Can more than one voice of conscience exist in the same faith community?

Should pastors be forbidden to officiate at same-sex weddings? Or forbidden not to?

I draw lessons from a first-grade play.

“But my parents won’t allow me to be in the play because it’s wrong to hold a gun,” I explained, barely pushing out the words against racing heart and tightening throat.

Mrs. Navarro, her coiffed white hair not softening the stern features she said traced back to Mexico’s most revered president, was not about to budge: “Is there a problem with your brain, young man? What could be wrong with pretending to carry a gun in a play?”

I was in first grade, son of Mennonite missionary parents who had just moved our family to Mexico City.

Between culture shock, theological shock and sheer terror, I had about used up my explanatory resources but tried one last time: “My parents say war is wrong. We’re Mennonites, and that’s what we’re taught. They say because war is wrong even carrying guns in a play is wrong.”

Mrs. Navarro snorted. “I’m not impressed; you are strange people. If you just won’t carry a gun, fine, unhappy boy. But you must be in the play. You’ll get a tiny part and be bored while your classmates have the fun you could be having.”

Half a century later, I can smile at the memory. But I still recall the sting.

And it took me decades to shift from blaming my parents for the misery they could have spared me had their consciences been more flexible. It was only a play.

Did you have to make me a laughingstock in first grade, not to mention seventh, when you made me exercise on a gym floor mat while my classmates learned dancing, another seduction of evil culture?

Or college, when I had to confess I’d never been to a movie theater because that, too, was bad?

Yet now that my parents are gone, I’m thankful for their great gift: teaching me that pearl of great price that is obeying conscience.

I’m grateful also for the tradition undergirding my parents’ treasuring of conscience.

For centuries, Anabaptist-Mennonites have believed with the Peter of Acts 5:29 and the radical reformers inspired by Peter that when human rules and God’s rules clash, “We must obey God instead of people.”

This matters today as denominational battles over same-sex understandings rage on.

It matters because the root cause of the war and our inability to extend ceasefire is conscience. No matter our perspective, most of us are convinced that to believe other than we do is to violate conscience. Any ceasefire must then solve the riddle of how more than one voice of conscience can exist in the same faith community.

In Mennonite Church USA, which I serve as dean at an Eastern Mennonite Seminary (EMS) confronted with how we form and honor consciences amid voices so at odds, the way forward is unclear. Yet finding a path is critical as divisions roil us.

Some congregations or regional conferences are voting to leave Mennonite Church USA because same-sex relationships are sinful, they must obey God at any price, and they believe Mennonite Church USA is not adequately maintaining dikes against sin.

Convinced justice and obedience to God require it, other congregations or conferences are, in effect, engaging in civil disobedience. Even as it goes against current Mennonite Church USA teachings, they are installing pastors in same-sex relationships, or their pastors are officiating at same-sex weddings.

At EMS, students preparing for ministry must wrestle with which theological convictions they may hold without running afoul of one denominational layer or another. How do they navigate when at times theology or practice of one layer—whether congregational, conference or national—is at odds with another?

Dare they candidly express their theologies (on any side of the spectrum) except at high cost? The price can involve external consequences for holding the “wrong” position—or internal soul, conscience, integrity consequences of blending in by sublimating convictions.

There is talk of restructuring Mennonite Church USA to take us beyond this wilderness.

I don’t pretend to be sure how, but it will have to address opposing voices of conscience. Such efforts may then further incite those wanting to exclude or marginalize Mennonite Church USA voices judged to be obeying humans over God.

As tensions mount, my faith in a reconciling outcome is shaken.

But I know what I wish for: the non-negotiability of conscience somehow to be named and honored.

So for example, Menno­nite Church USA is debating:

(1) whether our newest polity handbook should forbid officiation at same-sex weddings and
(2) whether the handbook offers rules or more flexible guidelines.

Meanwhile some—pointing, say, to the Cour D’Alene, Idaho, requirement that the for-profit Hitching Post Lakeside Chapel serve all comers, including LGBT—worry that someday a polity flip-flop could make same-sex wedding officiation a requirement.

I yearn for an outcome that doesn’t in effect “criminalize” ministers who make the “wrong” choice—whether conscience calls for refusing or embracing officiation at same-sex weddings.

A complexity of Mennonite—and often broader Christian—history is that commitment conscientiously to obey God has repeatedly foundered on opposing hearings of God. So generation after generation we face a paradox: Mennonites whose tradition sprang from commitment to hear God even if this required dissent to the established church in turn marginalize or sever relationships with those who dare dissent to current Mennonite understandings.

The war over theology and polity of same-sex relationships has brought Mennonite Church USA and many denominations (including United Methodist, to which the second-largest cohort of EMS students belong) to a watershed.

We can do the usual thing.

Putting our own consciences first, we can sanction or refuse to honor as faithful Christians those we believe hear God wrongly. Or we can ask whether this time we could try a new thing: structuring ourselves in ways that honor multiple voices of conscience.

In any denomination facing this riddle, many congregations, pastors, members and denominational entities are convinced they must obey God in ways anathema to the others.

A striking Mennonite Church USA example: one pastor’s officiation at a gay son’s wedding generated widely circulated open letters from family members offering contrasting—yet passionately Christian and scripturally based—expressions of conscience.

In other denominational settings, some resonate with Frank Schaefer, United Methodist pastor defrocked for officiating at the same-sex wedding of his son before being re-frocked. He explained his inability to uphold the UM Book of Discipline:

“Frankly, my conscience does not allow me to uphold the entire Discipline, because it contains discriminatory provisions and language that is hurtful and harmful to our homosexual brothers and sisters. It denies them their full humanity. I simply cannot uphold those parts of the Discipline.”

And some echo Michael Bradley, who in the Witherspoon Institute Public Discourse (“Between Magisterium and Magistrate: Notre Dame’s Choice on Marriage’s Meaning,” Oct. 28, 2014) opposes same-sex marriage and approvingly cites these words from the Roman Catholic 2003 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons”:

“In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws. … In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.”

It may be impossible for such opposing voices of conscience to remain in fellowship.

Solving the riddle will take something like the Pentecost inbreaking of the Spirit that enabled understanding across a babble of languages. Yet I pray that instead of emulating our culture’s fragmentation into an individualistic affiliation only with our own kind, we contribute our individual voices to a divine project larger than any of us alone can build.

I dare imagine that in the reconciling and peacemaking power of Christ there is neither LGBT nor straight and even that in Christ there is neither traditionalist nor progressive. I imagine the Spirit descending even on today’s speakers of different and often battling tongues.

I imagine Christians, guns holstered not only in plays but when loving LGBT-viewpoint enemies, able still to shake hands, pray together, break Communion bread together.

I imagine us able to look into each other’s eyes and see on the other side this paradox and this treasure: one whose conscience is thoroughly at odds with my own yet who remains a faithful Christian and in some way, however creatively or miraculously this is structured, a member of my faith community.

Michael A. King is dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, Harrisonburg, Va., publisher of Cascadia Publishing House LLC and author of Fractured Dance: Gadamer and a Mennonite Conflict over Homosexuality (Pandora Press U.S., 2001), which analyzes the difficulties of understanding opposing voices of conscience.