This is the Faith Debate, a theological round-table gab fest with the Mix Master as the Master of Ceremonies and the notorious Triple B, the Big Bridge Builder. Can we build it? Yes, we can. The Faith Debate is a free-for-all forum where faith community leaders wrestle over the truth. In less than 30 minutes, learn more about what really matters than others learn in a month. Are you ready for a clash of ideas? Are you ready for the sound of freedom? Let's get ready to rumble! Let's get ready to rumble. Ha! Yeah! In this corner, weighing in with a master divinity from Reformed Theological Seminary, the Faith Debate Master of Ceremonies, Troy Skinner. You got a moron here, is that it? And in this corner, weighing in as a pastor, teacher, and founder of bridges connecting needs and resources in the local community. Ooh, mama. The notorious big bridge builder, John Slicer. Now I'm just getting warmed up. Have you heard? The issue of homosexuality is bringing division to the Christian Church in recent years. The Episcopal Church now allows the ordination of openly gay clergy, but not until after a big fight within the denomination. The Methodist Church had a big international denominational vote on allowing same-sex marriage just this year. The measure did not pass, mostly because of Methodist leaders in Africa putting them at odds with the majority of Methodist leaders in America. It's a contentious issue, and we are going to go there for a few weeks on The Faith Debate, beginning this week. But first, we're gonna take a quick moment to talk about something that I have reason to believe is almost certainly not an area of contention for today's two panelists. Sharon Watts is rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Newmarket, Maryland. Jonathan Switzer, founder of Crossed Bridges in Frederick, Maryland. Jonathan just wrapped up the Frederick Goes Purple campaign recently. And so this is our first chance to have him report back. So what can you report back? Well, we can report back that all the middle schools and high schools went purple for the month, that a number of businesses like Shockley Honda and Thomas' English Muffins, which is now, I'm forgetting the new name of the company, but whole companies that went purple, along with all of the municipalities across the county and a bunch of churches, several churches lit up their spires and their You know the front of their building purple and Sharon is here today with a purple Ribbon on her shirt, and so there was really good awareness, education, you know, people that are talking to other people and then getting additional levels of training, you know, because and those that are, you know, struggling, walking around in the streets and then coming up and sharing their stories, right? Like there's just a space where the community was embracing and working together about what is a, you know, arguably, the most difficult health issue of our time. And so I'm really pleased with how it turned out and I look forward to the community continuing to kind of move that forward and to take things to the next level together. And Sharon, you're obviously a supporter of the movement. Absolutely. And you had some words of praise for how the event went before we started the show. And I know that health issues are a big matter of importance to you because of your history. You worked in the medical field for quite some time, right? Yes, I was a nurse, an RN, for 39 years in medical issues, mostly in Baltimore, and spent a good deal of my time in intensive care units, bringing back people who had addiction issues and working with people both in their homes and in the floor, floor nursing. very rewarding. I met a lot of people who had very difficult journeys, and I met many people who recovered. And I think it's really important that we continue to work very hard to treat and work with prevention and to work with recovery issues within our community. If we don't, we are going to be losing wonderful people that could be so enriching to our society. And that's the point. We have been losing You know, more than one a week for going on three and a half years. And so that's a lot of people that have passed away in our community in that time frame. Yeah, one a week in Frederick, right in Frederick. Right in Frederick County. But if you look through the entire United States, we are losing so many people every day, almost 200 people a day. There's a lot of depression, a lot of loneliness, a lot of isolation. You know, something happened, what do they say about millennials that 27% of them claim to have no good friends, 20% of them claim to have no friends, right? They're called the loneliest generation ever. Is that just social media? I don't think it's just social media. There's more going on dynamically in our nation terms of losing our faith in terms of you know the uh... the vitriol between political parties in such that uh... that we're just or were we've lost something in terms of cohesiveness in i think we're paying the price for that handle and lack of community uh... and that's the heart of the community actually relates uh... in some measure to the issue we're talking about these next few weeks yeah and there's uh... some potential medical, scientific component to it that might relate to it as well. I think that's how we ended up stumbling into this topic. When I first had the opportunity to connect with Sharon, we were talking about different things, and this show, the Faith Abate show came up, and we talked about what would be an appropriate topic, and health issues came up, and then somehow you blended the two the homosexual question, and addiction questions. I can't remember how you – I can't remember how you related them. Dr. Anneke Vandenbroek Both of them were very different to me. They're two very separate topics. But for me, one of the reasons that I initially got interested in healthcare is from reading the Gospel of Luke, and just being so, as a young person, a teenager, just being really drawn to the healing stories of Christ. And for me, one of the things that we need to look at as churches is stepping forward to offer our actions, putting our faith to action, so that we can help people who are in need of healing. For me, I think one of the most important things is getting our churches involved more. A lot of times with churches, we step away from issues like this, and we really need to be following Christ and bringing people to the table with us and talking to them. I think one of the most important conversations we can have in our churches today is what are your impressions of this entire crisis, this opioid crisis? How does it affect your family? Because I know very few families that have not had at least one encounter with someone who's an addict in their home or in their extended family. And if it's not with their extended family, they have friends. And I tell everybody, if you are not one of those families, you don't know how blessed you are. Now, before we transition into the predetermined main topic for this week's and the next few week's shows, you have an event coming up at your church, a bazaar of some sort. We do. We have a Christmas bazaar. We have a Christmas bazaar. So put on your calendars, please, November 16th from 9 to 4 at Grace Episcopal Church. We are at 5740 Green Valley Road, Newmarket, Maryland, 21774. And one of the main events, we have a silent auction, which is always very successful. Each one of our vendors put up an item and everyone gets to bid until somebody wins. and we also have a lot of vendors. Our teenagers are working on a youth activity room, and we are having a Santa Claus who will be walking through and greeting people. And I'm going to gather people at noon and talk about the Christmas story. So bring your kids, bring your smiles, bring yourself to the Christmas bazaar, and we hope you have a wonderful time. It's hard to believe we're headed into the Christmas season, huh? Now that's a lot of information comes and and we kind of sprung it on people I'm sure that nobody had their pens at the ready. So the quickest way to get all that information. It's on the website I'm assuming the church's website It is on our Facebook page and we will also have other Newspapers and things that we're sending it out. Okay, so if you go to Facebook and put in grace Episcopal Church You'll probably market in Newmarket. You'll be able to find because there are many grace Episcopal Church. So you have to put in Newmarket Okay, good helpful tip. I'm going to reset now because we're going to enter into, you know, the intended dialogue, get all the niceties and pleasantries out of the way. This is the Faith Debate. Jonathan Schweitzer with Crossed Bridges on the panel again. I don't know how many shows this is, got to be a few hundred at least. Yeah, a couple hundred. More than that, probably 800. Yeah, we've probably done at least 500 of them though, right? Yeah, at least. And Sharon Watts is the rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Newmarket. I'm Troy Skinner, host of the Faith Debate and pastor of Living Faith Ministries in Hagerstown, Maryland. So, we are going to talk about this homosexual question and give you a little peek behind the curtain. When the topics for the show are determined, I usually go to, you know, prospective guests and say, what's something you think maybe would be a good topic to tackle? Something that you're really passionate about, something you don't think is talked about enough, something you think is misunderstood, you know, whatever. What do you think? And I put that question to Sharon. We talked about a couple of different things and then she kind of landed on, you know, I think we should tackle the homosexual question and what that means for the church. So let me ask kind of a generic question. What was it that made you want to tackle this question on this show? So I think this is a question that's really pressing in Christian communities right now. We're very divided within most communities about how to address this issue. The Episcopal Church started working very deeply in the late 1990s in relationship to homosexuality. And we have extended our discussions internationally. It has been painful and it has been difficult, but we have discerned and come to a different place. And I wanted to offer that because I don't think this view is heard very often. So you came to a different place, so what is the place now? So we started in 2012. We had a general convention where we would accept homosexuals within our community with no reservation. We received them for full pastoral care. And this includes before the government allowed same-sex marriage, we developed a blessing service. And afterwards, we do participate in marriage. And the same we would with any other. We don't do everyone. Every person has to marry people according to whether they think they can be successful or not, or they can be supported or not. So, just like we don't marry every heterosexual couple that comes to us, it's the same thing, same standard. And this has come from a lot of scripture analysis, this has come from a lot of prayer, this has come from a lot of international discussions, and I wanted to bring that to the forefront. It's interesting, we were joking before the show started, and it's the first time Sharon's been on the show, and it can be a little bit nerve-wracking, you're like walking into somebody else's world. But this is an issue, a lot of the issues we tackle on the show, but this one particularly, because it's so high-profile and front and center in our culture, that this is a show where I'm imagining that Jonathan might feel like he's in the minority culturally. and runs the risk of being misunderstood or being accused of hate speech and not having compassion and that sort of thing. So I don't want to put words in your mouth, but are you feeling any of that weight before you weigh in on the... I guess right now we're going to start with the gay marriage question. So that's a yes and no question. The answer is yes. Yeah. Particularly in the last 10 years, our culture shifted dramatically in a very short period of time. Yes, it did. And so definitions that have been biblically accepted for Thousands of years as well as definitions that have been culturally normative shifted, you know in a very short period of time and and in that same context in the context of that shift people that that were on one side of it and were not considered horrible just you know having an opinion, you know, that is again, rooted in what was an understandable biblical worldview, all of a sudden became outcast and, you know, persona non grata. And, you know, how many scenarios do you hear about in the news, you know, just one after another where somebody – it just happened this week where a doctor in England was let go because his personal convictions are that gender doesn't change, and so it's not appropriate for him to identify somebody according to a pronoun different from their birth gender. And so he just shared that openly, and he got let go. from his job as a doctor, as a physician for that purpose. And so that kind of scenario means that we don't just get to deal with the issue of individuals that struggle with it, but we also have to deal with the fact that if you stand in a traditional biblical view on marriage and gender, then you are facing significant, not just pushback, but rejection and loss of influence, loss of favor in a whole number of circles. And so that doesn't mean that we should stop. loving and caring for, uh, people in, in that scenario, but it does make it way more complex about, you know, it's, it's, it's one thing to love, um, people who, you know, face rejection in the world. It's nothing to love somebody, uh, that is, is being used to reject you. Anyways, it's, it's just a different scenario. now as a point of clarification uh... everybody here understands but in case you listening don't understand we're not meaning to blend transgenderism and sexuality uh... as the same issue their separate issues correct uh... and right now we're focusing primarily on the the sexuality and particularly relates to marriage for for right now so jonathan is now with cross bridges but before that he was a longtime pastor at uh... crossroads valley and uh... When you were the pastor, were you ever approached, or if you had ever been approached by a same-sex couple who asked you if you would marry them, what did you say and how would you have said what you had to say? So I was never approached to marry a couple. There was one scenario where Two gentlemen were coming to church regularly and there was just the question as to where they might be on that issue. So one of the pastors dropped into a list of sins on a Sunday morning, a homosexuality, and shortly thereafter I got a phone call asking if they could sit and talk with me. kind of discuss where we stood on the issue. And we had a very pleasant conversation just talking through what we understood to be the biblical perspective on the issue. And as a result, they chose to not continue to attend church where we were. And so that's an example of a scenario where we faced it personally. I know many pastors that, have been called on the phone just to be asked, you know, hey, where do you stand on this issue? And sometimes I've even felt like those phone calls were being made like in a systematic way to kind of say, okay, well, these are the, you know, the bad churches, you know, that won't accept it. These are, you know, the accepting ones. And so, again, you know, there's significant pushback there. Yeah, and it's interesting that it gets framed that way, you know, because you haven't explicitly said it yet, but you're of the opinion that a biblically sanctioned marriage would be between a man and a woman. Right. Yeah, that would be your position. Yeah, and it's interesting. I think I would put it this way that that I don't see in in scripture Space to define Marriage any other way Right, and so it's where Jesus talks about marriage and he just comes out and he says, you know, it was this way from the beginning. God made them male and female, what God has joined together, let no man separate. Like that's the positive expression by Christ as to, you know, what he sees when he's looking at marriage and he ties it into creation. So anyways, my point is just, I'm sure we'll hear, your perspective on those, many of those passages over the next couple of weeks, but that we don't really have space to define it in other ways, that it's clearly defined. Pete So Jonathan doesn't see space, but the Episcopal Church apparently has decided that they see space. So how do you, how would you try to persuade Jonathan that there's space where he's not seeing it? So first of all, I'm not going to try to persuade anybody. I'm just going to offer what we believe. First of all, one of the things that I think is different between the two perspectives is we are not a scripture-alone church. We're a church that also believes that we stand not only on scripture, but we also stand on what we call traditions, which is the knowledge of the community as it has grown through the centuries in prayer and in worship, and our understanding of what the Holy Spirit is doing to us and where it's leading us. We also believe in standing on reason. We believe that God gave us an ability to think, an ability to learn, and that this is our responsibility to use this. So we stand on all three things. So you usually don't see Episcopalians pulling out as many Bible verses. We usually talk on it. But when we look at Scripture, we're looking at Scripture as a place where we're reading something that was written in another language. And most of us are not really fluent enough in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic to be able to really dive into scripture from that level. But we do, one of the wonderful things of our time, we do have computers that help us to do translations, and we can oftentimes go back to word-to-word translations, which I think is probably helpful for both of us. And, so we're looking at another language, we're looking at a time period in which Christ was talking, which is not today's time period, so we've got thousands of years, and we have to be careful sometimes how we bring some of these concepts forward. And then we're also looking at a cross-cultural experience. We have a area in the Middle East that's not the United States. So, we try to take all these things into consideration when we're studying scripture. Pete Now, you mentioned traditions and reason. The traditions part, I took that initially to mean like church tradition, and maybe in your context, specifically the Episcopal church tradition. But up until recent years, was there much of an Episcopal church or Christian church tradition addressing gay marriage and that being perceived as... So, our reflections literally began in the late 1990s. But traditionally, though, that's not a very long time. That's like 30 years. That's correct. So we started doing a lot of reflection around the late 1990s. And that's when we... I gave you more credit. 20 years, not 30 years. Just over 20, yeah. So that's when we started to look at this a little differently. So for this particular issue, it's probably more about reason, right? Trying to examine things afresh with new scientific inquiry, and medical opinion, and sociological. Or maybe the way to ask that is, how did your traditions prepare you in the 90s to begin to approach that differently? And actually, well, I don't know if you have time to give that a full-breathed answer, so we're going to have to wait a whole week to hear the answer to that. We've only got about 60 or so seconds left in this show. Unless you feel like you can answer it in less than 60 seconds, do you think you can? No, let's take a little time with this. So we're going to be back at this next week, and we lost a little bit of time by talking about some of the things that are important to talk about. Your website is still up on the Go Purple, correct? Absolutely. FrederickCountyGoesPurple.com. It's a great website. The gentleman that donated just did a fabulous job on that, as well as you can go to the Facebook page. And you can see all kinds of pictures and events that happened over the last month. So we're going to be transitioning, though, for those that were participating, we're transitioning into what are the next steps. And so we're going to be rallying those that participated to kind of identify together what are some things that we can do to capture the momentum from Frederick County Goes Purple and keep that going throughout the year. So stay tuned. That's Jonathan Schweitzer with Cross Bridges, also Sharon Watts, Rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Newmarket on the show. I'm Troy Skinners of the Faith Debate. We're online at wfmd.com. Till next week, 167 and a half hours from just about right now. God bless.