Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to Relatable. Today we are going to talk about a subject that a lot of you guys have asked me to dive into over the past couple of weeks.

We touched on it very lightly last week, but we're going to get a little more in depth today. And that is the decision by the Methodist Church to strengthen its stance on traditional marriage and the role of members of the LGBT community inside the church.

So let me give you a breakdown of how that all came about. And then we're going to zoom out a little bit further and talk about the trend of accepting kind of homosexuality and gay marriage in America, how that's changed, particularly how that's changed in the church.

And then I am going to address an Instagram post that a lot of you guys sent me in my Instagram messages.

And we're going to talk about what the Bible says about all of this. So let's start with the decision by the Methodist Church. So on February 25th, a couple of weeks ago, members of the United Methodist Church convened at a general conference conference in St. Louis, the top governing body of the denomination, the general conferences, legislative committee, made up of 865 delegates.

Some of these people are clergy, some of these people are lay people, they voted on three different plans. One plan was the one church plan. One church was the simple plan and another plan that they voted on was the traditional plan. And all of these had to do with LGBTQ people within the church.

The one church plan would allow individual churches to make their own decisions and regional conferences to make their own decisions regarding the members of the LGBTQ community and how they could serve as clergy.

And if they could be married in the church and then you have the simple plan, which would remove all language about the practice of homosexuality out of the Methodist book of discipline.

What one was actually the traditional plan. So according to religious religion news service, the traditional plan would strengthen the enforcement of language in the denominations rulebook, stating that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching and that self-evowed practicing homosexuals cannot be ordained as ministers appointed to serve or be married in the church.

So 53% of these Methodist delegates voted for the traditional plan. Some churches and some clergy members and some lay people have say have been saying that they're going to leave the denomination. Obviously they're very upset by this decision. Some say that they are saying, but that they're going to kind of defy this plan and they're going to continue to perform same sex weddings.

No matter where you stand on all of this, the division that's happening within the Methodist church, just as if it happened in any other denomination is is very sad and the pain that it's causing people on either side of this issue is also not something to take joy in.

Now a lot of conservative Christian to a lot of people who believe in conservative theology, of course, are happy that the traditional plan passed with a slight majority.

But we should also be assessing why this is happening and how we actually got to this position that we even have to have this kind of discussion. So let us acknowledge kind of the context of all of that because it says a lot about not just where the Methodist church is, but really where we are as a society and particularly where we are as the Protestant faith in general. So

pure research did a study in 2017 that analyzed the view on homosexuality of all Americans from 2001 to 2017. So if you looked in 2001, the opinion of all Americans at 57% of Americans opposed 35% of Americans favored gay marriage at 2017 32% opposed 62% were in favor.

So that changed a lot over 16 years of the public opinion on the morality and the acceptance of gay marriage, the vast majority of people today, whether they're Christian or not, would say that yes, homosexuality should be socially accepted in gay marriage is something that should be that should be, of course legal and should be something that is celebrated in the same way that had heterosexual marriages.

Pupole from 2015 looks specifically at Christians and said 54% say that homosexuality should be accepted by society. So the majority of Christians in 2015 said that homosexuality should be accepted by society that is up by 10 points from just eight years earlier. So again, we saw a large shift from before Barack Obama's presidency. I'm not necessarily tying this to Barack Obama quite yet, although I have done so in previous podcasts.

From before Barack Obama was president to the middle of his term and then to the end of his term, we saw a really big shift in ideology and immorality and views on sexuality in America. People got a lot more liberal particularly on social issues.

Gallup found that 41% of Protestants specifically view gay relations as morally acceptable. And so that's a little bit different from Christians in general.

There are less than half of Protestants at least I think this was probably in 2015 as well, who view gay relations as morally acceptable. And then a Pew study from 2014 looks specifically at the United Methodist Church, the denomination that we are studying right now and said that 60% of the United Methodist Church believes that homosexuality should be accepted. And that is again up nine points from seven years earlier.

The most liberal in this particular study that looked at the various denominations and their views on homosexuality. The most liberal were the United Church of Christ, Anglican Church, both denominations of the Lutheran churches were fairly liberal, although one was more liberal than the other.

A Piscopalian, extremely liberal in this regard. And of course the Catholic Church is far more liberal in the subject of gay marriage and Protestant churches are generally most conservative was the Southern Baptist Convention.

Assemblies of God in seven day Adventist, but every denomination within the Protestant Church and the Catholic Church also has increased in its approval of homosexuality over the past 10 years. Of course, we know the Supreme Court case, a Burgafel that ruled that gay marriage should be a right in the same way that heterosexual marriage is a right and public opinion really changed with that before a Burgafel.

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