Hey! Good news!

We found those young people your church keeps saying they are looking for. You know, the next generation that we keep hoping will come in our doors and save us? Well, we saw a  whole bunch of them today!

Here they are:

Here’s another view of more of them:

Our church members found them at the Dallas Pride Parade today. Thousands of them. We were there, along with five other United Methodist congregations, and almost 15 other churches, marching in the Annual Dallas Gay Pride Parade.

And, dang! We found a whoppin’ bunch ‘o young people!!!

I mean, not two or three. Thousands and thousands of ’em. All gathered together in one place.

Apparently, like John Wesley found several hundred years ago, there a big old world of young people, who might never darken the doors of a church. But they really really seemed to love our tshirts, with the church slogan on them…

They gave us lots of “high fives””‘ and smiles…and even some shock and joy, when they saw our shirts.

So, anyway…good news!

Those young people your church wants to attract really DO exist! And they seemed grateful to see church folks. And I got the feeling they just might be looking for the kind of church that most United Methodist Churches imagine they might be.

There’s just one teeny, tiny problem…

You know what pesky language in the Book of Discipline?

The silly language about homosexuality being “incompatible?”

Yeah…they hate that stuff.

They are soooo over doctrine like that.

Meanwhile in our denomination, we keep pretending doctrine like that is a matter of life or death. And as long as we do, as long as we cling to that exclusionary language –which logically is more in line with Westboro Baptist than most traidtional mainline protestant doctrine today(1)– they’re not gonna visit us.

Which is really too bad, doncha think?

But if you want to march with us in the Pride Parade next year, I’ll be happy to introduce you to some of them.

Because they are beautiful children of God.

(1) Arguably, the UMC is now officially the largest of the traditional mainline protestant denominations to not allow some “live and let live” like policies with respect to same sex wedding. This puts us, whether we like it or not, more in line with folks like Westboro than with those we have traditionally assumed we are most like.