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Reformation -- having the ancient truths presented in a new way, but exactly as they always were -- would be more than good enough for most of us. This kind of reformation is difficult or impossible for large church denominations, which derive much of their power from hierarchical authority and inflexible doctrine. But it can and does happen effectively in local congregations, like the many churches in this country that have decided to grant openly gay members full participation in their worshipping life.

These churches are gradually forcing their authorities to make incremental changes in their treatment of homosexual Christians, as shown by the recent Catholic bishops' letter to parents of homosexual children, "Always Our Children." These churches are adopting the methods of earlier Christian reform movements to abolish racist membership rules, for instance, or to let women lead worship. Most Christian churches still treat gay people, in deed if not in word, as something less than human. But the occasional successes gays have had in changing that demonstrate that reform is a job of which the Body of Christ, and the bodies that constitute it, are more than capable.

Many gay Christians want to get married; we want to be out and ordained; and we want to see the distinctive challenges of living as gay Christians explicitly acknowledged by our churches, preferably in some form other than a heresy trial. Homophobia is a big hurdle to reform, but it's nothing compared to sexophobia. Sex not only makes the church nervous, it actually makes the Church lie. Too often, churches teach that people are spiritual "souls" contained in bodies that operate as mindless pleasure machines. Christians forget, or we never discover, what mysterious creatures scripture actually describes us to be, with physical and spiritual lives that intersect, overlap and are never even as separate as those two words imply. We rarely experience sex as the divine gift it is, in the context of lifelong commitment to another mind, body and soul. And therefore, we rarely learn to integrate sexual ethics with the rest of our ethical lives.

Although this situation isn't unique to gay Christians, it's probably more exaggerated for us than for our straight brothers and sisters. We are habitually ignored in the preaching and liturgy of mainstream churches, and the churches' silence implies consent to the world's preference that gay sexuality be isolated in an entirely private part of life -- away from family, away from work, away from church and, in too many lives, away from love.

This silence casts many gay Christians into spiritual exile, the kind of exile that Spong describes as a place where "God must change or die." When we start coming out, God grows increasingly insistent that we receive the gift of romantic love in a way that will glorify Him, but our religion offers precious little guidance in understanding how to square this revelation with the God we've always known.

I experienced this kind of exile when I first started coming out, as a student at Princeton Theological Seminary. I needed to learn how to live faithfully as a gay man, but Princeton wasn't helping me do that, so I dropped out of school, moved to Boston and began looking for a church that would nourish both my love for Christ and my love for men.

I finally found that nourishment in a Catholic congregation, the Jesuit Urban Center in Boston's South End. With a traditional Catholic liturgy, the Urban Center has built one of the largest predominantly gay congregations in Boston. What the Urban Center knows -- and what Bishop Spong has forgotten -- is that for exiled believers, genuine reform begins with the activity of remembrance. Believers must dig deeply in scripture, church history and their own religious experience to learn what made religion compelling for them in the past and why it doesn't work anymore. If these explorations show the problem is not in themselves but in their tradition, they have to use the truths they've found to correct the lies their tradition teaches.

Worship at the Urban Center is grounded squarely in traditional Catholic theology. In those basic premises I rediscovered the power of a primary tenet of my faith: Christ's incarnation proves that creation, although fallen, is good. In daily life, it can be hard to believe you are good when you've been taught to feel shame about your deepest physical and emotional desires. The Urban Center, merely by welcoming gay people into the church, overcomes that shame -- and particularly, its religious manifestations -- with the love of Christ. That welcome makes us realize that our bodies are a blessing, for no other reason than that we're born. And it means worshipers at the Urban Center experience Christianity just as we always have, but also in an earth-shatteringly gracious and dignifying new way. Sometimes the priests use the lyrics from "Sunday in the Park with George" to clarify Christ's parables; sometimes they use St. Thomas Aquinas. That mixture of innovation and remembrance is the only effective basis for meaningful religious reform.

"Why Christianity Must Change or Die," by contrast, doesn't offer much help for Christians who believe our religion needs reform. Bishop Spong is wrong to blame Freud for flatlining First Presbyterian and St. Mary's of the Assumption, because people have not been exiled from the church by the power of modern science. They've been exiled by the weakness of clerics whose imagination isn't supple enough to make sense of new social realities in traditional Christian terms -- everyday stuff like corporate downsizing and exotic stuff like gay love.

The best counsel for Christians who seek revelation in such realities won't be found in Spong's book. To the extent that such counsel is available on the printed page, it will be found in scripture, when it's read as the record of God's negotiation and re-negotiation of His covenants with His people, and according to Paul's admonition to "Test everything, and hold on to the good." It will be found in the work of clerics, professors and writers who honestly engage the tension between traditional church doctrine and the vagaries of contemporary life: in Peter Gomes' excellent introduction to the Bible, "The Good Book," for instance, or Robert Wuthnow's sociological studies of American Protestantism and capitalism, or Kathleen Norris' new memoir about learning to use religious language, "Amazing Grace."

But we're almost always better off looking for churches that embody this tension than we are browsing our local bookstores in search of isolated epiphanies. It is our churches that will raise us, with Jesus, to new and eternal life. They're the places where prodigal, exiled Christians find themselves truly at home. And everybody knows, be they friends of Dorothy or just friends of friends, there's no place like home.
SALON | April 10, 1998

Michael Joseph Gross, a freelance writer in Boston, is a former seminarian and political speech writer, now writing a book called "Republican Guys: An Almost-Sexual Fetish."