By Barry Healy
The Uniting Church Assembly, the churchs highest decision making body, met in Perth for a week beginning on July 5. While the assembly took strong positions in support of Aboriginal rights, it was the discussion around the report Uniting Sexuality and Faith which generated the most controversy.
At the end of the often passionate debate, in which several important church figures, including Dorothy McRae-McMahon, came out, the report's task group withdrew the most controversial recommendations pending further discussion.
The draft report, released last year after six years of preparation, received more responses than any other in the history of the church. The vast majority of the 8000 responses were hostile.
Conservatives objected to a recommendation that homosexuals be recognised as full and equal members of the church — up to and including being ordained. When the assembly opened, some leading conservative figures, such as the Reverend Fred Nile, were publicly gloating about a "Methodist revivalism" that would allow them to split the church and form a breakaway sect.
According to the church's national secretary for social justice and one of the report's authors, Reverend Robert Stringer, the assembly achieved a number of important steps forward for gays and lesbians and a smaller number of steps back.
"The assembly received and affirmed the report", he told Green Left Weekly. "The Uniting Church now has a carefully argued and biblically based response to the complexities of sexuality.
"The commitment to consensus decision-making ... moved discussion away from exclusion to what it means to be an inclusive church."
Stringer said that the tone of discussion and the wording of motions were careful to avoid negative or moralistic language. He also noted that a number of gay and lesbian members were elected to the assembly for the debate.
"The presence of three clergy who revealed their [sexual] orientation, and two of them revealing that they were in relationships, meant that the issue was no longer theoretical but a present reality in the life of the church", he said. In fact, the assembly endorsed McCrae-McMahon by a standing ovation.
However, the assembly did not affirm gays and lesbians through passing motions; the resolution finally passed avoids any reference to homosexuals. "This perpetrates the invisibility of gay and lesbian members of the church", according to Stringer.
The most conservative positions at the assembly came from representatives of the Uniting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Congress, migrant congregations and the evangelical members of the Uniting Church.