We believe the Holy Spirit demands the full inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) people in the life of the church. For longer than the Israelites wandered in the wilderness the United Methodist Church has systematically and categorically denied the full humanity of LGBTQ people, intentionally deepening the soul-stultifying sin of discrimination, quadrennium after quadrennium. This injustice has been sustained by silence, timidity and cowardice instead of prophetic love. We have chosen the worldly rewards of ecclesial ambition, institutional maintenance and idolatrous allegiance to legalism over basic Gospel-mandated inclusion. We have fundamentally misunderstood what Heaven’s presence on earth requires of us.

Having experienced the liberating truth imparted by the Spirit, we can no longer sit in silent acquiescence before the unjust laws of The United Methodist Church. We will settle for nothing less than the complete removal of all discriminatory language against LGBTQ people in The Book of Discipline.

The usual approaches of legislation-writing, story-telling, holy conferencing and relationship-building have served their purpose, but have failed to end the discrimination that is destroying our church.

Because we love The United Methodist Church, and because we cannot continue to invest in approaches that have failed to halt the steady advance of intolerance, we hereby declare that until and through General Conference 2016, we will engage in a three-dimensional strategy to abolish the policies of discrimination against LGBTQ people. We will:
Disclose,
Divest,
and Disrupt.

To download a PDF version of the manifesto, click here.

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