Quotes from Ken Wilson

If we have a hair trigger on the exclusion gun, shouldn't it be aimed at those who are using their power to abuse someone who is in a weaker, more vulnerable position?

We so want to be right and so trust that our desire to be right is something that God would surely bless. Yet the desire to be right comes with a price: the fear of being wrong. And so, in a counter-intuitive way, this focus on being right seems to be the porridge we settle for when we exchange our birthright because we're famished and fear that father won't feed us.

This informal "pre-exclusion" is probably the more powerful and widely exerted form in many churches. It is in my denomination. As the divorced and remarried don't seek communion at a Roman Catholic parish, gays and lesbians don't seek to participate in most evangelical churches.

We are supposed to listen to the voice within us that says, "Gosh, this just doesn't sound loving, even though it sounds correct!" Of course, there's much sorting to be done: what does love really call for in a given situation? Nevertheless, the warning in Scripture is there for a reason.

The conscience is a communal organ—a way of knowing that we do with others formed always in reference to others.

In other words, the biblical writers were speaking to those who shared a rich cultural context, which shaped the way they communicated. I grew up in Detroit and share a rich cultural context with other Detroiters. When I say words like lions, tigers, and wings, I don't have to specify that I mean the professional football, baseball, and hockey teams. Fellow Detroiters get it because we share a rich cultural context.

But sometimes the quest for the right answer keeps us from testing a variety of good ones. In search of the right answer, we assume every answer other than the one we've settled on must be wrong. Forgetting that some things have more than one good answer. I'd like to think for example, that the question, "How can I love Ken?" might have many good answers, rather than one right one.

There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled—in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.

It's easier to offer easy answers when we are not the people facing the hard questions.

The words of an old hymn come to mind: But we make His love too narrow By false limits of our own; And we magnify His strictness With a zeal He will not own. For the love of God is broader Than the measure of the mind; And the heart of the Eternal Is most wonderfully kind. --—Frederick William Faber 1814-1863

Unbelievably, Augustine claims God makes Christians desire the salvation of those whom he has damned (Corrept.15, 47). Rist adeptly identifies this as "the most pathetic passage

RELIGION IS NO ESCAPE FROM THE MESSY BUSINESS OF HUMANITY.

A pastor stands at the crossroads of a congregation's conflicted conscience. It is a congested intersection, this place. Standing in the middle of it can be dizzying, frightening, awful, especially under the intense scrutiny that comes with religious controversy. You have to keep your wits about you to discern whether the groaning in your gut echoes the groaning of the Spirit.

The question of belonging is THE question addressed by the gospel.

I began to see the question of homosexuality in a new light. I couldn't shake the thought that if we applied the same pastoral consideration to gay people that we give to the divorced and remarried, we'd come up with something much different than the categorical exclusions from church and ministry that we have practiced.

A third way departs from the "open and affirming" and the "love the sinner, hate the sin" approach by regarding the question of whether and how the biblical prohibitions apply in the case of monogamous gay relationships as a "disputable matter" in the Romans 14-15 sense.

A third way asks people who differ on this question to accept each other as Christ has accepted them, without predicating acceptance on affirming the other's lifestyle on this and many other moral questions.

A third way urges disputants to recognize the limits of their personal responsibility for the actions of others and to leave the execution of a judgment to God.

There is something more powerful that the gospel calls us to give each other: not affirmation, not moral approval, but acceptance. Another word for acceptance is embrace. The opposite of exclusion is not mere tolerance but embrace. The "other" is received as one who is beloved.

They say disillusionment is a huge step in a person's spiritual growth, especially when it involves disillusionment with a false view of one's self as someone who doesn't make big mistakes

They see the church making accommodations for the divorced and remarried, and for many other things condemned in Scripture, while enforcing exclusionary policies against gay people.

In the deepest, most central place of our being, we don't want to cross God and our not wanting to is the beginning of wisdom.

Over four decades of pastoral ministry—I got started early—you make mistakes. But the mistakes you most regret are the ones that obscure the gospel and hurt the people you love, by saying in effect, "You do not belong," to those for whom Christ died to provide a place of belonging.

For too long, our controversies seem to boil down to conservatives and liberals (or, if you prefer, traditionalists and progressives) talking past each other for the benefit of stirring up their loyalists, as partisans do in the primary campaigns of electoral politics. The rest of us are expected to line up with our team just as soon as they show their colors.