Rev. Greg Dell put his own agenda above the law of the United Methodist Church when he conducted a service of “holy union” for two gay men, the prosecutor argued Thursday, as a landmark church trial got under way in Downers Grove.
Rev. Stephen Williams of Franklin Park, chosen to present the church’s case against Dell, said that the honor of the church and its 8.5 million members is at stake in a trial that has drawn national attention.
But Dell’s counsel, Rev. Larry Pickens of Maple Park United Methodist Church in Chicago, countered that the Methodist ban on gay marriage conflicts not only with other portions of church law, but with a broader tradition that has put pastoral necessity above legal limitations.
“It is really the United Methodist Church that is on trial here,” Pickens said. “We are facing theological schizophrenia in our church. This is the corner into which we have painted ourselves.”
The unusual public trial is a high-stakes confrontation over a 1996 church law that prohibits Methodist pastors from performing marriage-style blessings of homosexual couples.
If found guilty, Dell could be banned from ordained ministry. Either way, many Methodists believe that decades of wrangling over the church’s stance toward homosexuality will come to a head in the next year.
Yet under the vaulted ceiling and stained glass of First United Methodist Church of Downers Grove, the mood was businesslike Thursday, even cordial. Dell and Williams traded good-natured quips as they faced each other across the communion-rail that was serving as a courtroom bar, and more than 400 clergy and laypeople in attendance occasionally broke out into laughter.
In most respects the proceeding mirrored a secular trial, with Methodist clergy acting as judge, prosecutor, defense counsel and jury. Fifteen local pastors–13 jurors and 2 alternates, including 5 women and 10 men–sat in the first three pews of the church listening intently, occasionally deviating from secular practice to question witnesses directly.
William presented the church’s case in three hours with three witnesses, including the president of the United Methodist Council of Bishops, Chicago Bishop C. Joseph Sprague and Dell himself.
Dell is expected to testify again in his own defense, but Williams called him on Thursday to acknowledge that he had vowed to uphold church law at his ordination. Dell also testified briefly to the facts of the Sept. 19, 1998 union ceremony at Broadway United Methodist Church on Chicago’s North Side.
Both sides insisted that the trial has more to do with the definition of ministry than it does with sex.
“Whatever our duty to minister to homosexuals or any other people, it does not include, it cannot include a ceremony our Judicial Council has . . . forbidden us to perform,” said Williams. “Any other interpretation makes a mockery of eight-and-a-half million Methodists.”
Williams argued that the church has a right to create laws, and a right to expect its ministers to uphold those laws, as they promise in their ordination ceremony. “A threat to this right is a threat to the church’s very existence,” he said.
“The honor of our church, the honor of the Order of Elders, is bound up in this moment,” Williams argued. “Let it not be said in this solemn moment that we lost our courage, lost our soul.”
The most dramatic testimony of the day came from Sprague, who talked about his struggle to file an official complaint against Dell, despite his personal disagreement with the church’s policy toward homosexuality and his respect for Dell.
While he repeatedly stressed his belief that he had to uphold the law of the church, a point that the church counsel wanted the jury to hear, Sprague also said he felt a bishop must be held to a different standard. And in response to a juror’s question, the bishop acknowledged that he had performed two “holy union” services for homosexual couples before the 1996 prohibition was enacted.
“As a pastor, while I always sought to honor the vows that I took, nevertheless, in matters of particular conscience, I felt and behaved with more elasticity as a pastor than I do as a bishop,” Sprague said. “When we assume at any particular moment in time that we have landed on truth with a capital T, I become very nervous.”
Among Dell’s supporters who rallied behind the church Thursday was Rev. Jimmy Creech, the former pastor from Nebraska who faced a church trial a year ago on charges of performing a lesbian wedding service.
The jury in that trial failed by one vote to reach the two-thirds majority needed for a guilty finding, although Creech was not reappointed by his bishop when his term as pastor came to an end, and has since gone on voluntary leave.
Meanwhile, last August, the United Methodist Church’s highest judicial body ruled that the prohibition against homosexual unions is, indeed, binding law.
Dell’s trial went late into the evening Thursday and was scheduled to reconvene early Friday morning. Officials said the proceedings could be completed by Friday night.
