The head bishop of the United Methodist Church in New York on Monday committed to ending church trials in his region for ministers who perform same sex-marriages, essentially freeing them to conduct a ceremony still prohibited under his denomination’s laws.
As the first sitting United Methodist bishop to publicly make such a pledge, Bishop Martin D. McLee instantly became a leading figure in a decades-old movement within the United Methodist Church, the country’s second-largest Protestant denomination, to extend equal recognition and rights to gay and lesbian members. Though Bishop McLee said that he hoped his approach would heal the church’s deep divisions over homosexuality, more conservative Methodists warned that his actions would push the denomination closer to an irrevocable split.
Bishop McLee’s pledge came as part of a resolution announced Monday with the Rev. Dr. Thomas W. Ogletree, a Methodist minister and retired dean of Yale Divinity School who had faced a church trial after he officiated the wedding of his gay son in 2012. The trial had been scheduled to begin on Monday.
Instead, Bishop McLee, who oversees about 460 churches in lower New York State and Connecticut, agreed to drop all charges against Dr. Ogletree; in exchange, he asked only that Dr. Ogletree participate in a dialogue about the church and its stance on matters of sexuality. Promoting dialogue, the bishop said, could be a model for other United Methodist bishops to follow.
“While many insist on the trial procedure for many reasons, I offer that trials are not the way forward,” Bishop McLee said in a statement attached to the resolution of Dr. Ogletree’s case. “Church trials result in harmful polarization and continue the harm brought upon our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.”
The two ministers whose complaint had prompted the church legal process against Dr. Ogletree, however, disagreed and sharply criticized the settlement.
“The impact of this settlement today will be that faithful United Methodists who support the church’s teachings will be ignored,” the Rev. Randall C. Paige and the Rev. Roy E. Jacobsen said in a statement. “Far from avoiding schism, today’s settlement increases the probability that schism will take place.”
In October 2012, Dr. Ogletree, 80, presided over the wedding of his son, Thomas Rimbey Ogletree, to Nicholas Haddad. After their wedding announcement appeared in The New York Times, Mr. Paige, pastor of Christ Church in Port Jefferson Station, and Mr. Jacobsen, a retired New York pastor, filed a formal complaint against Dr. Ogletree for breaking church rules, sparking a legal proceeding against him.
Clergy in the United Methodist Church pledge to follow the church’s laws as contained in its rule book, the Book of Discipline. Among those laws is a prohibition on clergy officiating same-sex unions, in keeping with the book’s declaration that the practice of homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”
A liberal wing of the church has been pushing to change those rules since they began to be implemented in 1972, bringing up the issue for votes at each of the international denomination’s quadrennial conferences. In 2012, one retired bishop, Melvin Talbert, sparked a civil disobedience campaign by calling on members to act against what he felt were immoral and discriminatory rules.
Since then, about 1,500 United Methodist ministers around the country have pledged to officiate same-sex unions in defiance of the rules, including 217 clergy in the New York Annual Conference. Bishop McLee’s move, said Dorothee Benz, who leads a pro-gay rights group, Methodists in New Directions, shows that “the bishops are starting to catch the same drift.”
Bishop McLee was able to drop the charges against Dr. Ogletree because once his case was referred to the church prosecutor, there was no need to get the agreement of the original complainants to resolve the matter.
The resolution sparked a strong negative reaction among more conservative Methodists.
“We are really disappointed in the decision that was made to drop the trial completely because there was no penalty or consequence for an act of disobedience,” said the Rev. Thomas A. Lambrecht, the vice president of Good News, a traditionalist Methodist group. “And it’s very troubling that the bishop has made a commitment to cease trials, because it indicates that there will be no accountability in the future in New York to the Book of Discipline.”
For Dr. Ogletree, Monday was a day of triumph. His wife, son, and son-in-law joined him at the news conference, as did about 50 Methodist gay-rights supporters from around the country. “We need to have a framework where people begin to talk to one another,” he said. “I think it’s going to be one that we will see other bishops follow, and I am very happy about that.”