All Saints' MCC Christchurch - Pastor's Message

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From the Interim Pastoral Leader

At All Saints MCC we are a welcoming and affirming faith community.

In the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and through the history of the Church is an affirming God who embraced and celebrated a diverse humanity in a wonderful creation. In the creation narratives we find a religious truth in the words, ‘and God saw that it was good.’

Within the Hebrew Scriptures are celebrated same sex relationships, in the Gospels we see Christ holding up a gay man as the ideal of discipleship. 2000 years before the modern medical scientific age Jesus affirms that some of us are born gay. And remember ‘… and saw that it was good!’

Right: Saint Serge and Saint Bacchus martyred not because of their faith but because their Christian marriage was between two equals when ancient Roman society expected one partner to be master and the other slave, the Roman view of heterosexual marriage.

In the early life of Christianity we have stories of the church celebrating couples both heterosexual and homosexual.

Having gone through a period of Puritanism today the church is free once again to explore its diversity and to allow the stories that have been suppressed to live once again. We can also hear again the stories of female priests, bishops and popes, recapture the feminine roots to our understanding of God, and we’re free to explore faith within and outside of the boundaries of so-called orthodoxy.

All Saints is part of some 300 Churches throughout the world whose initial focus was on proclaiming an inclusive gospel to sexual minorities, gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgendered peoples. Until recently we were a Western denomination but over the last few years we have been invited into parts of Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe where to be gay, lesbian, transgendered etc. is not tolerated and can lead, in some communities, to state or family sanctioned death sentences.

Metropolitan Community Churches have a local and international calling to overturn prejudice and oppression.

Andrew
Interim Pastoral Leader

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13 June 2008