The Sexuality Debate in the Uniting Church
A divisive issue
Sexuality has been a very big and divisive issue in the Uniting Church over the past six or so years. The New South Wales Synod site has links to a wide range of information about the issue. including letters from various church members and links to a wide variety of other material on the issue of the place of homosexual people in the church around the world.
If you are interested in some more extended and scholarly treatments of this issue which come from a perspective that argues to include homosexual people fully in the life of the church, you could look at Homosexuality and the Bible by Walter Wink, Is the Homosexual my Neighbour? - a transcript of an address given by Tony Campolo and his wife, Peggy at North Park College chapel, Can the Church Listen? - a series of Bible studies for those who want to hear the stories of gay and lesbian Christians, and Homosexuality and the Uniting Church by Rev Dr Robert Bos You can find these links on the NSW Synod site, but they're a long way down! Another good place to look is One Man's Web where Rev Andrew Prior, a Uniting Church Minister from South Australia looks at this issue. In addition, this issue has recently been getting some attention more generally in various biblioblogs. Two that I have found particularly interesting have been on Doug Chaplin's Metacatholic blog and James McGrath's Exploring Our Matrix blog (this link is to the index page for posts about homosexuality and kind of content varies between posts). The post I have linked to provides an index to previous posts on the issue and Doug has attempted to be quite systematic about the issue. Both these blogs provide links to other blogs that articulate a range of positions on this issue.
If you want to look at information which supports the idea that homosexual people should not have leadership roles in the church, you could start at the Assembly of Confessing Congregations website, bearing in mind that by no means all of the material here could be called scholarly.