the church. "Even if it doesn't get out of the assembly, we have at least been able to achieve getting this issue out in front of the church, and it's a justice issue that simply isn't going away."
In a related matter, a separate committee threw out a report six years in the making about the changing nature of U.S. families, replacing it with a more conservative version. The original report, which recognized homosexual couples, may be resurrected before the full body this week.
The provision at issue in the ordination debate says candidates for ordination to church offices must live "in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness."
Though it also applies to adulterers or single heterosexuals who are sexually active, critics say the provision is used almost exclusively against homosexuals.
The Rev. Donald Stroud, an openly gay man who was ordained before the ban, said it "relegates one category of people to second-class membership in the church, and in effect second-class humanity," and is "weaving a destructive web over the whole church."
Stroud was the target of a presbytery investigation in Baltimore that resulted in no charges.
The Rev. Bob Sharman, an Alabama minister, countered that although he feels sympathy for those who feel shunned, it is time "to leave the church alone for a while."
Before the final vote, the committee rejected a proposal that would have put decisions about ordination in the hands of presbyteries or church sessions, which are ruling bodies.
The motion's sponsor, the Rev. Bob Conover of San Rafael, Calif., called it a compromise that would have kept the prohibition on the books while allowing greater discretion. But opponents said it rendered the church constitution meaningless.
"Do we really have a constitution, or is it a verbal ball of Silly Putty?" said the Rev. David Horner, who leads a congregation in eastern Pennsylvania.
The 50-page report on families, along with recognizing many different kinds of families, urges the denomination to oppose "principles or policies that would stigmatize any person ... based on family form."
The paper, however, was never voted on. Instead, committee members voted 34-24 with one abstention to replace it with a two-page statement that stripped out the references to homosexuals, among other changes.
"I'm not sure if it was able to have a full hearing with the number of sub-interventions from public interest groups concerned with sexual ethics rather than the support of families," said Peter Sulyok, the coordinator of the denomination's advisory committee on social witness policy, which drafted the paper.
Some conservatives feared the paper would be used to justify the ordination of gays. Alan Wisdom, a conservative Presbyterian who helped draft the replacement document, said those who worked on the new version wanted to preserve the strong parts of the paper and eliminate divisive elements.
"We didn't want it to be another debate about homosexuality," he said.