A number of months ago I served as the monitor for the hearing on the Sexuality Study for my synod. What was supposed to be an occasion for attendees to speak and me to listen got inverted quickly: I ended up doing most of the teaching, and they did most of the listening, for reasons I predicted awhile ago—no one actually knows what this study is about. It is not about homosexuality!

There are roughly two paragraphs addressing the subject, the point of which are, this church does not agree about this issue. The problem is, once I reviewed the actual content of the document (which most people there hadn’t read, no matter which side of the homosexuality issue they were on), pretty much everyone lost interest. As I had also expected.

Some months after that I found myself in a church venue where someone on the way to a similar hearing was exhorting people to report their comments online. The person phrased it this way: “Whether you are in favor of full inclusion, or whether you have… deep, deep problems with full inclusion, God bless you—just tell them what you think.” Hardly an unbiased turn of phrase; and one that, of course, missed the point of the Sexuality Study, which is not about inclusion one way or another.

But the broader issue is not about inclusion or exclusion either. Every community, without exception, includes some and excludes others. Communities that claim to include all exercise a very subtle and shame-based form of discipline on those who disagree. “Welcoming” and “inclusion” are actually void concepts, because they hide the real issues on which every community, of whatever sort, however big or small, is formed. There are always things which any given community cannot talk about and will not tolerate.

In fact, a welcome can be a coercive tool: become one of us! think like us! join us! There is a certain real threat in welcome, an ever-present unspoken condition, no matter who or what is doing the welcoming. Contemporary philosophy recognizes this, though the church by and large hasn't caught on. Personally, I'd like to see every chuch remove the "All are welcome" signs from the front; they are either deceitful or desperate.

More specifically to the issue at hand, though: every single church community excludes certain people from its roster. All of them exclude young children and the mentally deficient. Invalids that cannot leave their beds are generally not entrusted with the care of a parish. Criminals serving time are not included. In most cases, women are excluded. In our American Lutheran bodies, people without a master’s degree are excluded. (Does that make us guilty of class bias?) Non-Lutherans are mostly excluded. Non-Christians are entirely excluded. All this makes apparent the inanity of the inclusion/welcome argument, where homosexual ordination is concerned.

Inclusion and exclusion are not real criteria of anything, and certainly not the public ministry of the church. They are conceptual substitutes for the much harder business of sinners loving each other while they remain sinners.