Read Daring to be United, and think as you do that more than 6,000 churches have disaffiliated from America’s second-largest Protestant denomination because of its welcome-mat stance toward 2SLGBTQIA+ peoples: since 2019, one in five United Methodist Church congregations has defected.
In Daring to be United: Including Lesbians and Gays in The United Church of Canada, Alyson Huntly documents the UCC’s effort to embrace people of different sexual orientations. Her stories, as she reports them, “show people changing their hearts and minds,” members of “a church that dares to live out God’s inclusive and uniting love.” But, oh, the 1980s “were years of intense struggle and turmoil,” for “many congregations…were deeply and bitterly divided.”
“Page after page, the reader is struck by the gravity of the United Church’s…courage to persist, despite its internal conflict and attendant upheaval,” Quill & Quire reports. Huntly is thoroughgoing in her presentation of “members’ accounts of how they experienced ‘The Issue,’ as it became known”: tales “of conflict, confusion, as well as compassion, abound.” Others were impressed by the author’s telling: “The greatest strength of this book,” The Anglican Church of Canada declared, “is the stories and the people who illuminate the struggle.”
Daring to be United: Including Lesbians and Gays in The United Church of Canada
By Alyson Huntly
United Church Publishing House, 1998
