Mike Mather, a pastor who Dan Dick told me I should pay attention to if I wanted to see good things happening in Indiana, wrote recently of his frustration with so many of us Methobloggers.
I have done an unofficial count over the last two months of the 10 bloggers I read most often (who post fairly regularly) and I can tell you that the overwhelmingly the social issue that they write about – and that their readers most respond to – is sexuality. Now, I believe sexuality, is an important issue – but many, if not most, of these folks – are giving it time like the Bible talks about this issue more than any other. If you took out the references in the Bible to poverty – the Bible would look like swiss cheese. If you took out the references to sexuality – you would hardly notice and would cover large swaths of the Bible between references – in some cases 100’s of pages. It would be hard to cover 10 pages of the Bible without reference to the poor. Now all the references to sexuality wouldn’t distress me so much – but I just wonder – where in the hell do people find all that time to look into that and never write, or at least in any sort of close proportionate way, to the issues that are killing so many of our young people, to the ways in which so many of our sisters and brothers are living and dying – with people only seeing them as empty vessels who need to be fixed and not as beloved children of God with lots to offer.
For my part – and I don’t know if I’m on Mike’s top 10 – I see this from the blog author side. If I want to increase comments and traffic to my blog, all I have to do is write about homosexuality.
I’ve made an intentional effort to stay out of the sex debates recently so as not to have my blog taken over by it as we get closer to General Conference.
But I am still aware of the second half of Mike’s critique. As his rather convicting comment on my last post indicates, it not hard to bump into places where the gospel needs some nurturing. We just have to step outside the comfortable boxes we build for ourselves.
This may go for bloggers even more than normal humans.
John Meunier 
In the UMC, basic honesty should allow us to acknowledge that most of the conservative side are frustrated that the veracity of biblical teaching on homosexuality would even be up for discussion, and have encouraged moratoria on such debates, while the Reconciling/Soulforce side (and the wealthy secular foundations that fund both) won’t stop their outrageous tactics of always having to “make an issue of homosexuality.” With their tactics including such things as brazen violation of the covenant UM leaders agree to live by, harshly mean-spirited treatment of those who disagree with their agenda, merciless character assassination of those on the conservative side, smashing other people’s property, racist efforts to limit the power of African delegates, and demanding that in order to accommodate THEIR own personal issues with lack of sexual self-control every General Conference has to spend days on end debating the same old arguments and enduring their illegal temper-tantrums, trespassings, insults, intimidation, and false accusations so that there’s no time to address the unrelated problems and pains that OTHER people are feeling around the world, the UMC sexuality debates do NOT just concern the Bible verses on sexuality. Rather, these debates are directly relevant to the Bible verses that also address honesty, loving treatment of others (especially within the church), selfishness, self-control, respect for church and civil authority, racial egalitarianism, being careful with our speech, and the qualities that leaders in the church should have. If you take out all the verses on those topics, you’d also have a pretty “Swiss cheese” bible.
That being said, our church should extend compassion to gays and lesbians. But it’s worth considering that they ARE only 1% of the population, and much more of the people who are in (or should be in) our churches are suffering from poverty than from same-sex attractions.
why sex and not poverty?
discussing sex threatens no one. discussing poverty, on the other hand, threatens the entire edifice our society is built upon, and you threaten that at your peril…