Nearly 200 pro-gays arrested protesting Methodist meeting United Methodist News Service Thursday, May 11, 2000 CLEVELAND – Nearly 200 people, including a United Methodist bishop, were arrested Wednesday, May 10, for engaging in civil disobedience as a way of protesting United Methodist policies regarding homosexuality. The arrests occurred outside the meeting of the General Conference of the United Methodist Church. About 300 people participated in the rally organized by Soulforce, a coalition of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people and heterosexuals from a variety of faith backgrounds. The group is pushing the United Methodist Church and other mainline denominations, including the Presbyterian Church (USA), to fully accept sexual minorities in the life of the church. According to police officials, the protestors were charged with aggravated disorderly conduct after being led away when they blocked the convention center driveway. Bishop C. Joseph Sprague of Chicago was among the first protestors arrested. At least nine other active or retired bishops participated in the rally held before the act of civil disobedience. None of the other bishops was arrested. The Cleveland police had completed processing the arrested protestors and had released them by 7:30 p.m. Inside the Convention Center, history was made when the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. George Carey, addressed the United Methodist Church's top legislative assembly, the first head of the worldwide Anglican communion to do so. Clad in a purple cassock, the archbishop expressed great appreciation for the opportunity to speak to the spiritual descendants of John Wesley, an Anglican rector until his death. Christians, Carey said, "must transcend the concern for the survival of the church and start to focus (their) concern upon the kingdom of God and its centrality to church and society." The archbishop said he "abandoned a long time ago a theology of unity that assumes it means uniformity and sameness."

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