By Carrie Baker

CHICAGO, May 4, 2006 – The Methodist church, which is currently the third largest Christian denomination in the United States with 8.2 million members, decided on Tuesday to uphold a decision that allowed one of its priests to deny worship to a man because he was a homosexual. 

The judicial council of the Church made up of nine members, have decided that the Rev. Edward Johnson of the South Hill, Virginia United Methodist Church was well inside of his rights to not permit the homosexual man to have membership within the church and that Rev. Johnson should not have been suspended for doing so. 

The original ruling said that the priest in charge of the church has rights to deny any membership he/she feels necessary.  That order was not only upheld on Tuesday, but they also ordered that the Rev. be reinstated and given back pay from July 2005, when he was originally removed by his bishop.  The current bishop of the Virginia Conference, Charlene Kammerer, and the board of Ordained Ministry of the Virginia Conference had tried earlier, to no avail, to get the panel to reconsider its earlier ruling. 
Many Christian churches are blurring the lines between what they are allowing and what they are disallowing.  For example, even though the council decided to uphold the earlier ruling, the judgment was still split showing the deepening divisions on homosexuality in general within Christian churches.  In 2004, the same judicial council ruled that a lesbian minister lose her robes after she acknowledged her relationship with another woman.  Although also in 2004, a church trial found that a Seattle clergywoman was not guilty of "practices incompatible with Christian teaching," even though she was in a same-sex relationship.  This is an issue that continues to divide both politics and religion with no clear end in sight.