UNABLE TO BEACH consensus regarding the ordination of gays, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), like many other denominations, found itself embroiled for years in a series of winner-take-all battles with no end in sight. In 2001 a wearied General Assembly appointed the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church to help to break the stalemate. The task force consisted of 20 Presbyterians from across the theological spectrum; members of the group strongly disagreed about church policy regarding gays. Many of us still disagree, but we are all committed to finding a way forward. (In what follows I speak only for myself and not for my fellow task force members.)

When the task force first began to meet, many progressives wanted us to provide a new teaching on the subject of gay sexuality. Many traditionalists wanted us to confirm in no uncertain terms the church's prior teaching. We did neither. For better or worse, we were not given a mandate by the General Assembly to tell the church what to do; rather, we were empowered to try to model a way of approaching disputes that the church could endorse. While this may seem a modest goal, we did manage to become the first official Presbyterian group in 30 years of wrangling over the gay issue to file a unanimous report. That alone merits attention.

How did we move toward this unanimity? A decisive step was taken at the first meeting. We could have simply dived head first into controversial matters to see where the debate would lead us. I confess that this strategy appealed to me. In hindsight I can see that that would have been a serious mistake.

At the urging of a wiser member, we opted instead to take a step back and do something deceptively simple. We decided to concentrate not so much on the things that divided us but on the things that made us Christian in the first place. We spent much of our time worshiping, reading scripture, praying, and engaging together in Christian fellowship. We affirmed a common desire to bear witness to the love of the triune God who claims each one of us, notwithstanding our disagreements. This helped provide a grace-filled context within which to reapproach the matters over which we differed.

When we finally did take up the question of same-sex relationships, we began not with our own individual biases but by studying together a diverse collection of theological perspectives. This gave us a common literature and a language within which to discuss what was at stake. We went through a process of identifying strengths and weaknesses in every position, including our own, and looked for bridges between one position and another.

Having injected this measure of objectivity into our study, we 'also tried to relate personally to each position, though no one was forced to identify publicly with one position or the other. Some of us shared stories about our experiences with gay and lesbian people. It was important to the tenor of our conversations that one of our task force members was an openly gay man in a committed relationship.

In studying the church's official position of welcoming gays as individuals but refusing to sanction a gay relationship for an ordained church leader, we took notice of two major criticisms leveled against it. Not everyone on the task force accepted these criticisms, but all of us wrestled with them.

First, the current policy trades on a sharp distinction between sexual orientation and practice, a dichotomy of accepting gay identity but of condemning gay love. At the time this policy was formulated in 1978 it was a combination of tradition and innovation. It was traditional in that it interpreted scripture as saying no to all homoerotic sexual practices. It was innovative in that it accepted the new scientific category of sexual orientation. The 1978 policy, which has been reconfirmed several times since then, struck a compromise between those who utterly rejected all forms of gay sexuality and those who wanted to show some measure of toleration.

This combination of tradition and innovation presents a dilemma. If the church truly accepts a person's sexual identity (as the current policy does), then what sense does it make to condemn the love that flows from that orientation, especially if the lovers are committed to one another and long to be bound together in a covenantal union blessed by the church?

Some defenders of the current policy would respond by offering a counterexample: having an orientation toward pedophilia would not entitle a person to engage in the molestation of children. This is true, and emphatically so. But the analogy is a false one. In the case of pedophilia, the church rejects both the practice (exploitation of children) and the orientation that leads to it. We consider pedophiles to be suffering from an illness, but that is not so in the case of homosexuals. (In 1974 the American Psychiatric Association removed homoerotic desire from its list of psychological disorders.) What are we to make of an ethical teaching that can make no meaningful moral distinction between relationships grounded in exploitation and those based in covenantal commitment?