Sex & Gender Identity - Considering Johannesburg

The free discussion guide is here: [GUIDE LINK]. If you missed Episode 1, on marriage, divorce and remarriage, it’s here: [EP01 LINK].

Not a Word I Disagree With

On the last day of the 2026 General Conference, Lori Rowe, a lay delegate from Florida, walked to microphone three to speak against an amendment. Her first words were, “There’s not a word that I disagree with in the substitute amendment.”

Her objection wasn’t to anything the amendment in front of her said. It was to what it replaced. And that’s this whole story in a sentence.

Petition 1127 rewrote the Global Methodist Church’s statement on sexual sin and added its first explicit statement on sex and gender identity. On the floor it took about ten minutes, and every argument that mattered was about what gets left out. What must a church say to a girl being told she might really be a boy? To frightened parents? To an adult who transitioned years ago and walks into your church next Sunday? And what must a church never forget to say?

This is a tender subject. Some of you love someone who has wrestled with gender dysphoria, or have wrestled with it yourselves. I’m going to tell you the truth as I understand it, the way Jesus would want it told to someone he loves, because he does love you.

Two Sentences and a Door

Our Social Witness, ¶302, is fourteen short statements, each a sentence or two with Scripture attached. We made it short on purpose, after decades of watching the United Methodist Social Principles grow into what Chappell Temple, this year’s Social Witness chair, called the quadrennial bloodletting. Changing it took a three-quarters vote, and whatever we wrote into ¶302 in Johannesburg will be very difficult to rewrite.

Here is ¶302.8 as the church adopted it in Costa Rica in 2024:

“We are saddened by all expressions of sexual behavior, including pornography, polygamy, and promiscuity, that do not recognize the sacred worth of each individual or that seek to exploit, abuse, objectify, or degrade others, or that represent less than God’s intentional design for his children. While affirming a scriptural view of sexuality and gender, we welcome all to experience the redemptive grace of Jesus and are committed to being a safe place of refuge, hospitality, and healing for any who may have experienced brokenness in their sexual lives.”

Two sentences. The first is a statement of sorrow; the second is a welcome. Twelve of the fourteen statements in ¶302 open with “We believe.” This one opened with “We are saddened,” the only one that tells the world how we feel.

It named three behaviors, a vice list like the ones in Scripture, and gave three tests for everything else. The word “gender” appeared once, undefined. Nothing about two sexes, transition or children. In 2024 that silence may have looked like restraint. By 2026 a good many of our people had decided it looked like somewhat of a negligent gap.

And it ended with the door open: “we welcome all to experience the redemptive grace of Jesus.” As the legislation developed, that language of welcome seemed to go missing.

Call Sin Sin

Five petitions were aimed squarely at ¶302.8, from Springfield Oaks in South Georgia, Jonathan Lee of the Upper Midwest, Stewart Kouba of Trinity and others, most wanting to name specific sins. I wish those had gotten more play; I think particularity is our friend. Of the four I could read, every one kept a statement of welcome.

Then there’s 1127, filed by David Watson of Allegheny West, who really needs no introduction. His rationale was blunt:

“As a church, we are not primarily interested in what makes us sad, but in identifying ethical and unethical forms of behavior. We identify immoral actions as sinful.”

Three aims, plainly stated: call sin sin; say there are two sexes and that sex and gender belong together; and deal with intersex conditions head on, so nobody can use them to argue the categories away. This was all very solid, and I appreciate Watson for it.

His petition changed the verb to “we recognize as sinful,” added sex slavery to the list, affirmed “there are two sexes,” and called intersex conditions “disordered” while valuing the person as the image of God. It called transition “morally wrong” for adults and “physical child abuse” for minors. And it closed with a sharper welcome than 2024’s, naming “those with gender dysphoria and same-sex attraction.”

I filed Petition 1457, a statement under ¶302.9 on biblical anthropology: that all persons are created by God in his image as male and female, and that human identity isn’t defined by fallen desires, inclinations or temptations but by redemption and sanctification in Christ. The committee voted not to approve it, 40–0 with one abstention. So now you know where I stand, and you know I lost.

Thirty-Six to Three

The Social Witness committee supported 1127 as amended, 36–3–0 (Daily Journal, Wed 2 Sep, p. 40). It added adultery and pedophilia to the list. Good. It struck the “physical child abuse” sentence. I think that’s regrettable. And it added a paragraph opposing “practices, policies, or interventions that encourage or assist minors in seeking to alter their God given sex through social, medical, or surgical transition”: narrower, with no word about adults, but wider, reaching social transition and policies.

One thing isn’t marked at all. The petition’s third paragraph, welcome and Scripture references included, simply isn’t there, not struck through, just absent. When Temple presented it on the floor he seemed to indicate it was supposed to be there, but I still found myself confused.

At 92 percent in committee, 1127 went on a consent agenda, to be adopted without debate. On Thursday, Bella Duke of Mid-Texas and ten delegates pulled it off, and it waited two days.

Ten Minutes

Saturday was the last day of legislation. Brad Folsom of South Georgia moved to cut debate to two speeches each way, two minutes apiece, and the body, tired and watching the clock, chose speed. An hour later Temple brought 1127 to the floor, read something close to the missing welcome, and called on Susan Kent of Trinity, who had a substitute “which will simplify this whole petition.” Kent kept “We believe,” the word “sinful,” and the welcome and Scripture references, but left out everything specific: no named behaviors, not even pornography; no marriage; no two sexes; nothing on minors. Her text, she said, “does not define our Christian ethics by a list of prohibited behavior, but roots it in God’s design of humanity.”

To my mind, given the myriad vice lists found in our very Scriptures, Kent’s proposal was decidedly unscriptural.

Lori Rowe’s reply was the mirror image. She agreed with every word of the substitute; her objection was its silence, above all about children. “We have children who are being asked to reject their sex by their peers, by their schools, by people online. This is being done without consent or knowledge of parents.” She asked for “unmistakable condemnation of these practices.” Practices, notice: not children, not parents.

The substitute failed on a show of hands, and I’m very glad for it. No one spoke for or against 1127 itself; the chair went straight to the ballot. The hall screen put up the count: 308 yes, 41 no, about 88 percent, well past the three-quarters it needed.

Then Temple took the microphone: “Many of us have been working on this issue for more than 40 years. … You’ve made my last rodeo my best one.” Anyone who lived through the long Methodist argument over sexuality, from 1972 to the division that gave us the Global Methodist Church, heard relief in that. The church was finally saying out loud what it has always believed.

What the Book Says Now

As printed, the adopted text calls sinful all sexual behavior that exploits, abuses, objectifies or degrades, naming adultery, pedophilia, pornography, polygamy, promiscuity and sex slavery; grounds our ethic in God’s design of us “as males and females” and in marriage between one man and one woman; affirms “there are two sexes”; calls intersex conditions “disordered” while valuing the person “as imago Dei”; and opposes transition for minors. It has no Scripture references and no welcome.

It doesn’t call experiencing gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction a sin; its list of sins is a list of behaviors. It says nothing about adults who have transitioned, and it sets no rule for membership; ¶302 is a witness, not a rulebook.

Which leaves real questions. Will the welcome be in the published 2026 Discipline? (I’m fairly confident it will.) What does “social transition” mean for youth ministers on the front lines with young people caught up in sexual critical theory? We came out of a body obsessed with activism; to what degree will GMC churches engage the public on these “policies,” if at all? How do we receive the adult who has already transitioned? (On that, I’d recommend the Institute on Religion and Democracy’s panel The Church and Gender Ideology with KathyGrace Duncan. And on what’s happening among our young people and in our legislatures, my conversation with January Littlejohn.) And Temple’s own question from Thursday: will it play in Paris, Panama, Kenya and Nepal? Is this crisis really as unique to the West as we think?

Male and Female Created He Them

I believe the heart of what the church adopted is true. God made us male and female, and our bodies are not costumes worn over some truer self hidden inside. The very first thing Scripture tells us about human beings is this:

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27)

When Jesus was asked about marriage, he went straight back to that verse: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4). The Lord of the church treated the two sexes as part of the foundation, not an arrangement we’re free to renegotiate. I don’t think we should apologize for saying it. A church that can’t say what a human being is won’t be able to say much about how a human being is saved.

The Groaning Body

But for a growing number of families this isn’t a theoretical debate. It’s tempting to believe that participating in someone’s delusion might bring them peace, and we do desire peace for people. Gender dysphoria is real. The distress is real. If you’ve ever sat with someone at war with their own body, you know it isn’t something to laugh at. It’s something to weep with.

The Bible isn’t embarrassed by bodies that hurt. Paul, who had his own thorn in the flesh, wrote:

“For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” (Romans 8:22–23)

Christians groan in their bodies, all of us. The Christian hope for a body at war with itself is not a better body of our own making; it’s the redemption of the body God gave us, in the resurrection.

But it isn’t only a future hope. Salvation is a present reality, which is why I wish the General Conference had adopted my legislation. The peace we desire and offer is found not in ourselves but in the person, work and mind of Christ. By the power of the Holy Spirit we can be freed from this confusion and our bent toward sinning. I wish a body so confident about the power of the Holy Ghost had said so plainly. These are hard words to bring to someone in pain, but they aren’t cruel, because they’re true, and they’re the same hope I hold for my own disordered heart.

The Norm and the Exception

The sentence I expect will hurt the most calls intersex conditions “disordered.” In Christian theology that doesn’t mean disgusting, guilty or sinful. It means something isn’t working the way it was made to work, because we live in a fallen world. By that definition my eyes are disordered; I’m wearing contact lenses. My heart is disordered, and so is yours. In the same conversation where Jesus said God made them male and female, he said this:

“For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.” (Matthew 19:12)

He names the norm, and then names people whose bodies don’t fit it, some from birth. The exception doesn’t erase the norm. And God’s word to such people, long before Jesus, was astonishing:

“For thus saith the LORD unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, and choose the things that please me, and take hold of my covenant; Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters.” (Isaiah 56:4–5)

If the Global Methodist Church is going to say “disordered,” we had better say it the way God says it, with a place and a name attached, and knowing it’s true of us too.

The Little Ones

I support what the church said about children. The loving thing is to walk with a distressed child patiently, with good counsel and the parents at the center, not to start a child down a road of drugs and surgery that may not be reversible. That’s no longer a fringe view. England, among others, has pulled back sharply on puberty blockers for minors.

I’m disappointed the committee struck “physical child abuse.” Many parents went down that road because they were terrified, bullied and pressured by “experts” who asked, “Would you rather have a living child of the opposite sex, or a dead child?” To shrink now from calling the travesty of sex transition what it was is a failure of the church to name what has taken place. Parents who gave in need to repent. Comfort without repentance is its own cruelty; it cannot absolve unconfessed guilt.

But I’m glad the new text reaches past medicine to social transition. We aren’t only concerned about bodies but about the mistaken beliefs within them. The Scriptures warn:

“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.” (Deuteronomy 22:5)

Do we have the clarity to explain why? Those words will land in real homes and real youth rooms, and we’ll need a great deal of wisdom about what they ask of a teenager, a parent and a youth pastor. Jesus was stern with anyone who got between him and a child:

“But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:14)

Our first job with a struggling child isn’t to win an argument. It’s to make sure nothing we do keeps that child from Jesus.

And Such Were Some of You

The Scripture this paragraph cited in 2024, First Corinthians 6, doesn’t stop at its hard list of sins in verses 9 and 10. Then Paul writes this:

“And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” (1 Corinthians 6:11)

That verse is the whole gospel in a sentence. It tells the truth about sin and the truth about grace, and the Scriptures don’t let us separate them. Methodists have always known this. Wesley’s societies weren’t clubs for the already holy. The General Rules asked one condition of those who wanted to join: “a desire to flee from the wrath to come, and to be saved from their sins.” That door was the point. So long as people were willing to walk through it and take up their cross every day, they always had a place among us.

This shouldn’t be hard. We preach the truth about sin and repentance, and anyone the Spirit empowers to receive that word and turn has a place in God’s church, however strange by the world’s standards. We’re a peculiar people anyway:

“But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” (1 Peter 2:9)

Chappell Temple called this his last rodeo, and his best. I’m glad for a church that finally says plainly what it believes. Until next time, speak the truth in love, and “grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ” (Ephesians 4:15).

Go deeper

• Watch Episode 2 of Considering Johannesburg:

• Download the free discussion guide (both texts side by side, the Kent substitute, the floor arguments in the delegates’ own words, Scripture, and questions): [GUIDE LINK]

• Primary sources: GC2026 petitions (Petition 1127, Petitions Report p. 70; Petition 1457, p. 72) · Workbook and Daily Journals (Daily Journal, Wed 2 Sep, pp. 40–41) · the GC2026 livestream, Thursday 3 and Saturday 5 September

• The Church and Gender Ideology, Institute on Religion and Democracy, with KathyGrace Duncan

• Trans Ideology, Our Children, & the Church: my conversation with January Littlejohn

Next time: protecting the unborn and the mother, Petition 1111, pulled from the same consent agenda that Thursday morning.

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