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Dr. Denny Wayman

dwayman@fmcsb.org

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THIS ONLINE DISCUSSION IS PROVIDED BY THE STUDY COMMISSION ON DOCTRINE – SCOD. In the life of the church there are three levels of authoritative documents. Within the Free Methodist Church we define the three levels in this way: First Level is the BOOK OF DISCIPLINE: Official documents approved by the delegates at the General Conference. Second Level is the STUDY COMMISSION ON DOCTRINE: Guidance provided to the church by those assigned the task. These are not personal opinions, but are vetted by scholars who have various expertise. Though not binding on the church, they are meant to be helpful scholarly works. Third Level is this FREE METHODIST CONVERSATIONS. This online discussion is where various individuals express their own opinions about a variety of issues. These are not authoritative, nor are they necessarily meant as guidance, but God may use them to do so. There are SCOD documents on this site and the members of the SCOD will be participants. We are inviting the entire church to join the discussion. Our intention is not to limit discussion but to elevate it by assuring that God’s love and respect is always expressed. We will therefore post those comments which further our mutual understanding and assure that every person is being treated with dignity even when disagreement is being voiced. Specifically: 1. The SCOD encourages respectful, intelligent and impassioned discussion and debate. 2. The SCOD encourages a Wesleyan method of looking at the topic from a Scriptural perspective as well as that of Reason, Tradition and Experience. We recognize the Revelation of God in Scripture is our primary source of truth, with Reason, Tradition and Experience serving as supportive resources. 3. Any personal attack will keep the entire comment from being posted. This includes not only attacking others within this SCOD conversation but anyone within the larger secular or Christian world. 4. Any libelous, defamatory, profane, vulgar, threatening, harassing abusive, hateful, racially or ethnically objectionable comments will not be posted. 5. Any invasion of another’s privacy or any post that emulates or pretends to be someone else will not be posted. 6. This online conversation is not to be used to solicit or advertise personal blogs. 12. The SCOD, in our sole discretion, retains the right to remove individual posts or to revoke the access privileges of anyone who we believe has violated any of these standards. For more informal conversations with Free Methodists: LIGHT AND LIFE CONVERSATIONS – Facebook page LIGHT AND LIFE MAGAZINE – Facebook page – Online Issues FM RADIO – Facebook page or iTune episodes If there are any questions contact our moderator, Dr. Denny Wayman: dwayman@fmcsb.org.

WALKING WHILE BLACK: GARNETTE CADOGAN ON THE REALITIES OF BEING BLACK IN AMERICA

May 15, 2017 By

Listening to the experiences of our people of color is vital to our understanding, compassion, wisdom,identification and unity:  Read this account.   This articles is written by a Jamaican who loved to walk and then came to the U.S.  His name is Garnette Cadogan.

Excerpts:

“My only sin is my skin. What did I do, to be so black and blue?”

–Fats Waller, “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?”

On my first day in the city [New Orleans], I went walking for a few hours to get a feel for the place and to buy supplies to transform my dormitory room from a prison bunker into a welcoming space. When some university staff members found out what I’d been up to, they warned me to restrict my walking to the places recommended as safe to tourists and the parents of freshmen. They trotted out statistics about New Orleans’s crime rate. But Kingston’s crime rate dwarfed those numbers, and I decided to ignore these well-meant cautions. A city was waiting to be discovered, and I wouldn’t let inconvenient facts get in the way. These American criminals are nothing on Kingston’s, I thought. They’re no real threat to me.

What no one had told me was that I was the one who would be considered a threat.

Within days I noticed that many people on the street seemed apprehensive of me: Some gave me a circumspect glance as they approached,

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CHASTITY AND HOMOSEXUALITY in CATHOLIC CATECHISM

May 10, 2017 By

In the Catechism of the Catholic church this is the teaching on Chastity and Same-Sex attracted people.  What do you find that you appreciate about this teaching and what questions does this raise for you:

 

Chastity and homosexuality

2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,141 tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”142 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity.

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THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

May 4, 2017 By

In his book released May 2, 2017, Richard Rothstein writes about the United States’ government programs that segregated our neighborhoods and created much of the economic and educational inequities we experience today.

Rothstein presents a comprehensive explanation of various government programs and how the result of many was the segregation of the poor into areas of a city which then produced a lower tax-base with inadequate funding for education, police and other aspects of life taken for granted by the middle class, primarily white citizens.

He writes;

In 2014, police killed Michael Brown, a young African American man in Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis.  Protests followed, some violent, and subsequent investigations uncovered systematic police and government abuse of residents in the city’s African American neighborhoods.  The reporting made me wonder how the St. Louis metropolitan area became so segregated.  It turn out that economic zoning – with a barely disguised racial overlay- played an important role.

To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class whites resided, local and federal officials began in the 1910s to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford.  Certainly an important and perhaps primary motivation of zoning rules that kept apartment buildings out of single-family neighborhoods was a social class elitism that was not itself racially biased.  But there was also enough open racial intent behind exclusionary zoning that it is integral to the story of de jure segregation.  

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WHAT IS A RACIAL MICROAGRESSION COMMUNICATING?

April 27, 2017 By

By Denny Wayman

As a pastoral counselor I have had both formal and informal training in cross-cultural counseling.  However in that training we often think that we have a window into the lives of people from another culture.  But the truth is that we often only have more informed prejudices.

One of the areas in which this occurs is in many forms of micro-insults and microaggressions.

The university of Minnesota created a chart to help explore what people of color experience as a microagression:  Click Here

Wikipedia describes a Microagression this way.

“A microaggression is the casual degradation of any marginalized group. The term was coined by psychiatrist and Harvard University professor Chester M. Piercein 1970 to describe insults and dismissals he regularly witnessed non-black Americans inflict on African Americans.[1][2][3][4] Eventually, the term came to encompass the casual degradation of any socially marginalized group, such as the poor or the disabled.[5] Psychologist Derald Wing Sue defines microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership””

What is your experience?

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WHY AREN’T MORE CHRISTIANS OUTRAGED BY SEXUAL HARASSMENT SCANDALS?

April 25, 2017 By

Let’s discuss what we should be saying as Free Methodists – comment below.

In a recent article in RELEVANT magazine, Samantha Field asks the question:  Why aren’t more Christians Outraged by Sexual Harassment Scandals?  Turning the question on its head she walks with us through her own experience of rape and harassment and points out that in the church the objectification of women, the subjugation of women and the excusing of leaders works together in ways that can cause the church to be silent when we should be speaking out.

This paragraph is something that caused the FMC to rewrite our discipline in cases of Pastoral sexual abuse to make sure that we care for the victim of these who abuse their position of trust and influence:

“Christians tend to place more value on our male leaders than on the women they hurt. Just this week, the #ThingsOnlyChristianWomenHear tag was trending on Twitter. In the time I was reading it, the number of women who said “Don’t tell anyone he assaulted you, or you’ll harm his ministry,” was in the dozens. As heartbreaking as that is, it’s all too common. I have been told—twice—that telling the truth about a man harassing me or assaulting me would “harm the Lord’s work,” and I should keep silent about it.

No one wants to acknowledge that our leaders have feet of clay, but it seems that when our political or religious goals are at stake,

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