ATLANTA — The Covenant Network of Presbyterians gathers November 1-3 for its annual conference ten years into its so-far-unsuccessful effort to convince the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to change its policy on ordaining gays and lesbians.

The theme for this year is “testimony”, or, as preacher Scott Black Johnston, pastor of host church Trinity Church in Atlanta, put it during opening worship Nov. 1: “Can I Get a Witness?”

The idea is that there is power in testimony — in honesty and truth telling; that minds and hearts can be changed through sharing stories of struggle and faith; and that testimony allows voices to be heard that are not always welcome in the church.

There is a further recognition that the territory ahead is bumpy and uncertain — and that, as the Covenant Network perseveres in what it sees as a struggle for justice, losses will come along the way, and the network needs some way of measuring progress that’s not only about simply winning or losing particular General Assembly votes.

One of the first testimonies at this gathering was planned, that of Andrew L. Cullen, a pastor who described himself as a “self-avowed, practicing conservative evangelical” who has changed his mind on the issue of ordaining gays and lesbians. During the opening session, Cullen told of how, over a long time and through getting to know personally gays and lesbians in Heartland Presbytery, “God’s spirit brought me to a new understanding.”

He left the congregation he served for 16 years, a church which since has left the PC(USA) for the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and where he was asked if he had grown “soft on the Bible.” Cullen, now the interim pastor of Rolling Hills Church in Overland Park, Kan., said he answered, “I knew the Spirit was taking me in a different direction.”

Another testimony was more impromptu – that of a white-haired lesbian from Phoenix who said “I’m the only gay person in my church who has come out. I’m old,” the woman said. “I’m an older elder. I’m almost too old to wait” for the church to change. “I think you have to help us more,” she said, “because we’re so scared.”

Gays and lesbians are afraid of how the people in their congregations will react if they come out – if they tell the truth about who they are, the woman said.

“It’s fear,” she said, “and it’s real.”

The opening chords of this gathering, for which nearly 300 people have registered, were not a stirring battle cry but the words of Anna Carter Florence, an associate professor of preaching and worship at Columbia Theological Seminary, who spoke of learning from a 10-year-old friend, a die-hard Cubs fan, the value of learning how to lose.

What about the Covenant Network?

“The Covenant Network isn’t an organization of losers,” Florence said, yet its advocates are having to take a long view of history in working for change in the PC(USA), which a decade ago adopted rules limiting ordination to those who practice fidelity if they’re married or chastity if they’re single.

Talk to young adults in their 20s, “and you realize it’s only a matter of time” before acceptance comes for gays and lesbians, she said – and that the question of whether churches should ordain sexually-active gays and lesbians “will be historical codas in our grandchildren’s textbooks.”

But “before we can win — whatever that means, whatever that looks like in God’s time and wisdom … we have to learn how to lose,” Florence said. And part of that involves, she said, showing others what’s in our personal fleshpots – acknowledging what we’re holding on to so tight that it’s keeping us from moving on to where we need to go.

The church, she said, could do a better job of teaching people to lose.

“Life does not always go the way I thought it would,” she said. “Stuff happens. People break. Secrets get harder to keep and sometimes they blow up and take you with them.” As her sister-in-law puts it: “Life is not for sissies.”

But the Bible speaks of success — that “the victory is ours,” and that if you ask, you will receive, Florence said. Sometimes we think of that, she said, more than of Exodus, of how we must all make the trek through the wilderness, and to be honest about what’s in our “flesh-pots,” the things we’re attached to and must leave behind if we’re ever to get to the promised land.

“Testimony is narrating something and confessing something,” Florence said. “Telling a story, yes, but confessing a story about God. It’s witness, come what may”  as did the women who went to the tomb, saw that Jesus was not there, and went to tell a skeptical world that Jesus had risen.

Preaching can be testimony, Florence said, but so can be private conversations, “the sort of witnessing you don’t want to post on the Internet.” She described those small-group conversations as “private, messy, intimate, vulnerable work,” where “you can dare to tell what’s in your fleshpots and why it’s so hard to leave Egypt while you are crusading for others to come across.”

She spoke of Larry Craig, the Utah Republican arrested in a bathroom in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, allegedly for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer. In Craig’s world, Florence said, powerful, successful men are married heterosexuals.

“Larry Craig needs us,” she said, because “Larry’s church taught him what he knows, and we’re all part of that. And if our churches help to foster that kind of compartmentalization and barricading of self, what are we going to do about that?”

Jin Kim, pastor of the Church of All Nations in Minneapolis, said during a question-and-answer session that interns at his church are not allowed to preach until after they’ve given their own testimony, and named that in their own lives that they consider most shameful.

Then they serve as an example of how “the gospel is incarnated in your own life, liberating you from guilt and shame,” Kim said.

What’s in our flesh-pots?

“If we look around, it’s kind of obvious,” Kim said. Beautiful churches and seminaries are “built on land that was stolen and with labor that was enslaved. All of this was built on other people’s sweat and other people’s land. Our privilege is the flesh-pot we keep granting to white people” – including to white gays and lesbians, but not to people of color.

Johnston, preaching during opening worship, asked the question, “Can I Get a Witness?”

“I think there’s a whole lot of theology packed into the question,” — a question African-American pastors often ask in the call-and-response pattern of preaching, Johnston said. It’s a question people are supposed to answer “in the moment, from the heart of your faith,” Johnston said. And the question implies that “the God we worship is busy knocking around in the world today” and it places the community at the heart of gospel proclamation, by asking, in essence, “Are you getting this too?”

Johnston addressed the question by asking whether it matters that author J. K. Rowling has revealed that she considers Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of the fictional Hogwarts school in the Harry Potter series, to be gay.

Does it matter whether Dumbledore is gay, Johnston asked, or is that irrelevant, as some have suggested?

He pointed to the cover of the program for the evening’s worship showing a fresco from Fra Angelico, on All Saints Day, of a multitude of saints. “Do you wonder in that great cloud of witnesses how many of them are gay? How many are straight? Does it matter?” Johnston asked.

Dumbledore led the fight at Hogwarts against darkness and death – that’s what matters, Johnston said.

And as the PC(USA) enters what some are characterizing as a judicial rather than a legislative season, “then it is time, my friends, for witnesses,” Johnston said. “I think we need to sit in small circles right now and tell our tales,” stories that are honest, painful, goofy, stories of God at work in the world.

Be honest about who we are. Share from the heart, listen to the faith stories of others”.

Then it’s time to ask, he said, “Can I Get a Witness” publicly to the truth of what’s being said.