ATLANTA (AP) — It was a typical Sunday scene and, in its own way, a small act of defiance.Members of St. John’s Lutheran Church last weekend filed by their pastor, hugging him and exchanging jokes. Gleeful children rushed past toward a treats-laden table.

Many in the 350-member Atlanta congregation say they don’t plan to let the Rev. Bradley Schmeling leave the pulpit on August 15, as ordered last week by an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America disciplinary committee because he is in a gay relationship.

Defying the order could end Atlanta’s oldest Lutheran church affiliation with the ELCA, cutting off the small church and its members from the large denomination’s resources, including community service programs, hymn books and access to synod officials for guidance on legal, financial and spiritual matters.

St. John’s members hope it doesn’t come to that. They want the denomination to change its rules about sexually active gay clergy at its biennial churchwide assembly August 6-12 in Chicago, just days before Schmeling is set to be removed from the clergy.

“We are not an activist church, even though we can stand for issues of justice,” said Charles Fox, who occasionally assists Schmeling at Sunday worship. “He exemplifies the kind of love and empathy I envision Christ to have had.”

The committee, which basically served as the jury in a closed-door trial, found Schmeling guilty of breaking the denomination’s rules for having a same-sex relationship. However, the committee also called those rules “at least bad policy,” and recommended changing them, which the ELCA could consider at its biennal meeting.

St. John’s — a congregation that gathers in a 1914 Tudor-style manor in one of Atlanta’s historic, mansion-lined neighbourhoods — now finds itself in the middle of a campaign to allow sexually active gays to be pastors in the largest Lutheran denomination in the US.

“It hasn’t been a problem to explain Brad or his relationship to our children as much as what the church wants to do,” said Fox, a married father of a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl.

The ELCA, which has 4.9 million members, allows openly gay clergy, but only if they are celibate. Still, many Lutheran churches support ordaining partnered gays and perform same-sex blessing ceremonies despite the policy. The same debate over how biblical verses on gay relationships should be interpreted is tearing at many mainline Protestant groups.

Schmeling told both his bishop and congregation about his sexual orientation before he was chosen pastor in 2000; at the time he was not in a relationship.

Last year, when Schmeling told Bishop Ronald Warren of the Southeastern Synod that he had found a lifelong partner, Warren asked the 44-year-old pastor to resign.

Schmeling refused and Warren started disciplinary proceedings.

Much like a trial, a closed-door disciplinary hearing committee of 12 ELCA members, both lay and clergy, heard evidence for nearly week in January. Seven of them felt the rule as stated left them no choice but to defrock Schmeling.

But the committee also wrote that, if not bound by the church’s rules, they “would find almost unanimously that Pastor Schmeling is not engaged in conduct that is incompatible with the ministerial office” and would order no discipline.

Further, the committee suggested the ELCA remove its rule and reinstate gay clergy who were removed or resigned because they were in a same-sex “lifelong partnership.”

At the ELCA’s last national meeting in 2005, a proposal to allow synods to decide if they would accept a pastor in a same-sex relationship failed after getting nearly half the 1,000 votes, short of the required two-thirds majority.

St. John’s members and gay rights groups hope Schmeling’s case will provide the final push for change.

“We could have dodged the bullet for St. John’s and Brad, but the gun would have remained loaded for every other gay and lesbian pastor in a committed relationship, and there’s lots of them,” said Emily Eastwood, who assisted in Schmeling’s defence and heads Lutherans Concerned, a national group that fights for full inclusion of gays in the church and is drafting a policy change to propose during the upcoming biennial meeting.

The largest ELCA synod in the US, which includes Minneapolis and has more than 225,000 baptized members, already supports sexually active gay clergy.

Its members voted for the national resolution in 2005.

“What we like to believe is that it’s up to us to find ways to utilise the gifts of all people,” Bishop Craig E. Johnson said.