Society & Culture

Does your church have a statement on marriage? If so, is it in the constitution/bylaws? How was it approved (church vote, etc.)? How is it publicized, if at all (web site, handout to members, etc.)?

The elders of our church (we are an elder-led church) drafted the following statement on marriage. It is based primarily on the suggested language of the Alliance Defending Freedom, with some of our own wording added to stress the “grace” side of things. We have not yet made it public in our church as we are working on the best time and place to do that.

A hot topic today is whether the church should get out of the marriage business, whether the government should do civil unions, and terminology.

For example, should we keep the state terminology the same “marriage” and come up with a new term for a religiously endorsed heterosexual marriage, like Eden Marriage (or some other term). This would be the term for church/synagogue/mosque endorsed heterosexual marriages as well. I couldn’t fit all that in the first choice below, so please understand “church” in this way below. This would be the easiest and quickest to implement.



The relatio post disceptationem read aloud in the synod hall, while defending fundamental doctrine, calls for the church to build on positive values in unions that the church has always considered “irregular,” including cohabitating couples, second marriages undertaken without annulments and even homosexual unions.



Regarding homosexuals, it went so far as to pose the question whether the church could accept and value their sexual orientation without compromising Catholic doctrine.