All that celibacy stuff? Oh, never mind.

Yesterday the news broke that yet another mainline denomination has cleared homosexuals to be ordained.  [yawnnn..]  Excuse me, but it's hardly news anymore, right?   This is a path that has been trodden before.  So it's not so much the ordaining of gays to the clergy that's startling about this latest move for a denomination to enlarge its tent, but the way they chose to get there.  To quote from this NPR online article, the route the PCUSA took was "ratifying a proposal that removes the celibacy requirement for unmarried clergy".  That, apparently, was standing in the way of ordaining gays.

Um... wait.  What?


Are they saying that unmarried gays can't possibly be celibate?  I sure hope not.  Or that celibacy would be too much to expect for anyone ordained to the ministry?  Certainly there's a precedent for pastoral celibacy in the Catholic Church, albeit one that has met with mixed success over the centuries.  So what about existing heterosexual pastors who are unmarried?  Are they now also free to, um... fornicate at will?  Yikes!

I must be missing some crucial detail.  Surely such a high calling as the call to the professional ministry, the ordination to the pastorate, comes with an expectation of exemplary behavior and some measure of personal sacrifice.  Is it really too much to ask that an unmarried minister be celibate?  St. Paul suggests in I Cor. 7 that celibacy is a gift; some people have it and some don't.  And if you don't have it... then go ahead and marry, it's no sin.  And for gays, in more and more states (like mine), it's also legal.  In Paul's words, even though celibate singleness is a gift and useful for ministry, it's still "better to marry than to burn with passion".  In the New Testament, then, effective ministry is subservient to personal holiness.  You don't sacrifice morality for the sake of ministry.  The ends don't justify the means.  Ministry must yield. 

So, for those churches who want to be inclusive of gays in the pastorate (the theology of which I'm not debating here), rather than relax the standard for unmarried celibacy, why not instead have a church-sponsored ceremony that serves the purpose of recognizing a committed, monogamous same-sex relationship within the church... even if the state you live in does not do so?  That seems a better route to take; expect (and honor) a committment to life-long monogamy in the pastorate.  Don't lower the standard.

And if you don't aspire to be held to that higher standard... don't aspire to be ordained.  I don't!  There are some gifts I do not have.



(of course, if the government were out of the marriage business, as I've argued before, and Presidential Candidate Ron Paul also suggests, we wouldn't be having this discussion.  The churches would be defining marriage, not the state.)