With the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland coming up in less than a month the reports are becoming available and the press releases are flowing.  If you want to check out the reports they are available on the General Assembly Reports page and the Online Newsroom is dominated by releases for each of the major reports.

However, the highest profile report appears to be coming from the Mission and Discipleship Council and is titled “A challenge to unity: same-sex relationships as an issue in theology and human sexuality.”  The report is available in MS Word, RTF and Text formats.  You can find all three formats under Mission and Discipleship Council on the Reports web page or if you want you can jump straight to the MS Word format.  The report is 37 pages long and I have barely had a chance to skim through it yet.  I’ll try to read it in more detail tomorrow.  However, looking at the reactions that have come out about it there are a wide variety of reactions and opinions on it.  More on that in a minute.

First, a brief note on the history of this issue and this report.  It is important to remember that the major controversy at last year’s GA came not from this report but what was supposed to be a more routine report from the Legal Questions Committee.  That began not as a theological question as much as a civil legal question in response to the government passing the Civil Partnerships law permitting civil unions.  This year’s report is much more involved in the theology.  There was an earlier report adopted in 1994 and in 2004 the process began to update that report with the 2005 General Assembly commissioning this present two year study.

I have not had a chance to read the report in detail but in scanning it a few things stand out.  One of these is section 4.8 – The Church and Power.  In that section the report says:

But while churches participate in sexuality debates, there is a newer emphasis within the churches that power is exercised through service, according to which the churches align themselves not least with the poor, weak, marginalised and alienated in society and in the world as a whole.  In other words, the church increasingly identifies with people conventionally excluded from power.  Part of this emphasis includes listening to the voices of gays and lesbians, especially gay and lesbian Christians.  Hitherto it has been very difficult for people to speak openly in the church of homosexual desire or orientation, fearing judgment and punishment.  This report plays a small part in developing this process of listening to voices from previously unheard quarters.

Beyond this the study seems to cover the usual ground:  The differing approaches to interpreting scripture, the current scientific and psychological understandings, and how should homosexual persons live in the context of a Christian life.  And maybe the most significant thing about this report, is that it really comes to no conclusion about the issue in the section marked “Conclusion.”  The working group basically says “Here are the issues, we need to be talking about these questions and circumspect about answering them.”  To quote the final part of the conclusion:

Therefore the Mission and Discipleship Council presents this report, prepared by a Group of Christians who shared in debate their own unique perspectives and
convictions, and in so doing represented the wider Church. The report
endeavours to present different approaches to issues in homosexuality
generously and charitably, trying always to avoid caricature.  The unity within the Group – and Christians’ unity more generally – does
not however come simply from courteous debate, listening to all points of view, and attempting to understand the other more deeply, although these are virtues which the Group members tried to exhibit… The Council hopes then that readers of the report will be aided by it as they read it, reflect on it and discuss it together, worship and break bread together and journey on in faith.

I have found no specific recommendations for the church or theological affirmations being put forward in this report.

Now, for the press coverage. 

The one that intrigued me the most was the press release from the Church of Scotland itself.  It is titled “Kirk admits to ‘historic intolerance’ toward gay people.”  That headline is sure to grab interest and raise a few people’s tempers.  Reading through the article the basis for the headline is a line in the article which is taken from a very similarly worded line in the Process section (4.5) of the report: “…and the working group has listened to testimonies which have led members to recognise pastorally insensitive – indeed, sinful – attitudes on the part of the Church towards gay people.”  From a polity standpoint there is a problem here in that this is a report of a committee and it is not until GA adopts it does it speak for the Kirk as the headline suggests.  (Any Church of Scotland polity wonks out there who want to correct this point please let me know.)  However, I am further surprised that a point in the process section of a report that has no real action points would be singled out for the headline.  Finally, there is also the implication in the line that it was some, but not necessarily all, members of the council who were led to recognize the insensitive and sinful attitudes.

The web site Christian Today has an article titled “Kirk Report on Homosexuality a ‘Major Disappointment.'”  The article reports that the liberal group OneKirk welcomes the report as a step to “greater openness” while the evangelical group Forward Together finds the report a “major disappointment” because it says nothing new.

Finally, among some other news articles, is an article in the The Guardian titled “‘Sinful’ Church of Scotland told it must accept gays in its ranks.”  Now, I must admit that I’m not sure where that headline comes from because the article covers the same territory the others do.  Again there seems to be an emphasis on that one line in the process section.  I highlight this article because in the last paragraph there is a comment from Callum Phillips of the gay rights pressure group Stonewall Scotland that the report was a “cop-out”  because it was a theological document and did nothing practical.

This promises to be an interesting item on the docket.