Homosexuality Issue Threatens National Council of Churches : Faith: Either way, the group risks offending part of its membership. Conservatives will bolt if the council recognizes gay denominations; liberals are pressuring it to do so.

The nation’s leading ecumenical agency, still reeling from financial problems that prompted a major reorganization, is plagued with questions of sexuality that threaten to tear it apart.

At issue are Christian attitudes toward homosexuality--a topic that has embroiled virtually all of the nation’s major churches in heated debate and has now put the National Council of Churches, the preeminent symbol of the nation’s ecumenical movement, on the horns of a dilemma:

Should the council respond to demands of homosexuals and their advocates, or should it listen to Orthodox leaders who condemn homosexual practice and are threatening to bolt from the council?

The Rev. Joan Campbell, general secretary of the New York-based council, acknowledged in a recent interview the fine ecclesiastical tightrope the council is being forced to walk. Campbell said she is committed “to hold(ing) the body together in the best way possible.”

The national council is holding formal talks with the Metropolitan Community Churches, a small denomination whose membership is mostly homosexual, and is considering expanding the talks at the local and regional levels. The talks are extremely important to powerful factions of activists in Protestant churches that form the backbone of the council. Those activists support full acceptance of homosexuals in their churches, in ecumenical organizations, and in society at large.

At the same time, the national council is feverishly trying to hang on to its Orthodox member churches and is seeking to improve relations with other groups that condemn homosexual practice--the Roman Catholic Church and evangelical Protestant churches.

At the end of October, the national council was jolted when four of its nine Orthodox churches decided to join the Greek Orthodox Church in suspending national council activities--contending in a statement that the council had taken stands “contrary to the historic apostolic tradition of Christianity (pro-abortion, the ‘gay church,’ the altering of the Scripture texts, etc.).”

The council and the five Orthodox bodies earlier this fall named representatives to a joint blue-ribbon panel that will be meeting to discuss future Orthodox participation in the council.

United Methodist Bishop William Grove of West Virginia, chairman of the national council committee appointed last year to hold talks with the Metropolitan Community Churches, said homosexuality raises questions of scriptural interpretation and authority that evoke “profoundly different convictions shared by people passionately.”

In mid-November, Grove’s committee issued a report that said issues of sexuality generally, and homosexuality specifically, are like “a great seismic fault” that pose “a fundamental challenge to the peace and unity of the church.”

Campbell admits that walking the tightrope will be no easy matter and says she has made the whole issue “a matter of prayer.”

If the Orthodox churches abandon the council, it would lose more than one-fourth of its 32 member churches. Perhaps more significant from the standpoint of its ecumenical mission, the council would represent only one of the three major streams of Christianity--Protestantism.

Although Catholics participate on a number of council agencies, they have refused to become formal members.

For some Orthodox churches, the council’s ongoing conversations with the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches--a denomination founded in 1968 as a safe haven for homosexual Christians--raises a red flag, despite repeated denials by council officials that the talks could lead to council membership.

The Rev. Gabriel Abdelsayed, who heads the American branch of the Coptic Orthodox Church, said in an interview that Orthodox officials object to the talks regardless of the goal. They are of “no use,” he said, because homosexual activity is “against Scripture.”

Abdelsayed repeated a warning the Orthodox churches issued in 1983 when the Metropolitan Community Churches applied for membership: “If there is any membership, then all the Orthodox, both the Oriental and Eastern, will withdraw.”

Although five Orthodox churches have suspended council activities, so far they technically have remained members.

The Rev. Leonid Kishkovsky, an archpriest of the Orthodox Church in America and president of the national council until his term expires at the end of the year, said: “I have the sense that many Orthodox have the anxiety that dialogue (with the Metropolitan Community Churches) is part of the process that would lead to membership.”

He called that anxiety “understandable but inaccurate,” given that membership is not the goal of the talks.

Nevertheless, leaders of the Metropolitan Community Churches clearly maintain hope that their church will someday join the council. They think membership would help “legitimize” the denomination in the public’s eyes and see the ongoing conversations as paving the way.

The Rev. Troy Perry, the founder and moderator of the 22,000-member denomination, said: “The longer we can continue the dialogue, the easier it will be for our application to be processed. . . . To know us is to love us.

“When we feel the Holy Spirit (moves us), we will put our application back on the table,” Perry said.

That is precisely the concern of Orthodox leaders.

From the Orthodox viewpoint, Kishkovsky said, the council could not admit the Metropolitan Community Churches without endorsing homosexual practice because the church’s “organizing core and principle” is defined in terms of homosexuality.