(RNS) — As the United Methodist Church has spent decades debating the place of LGBTQ Christians in its ministries, the Rev. Adam Hamilton has emerged as “the Pied Piper for Methodists in the middle.” At the global denomination’s General Conference meetings in 2012 and 2016, Hamilton — who pastors the largest United Methodist church in the United States — supported measures that would have allowed United Methodists to disagree with its rulebook, which claims the “practice of homosexuality” is “incompatible” with Christian teaching. More recently, he backed the so-called One Church Plan, which would have allowed churches and regional bodies known as annual conferences to decide whether to allow LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage. In February, that plan — which also had been recommended by the denomination’s Council of Bishops — failed at a special session of the General Conference in St. Louis. Instead, delegates adopted what’s known as the Traditional Plan, which strengthened … [Read more...]

(RNS) — After her unexpected death at age 37 at the beginning of May, Rachel Held Evans’ loved ones gathered Saturday (June 1) to remember her in a funeral service. The service was held at First Centenary United Methodist Church in Chattanooga, Tenn. Many of the writer’s friends followed along from a livestream of the service hosted on her website. During the service, twitter was filled with remembrances and outpourings of love for Held Evans under the hashtags #becauseofRHE and #rememberingRHE. Held Evans’ casket, topped with a bouquet of yellow flowers, was carried up the aisle of the church at the beginning of the service, followed by her husband, Daniel Evans, and their two young children.“She made me better than I was before I met her,” Daniel Evans wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “She left the world better than how she found it. For that I will always be grateful.”The service was ecumenical but drew from the Episcopal Church’s funeral liturgy, Held Evans’ adopted … [Read more...]

CHICAGO (RNS) — Despite prayer vigils, a letter-writing campaign from her church and her denomination and a petition for a stay of removal from her lawyers, a student pastor was deported this week in what the head of the mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is calling “an egregious case once again of family separation.” Betty Rendón, who fled with her family from Colombia during the country’s civil war, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials on May 8 after her application for asylum was rejected more than a decade earlier. Another, last-minute application to stop her deportation was denied Friday (May 24), the National Immigrant Justice Center confirmed. Rendón and her husband, Carlos Hincapié, were transported to Louisiana over Memorial Day weekend before being put on a plane to Colombia on Tuesday morning, according to the center. ICE could not immediately be reached for comment. Rendón had been studying at the Lutheran School of … [Read more...]

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (RNS) — At the evening prayer service at a new residential complex here, a dozen young people took turns reading a passage from the Gospel of Luke, reciting a Psalm and singing some prayers. They paid no mind as one woman tripped over the words “rebuke,” “unrighteous” and “snare” that appeared in the liturgy. They congratulated another person who, at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, blurted out, “What does ‘amen’ mean?” “Good question!” some exclaimed in unison. It means “truly,” offered one; “so be it,” offered another. These kinds of moments are common at the weekly service where a mix of graduate students and a handful of adults with developmental disabilities share living quarters in three new buildings in the city’s Haymount neighborhood. Friendship House, as they call their co-housing space, is in many ways an outgrowth of the thinking of Jean Vanier, the Catholic theologian and humanitarian who died earlier this month and who changed the way many … [Read more...]

(RNS) — About five years ago, the Village Church of Barrington, a congregation northwest of Chicago with a $1.8 million annual budget and average weekly attendance of 600, decided to become accredited with the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. ECFA — founded in 1979 to promote financial integrity in Christian ministries and avert heightened government regulation in the wake of televangelist scandals — claims nearly 2,400 members. Those member churches and nonprofits receive more than $29 billion in annual charitable donations from 20 million donors, according to the Virginia-based ECFA. The Village Church already allowed members to review its books and prided itself on having a transparent approach to finances. Joining ECFA would help cement its commitment to transparency. “We thought it would give donors confidence to know that we were doing things by the book,” said David Jones, the Village Church’s senior pastor. But now — amid scrutiny over ECFA’s … [Read more...]

NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) — As disputes over homosexuality continue to stir within the worldwide Anglican Communion, conservative African bishops say they will boycott a decennial gathering of top clerics next summer unless what the Africans consider godly order is restored. After delaying the Lambeth Conference, normally held once a decade, for two years, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the global leader of Anglicanism, has invited all active bishops and their spouses to the United Kingdom in July and August of 2020 — except the spouses of bishops who are in same-sex unions. But the African bishops object to the invitation of bishops in the communion who are in same-sex unions. Those bishops’ presence, the Africans say, constitutes an endorsement of homosexuality, which they reject as contrary to the Scriptures. “I will not be at the Lambeth Conference for those reasons. Others are also boycotting,” Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit of Kenya told Religion News Service in an … [Read more...]