Editor's note: More than 800 Methodist clergy and lay leaders are gathering in St. Louis for a special Saturday-through-Tuesday meeting to try to come to a decision on the church's stance on LGBT issues. In a column written earlier this month, Metro columnist Sharon Grigsby laid out what's at stake and how North Texas Methodists are approaching the issues this weekend.

The North Texas Methodists with whom I have shared church pews for most of my adult life are a hopelessly optimistic bunch. Even after more than 40 years of disagreement over human sexuality issues within America’s second-largest Protestant denomination, local Methodists are keeping the faith that a global gathering this month might finally end the energy-sucking stalemate.

Debates about harsh discriminatory language, ordination of LGBT clergy and the ability for same-gender couples to wed in the Methodist Church have, for decades, squashed other conversations and impeded the denomination’s mission. Every four years, the Methodists’ decision-making General Conference convenes and — right on schedule — any effort to move forward on LGBT matters dissolves into bitter disagreements, showdowns and threats of splits.

This was the hot topic back in the mid-1990s, when I was The Dallas Morning News' religion editor. Twenty years later, visiting local Methodist congregations in my search for a church home, I felt like I had stepped into a bad rerun. Same debate. Same lack of progress.

I'm far from the only Methodist whose point of view on this controversy is, What's so difficult about ending unjust discrimination? But the issue is more complicated than that for a denomination that long ago went worldwide and whose growth in recent years is overseas, including in African countries where homosexuality is still a crime.

Methodist leaders say the denomination’s big-tent philosophy is one of its greatest strengths. In their view, theological and intellectual diversity strengthens the church. The goal of many who want to tackle the sexuality decision — both in North Texas and beyond — is to find a way to keep everyone at the table.

After the 2016 General Conference came dangerously close to a full breakdown over LGBT issues, the Methodist Council of Bishops appointed the Commission on a Way Forward to propose a solution to the stalemate. Beginning Feb. 23, a special session of the General Conference will meet in St. Louis to debate and vote on the commission’s work.

You’ll undoubtedly see a flurry of headlines about the conference — and not all of them will be nuanced. So here’s what you need to keep in mind: The gathering is a significant and complicated moment in the life of this denomination, which will continue to do good works in North Texas no matter what the church’s worldwide leadership decides.

From left: Joe Stobaugh, Tim Crouch and Kelly Carpenter are three of the members of the North Texas Methodist delegation that will be part of the special General Conference session on LBGTQ issues in St. Louis this month. (Shaban Athuman / Staff Photographer)

The two options most in play are the One Church Plan, endorsed by the Council of Bishops, and the Traditionalist Plan, preferred by the most theologically conservative congregations, which include churches in the U.S. as well as overseas.

A vote between those two proposals likely will be very close. It’s possible that no plan will get sufficient support and things will stay just as they are, leaving anti-LGBT language in the Methodists’ law and doctrine Book of Discipline.

The One Church Plan would allow individual churches to decide whether they want to allow same-gender weddings and let local Methodist conferences make LGBT-ordination decisions. Most important, this proposal would remove the controversial statement from the Book of Discipline that the practice of homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

While I’d like to see the denomination go even further, the One Church Plan allows for the possibility of Methodists staying together while continuing to disagree. But that’s no certainty.

The conservative wing of the denomination has warned that hundreds of congregations — including several of the denomination’s largest and most affluent — will pull out if the One Church Plan passes.

Those leaders are pushing the Traditionalist Plan, which preserves all the current language against homosexuality and includes harsh enforcement of those positions.

Two other options — one that unequivocally affirms the LGBT community and another that reorganizes the denomination along ideological rather than geographic lines — may also be in the discussion.

In the months leading up to the St. Louis gathering, both the local delegation and many individual churches have held multiple education and listening sessions with North Texas Methodists.

Reserve delegate Joe Stobaugh, executive minister of worship and arts at Grace Avenue United Methodist Church in Frisco, told me he’s been part of a dozen or so of these meetings, from Oak Lawn to Sanger.

He will head to St. Louis knowing that none of the plans is perfect. But he will be committed to reminding others that “these aren’t issues — these are people. All people are made in God’s image and all are worthy of love and respect and dignity.”

Although he worries that the various sides are so entrenched that no new decision will be reached, his personal hope is that “every level of church life will be open to all people.”

Lay delegate Kelly Carpenter, associate director of the local conference’s center for leadership development, says her goal is “to hear more. I still need to look in the faces of more people and be in those moments together.”

Carpenter, who laughs about being a Methodist nerd, told me, “It’s a big decision with significant consequences. Part of being called by God is to do difficult things. And to see God in every single person, even when you disagree with them.”

Tim Crouch, a member of First United Methodist Church in Denton, is the leader of the North Texas delegation. That group is made up of 10 voting delegates, equally split between clergy and laypeople, as well as reserve members and other supporters.

Crouch knows it’s past time for action. “This has been a very divisive issue for a long time and in recent years at General Conference, it has gotten in the way of other work,” he said. But he believes that the wide diversity of people who call themselves United Methodists "helps us understand how to be a better church. We as a church need both ends of the spectrum.”

That was the glass-half-full message I heard from all the local delegates, including Andy Stoker, senior pastor of First United Methodist Church of Dallas, the congregation I’ve most recently been a part of.

He reminded me that church schisms are part of what it means to be a Methodist. “We are a big-tent church,” he said. “We can handle dissension and disagreement.”

United Methodists need to make these LGBT decisions — even if the solutions are imperfect. And the debate needs to spring from the compassion and grace that this denomination’s members consider their trademark.