The Disunited Methodist Church

I had an experience similar to something mentioned in the article. I was driving through a small town in Texas a couple of weeks ago, and passed by what used to be the “First United Methodist Church.” Most of the lettering was still up, but the “United” had been ripped straight out of the brick wall. It was eerie.

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary On the Monday after Thanksgiving, after Mindy Sutton finished her day as the dean of students at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, she drove home to Mabank, a small town of about 4,500 an hour southeast.

Gurley, 63, grew up in the Dallas suburbs of Mesquite and Wylie but describes himself as “about as country as a city boy can be.” He sports a gray horseshoe mustache and speaks in a drawl that bends vowels into two syllables.

The pandemic-prompted acceptance of remote work spurred many Dallasites to move to their lake houses full time, and these days, the main road through Mabank is thick with traffic and lined with billboards advertising waterfront real estate.

Through a program called Love’s Outreach, they serve 150 meals each month to residents of Cherokee Shores, an unincorporated area at the edge of a dense forest where meth dealers sometimes hide.

Daniels and Gurley Googled the prohibition on same-sex marriage and arrived at Genesis 2:24, which reads, “A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh.” The language also appears in the book of Matthew when Jesus is questioned by the Pharisees about divorce.

An examination of the grammar, a comparison to similar wording in Genesis, and a review of the surrounding context in chapter 18 led Scholz to a reading of the passage concluding that what is forbidden is male-on-male incestuous rape.

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