How exactly is my church supposed to be held "accountable" for pre-2002 Christian actions?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This is something that's confused me and why I bring up the 2002 founding date. What does "accountability" mean and what can be done about it?

Also like how can it be held "accountable" for other churches' homophobia when we do affirm same-sex couples and allow our pastors to officiate same-sex weddings. What else is there to do?

[afleitch]

This is something that's confused me and why I bring up the 2002 founding date. What does "accountability" mean and what can be done about it?

Also like how can it be held "accountable" for other churches' homophobia when we do affirm same-sex couples and allow our pastors to officiate same-sex weddings. What else is there to do?

Well you haven't really outlined who or what is asking it to be accountable?

But in general, as a Christian church in that tradition, should Christianity historically and as a wider community be accountable for fostering homophobia from it's most 'benign' to physically violent throughout it's history? I think it should be. It's something that can be extended to a lot of religious and secular institutions and everything from the treatment of women, race and disability.

And if your church is affirming, then it's being accountable for it and setting an example. So it should be thought of in the positive.

[John Dule]

As a Christian, the existence of your faith community predates 2002.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

I don't know what "being held accountable" is supposed to mean here. But say if one founded an entirely new communist party in 2002 I think it would be fair to ask how one accounts for the actions of previously and currently existing communist parties elsewhere, if this analogy makes sense. It's a question that at least should be considered, though as afleitch said it doesn't have to be a negative necessarily.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I don't know what "being held accountable" is supposed to mean here.

I think this is what BRTD is asking. I'd need more information about his church's relationship with other groups in the community to hazard an answer.

[Vosem]

It should not, because people (and organizations -- after all, corporations and congregations are people, my friend) should never be held accountable for things that happened before their births.

[Donerail]

It should not, because people (and organizations -- after all, corporations and congregations are people, my friend) should never be held accountable for things that happened before their births.

BRTD's church claims to be a Christian church and thus traces its birth to the early Christian communities described in Acts, not the year 2002.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I don't think that 'accountable' is quite the right word - it would strike me as more of a matter of awareness and, with that awareness, responsibility. If we use antisemitism as an example (which makes sense as the issue is both unusually extreme and unusually fundamental, so highlights wider issues well and provides a general framework that can be quite easily transposed on to other issues) then I would suggest that serious Christians have a moral duty to be aware of the long history of Christian antisemitism,* to recognise it for what it is and to be constantly on guard against it. That doesn't mean declaring Year Zero and throwing out anything potentially tainted: this would actually be an act of dishonest cowardice; a refusal to properly come to terms with the issue as it existed in the past or to take it with adequate seriousness in the present. The age of the church in question is not relevant: Catholics and Lutherans might have more directly painful ghosts to acknowledge, but that doesn't mean that Methodists (for instance) are exempt from the same concerns and considerations. Accepting all of this does not weaken Christianity as the religion is one firmly rooted in apparent contradictions; one that has often sought for (and found) deeper meaning in those contradictions; one that accepts as axiomatic that all earthly things have some flaw in them.

_{*Which includes, for instance, being aware that from a Western Christian perspective the bulk of it is flatly heretical and yet it was endemic anyway.}