UMC Reversal: What Does This Have to Do with Us?
May 9, 2024
I was raised in a United Methodist Church and have wonderful memories of my childhood and youth. Our rural church in North Dakota was picturesque, situated at the intersection of two gravel roads on a corner cut out from fields of wheat and sunflowers on land donated by members of our family tree. The men of the church built the church themselves which sits alongside a parsonage and cemetery out back. It could be a movie set.
The General Conference of the United Methodist Church just voted to overturn its prohibition against openly LGBTQ clergy. Some are celebrating while others may be embarrassed to be associated with a denomination that would do such a thing. It may feel like a decision that only affects people far from your own experience. I would like to share my story. Our story.
The church played an absolutely central role in our family – and I was happy about that. I loved church. I was part of a family that showed up any time the doors were open – although, in this rural setting, the doors were never actually locked. Among other things, my mother was a beloved Sunday School teacher and active with missions, connecting us with the state and national levels. We even hosted a missionary from Hong Kong at our kitchen table. My father was a trustee, and I can only imagine every other function too, active in the Brotherhood. We always sat in the same third row pew on the left side – where there is now a plaque on a new window featuring a stalk of wheat in honor of my parents and aunts and uncles.
I have fond memories of Sunday School flannelgraph panels illustrating Bible stories, the annual Christmas Eve pageant – always wishing to be Joseph. Vacation Bible School and church camp every summer. Washing dishes after a potluck and listening to women tell stories. Youth group on Sunday evenings – serving as president twice. I was a youth delegate to the state annual conference meeting.
In 7th grade I started playing the organ during worship on Sunday mornings, taught by the pastor’s wife. In high school I started riding along with the pastor – Rev. Cushing, never “Ralph” – to the other churches on our three-point charge, which means one pastor serving three churches in a 65-mile circuit every Sunday. He picked me up so I could play the piano at one of the country churches with only 14 worshipers. We had wonderfully deep theological conversations. Sometimes I would go along to play the pump organ at the second church in a small town with 25 worshipers. Ours was the “big church.” My aunt was the main organist and I played regularly.
I never encountered words of hate in my local church – from either pulpit or people. The love of Jesus was the message. I believed that and so when I was 7-years old, I went forward one night during the annual week of revival services and gave my life to Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Our revivals were quiet. Lots of singing, always in four-part harmony, a sermon by a guest preacher, and an altar call. Emotion came in the form of quiet tears, not shouts of praise. When a Baptist from Texas moved to one of the local farms and joined our church, his enthusiastic “amen!” during very dry sermons still caused people to jump even years later.
I wanted to paint a picture of this idyllic setting. A church that was a place of love and belonging and intertwined family trees – we may have been second or third cousins with over half of the church. The church encouraged my musical abilities long before they were very good. I was a good kid and when I announced that I was called to become a pastor, no one questioned why. I knew that one day my picture would be added to the frame of the many others from this small church who had been called into ministry as pastors and missionaries – and even included my sister and aunt because they married pastors. However, I’ve been ordained over 30 years and my picture never made it to the wall. My mother was sad about that until the day she died at age 90. Why?
I graduated from high school in 1983 and only looked at United Methodist colleges. I intended to go straight from college to seminary and become a pastor in North Dakota. I reasoned that I should return home because people who weren’t raised in North Dakota wouldn’t want to move there. Big changes came while I was in college. First, the farm crisis hit hard. Our family like thousands of others were suddenly forced out of business. Those family farms supported small towns and small churches. Both started emptying out.
Secondly, I accepted what I had tried to deny for years. I started to understand in high school that I was different but didn’t know exactly how. I was mortified when I figured out that I might be gay. What little I knew about it wasn’t good. I did what I could, including a lot of prayer on my knees, to be something other than what I realized years later I couldn’t change. In the middle of all this, the United Methodist General Conference adopted a rule in the Book of Discipline that prohibited “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals” from ordained ministry. It felt like a particularly cruel joke that I would both be called to ministry and be gay. I knew that when I met with the Board of Ordained Ministry, I would be asked if I was a self-avowed, practicing homosexual. I considered lying since, as my campus minister counseled, it would be an unjust question. In the end, they didn’t ask because they already knew me so well. I had been so active as a youth in the conference. But I decided I wouldn’t be put in the position of deciding to tell the truth or a lie again. I would pursue ministry as a pastor somewhere else – not that there were really many options. But God made a way out of no way. Not long after, I received a phone call inquiring whether I would be interested in serving as the pastor of churches in two small towns during my senior year of college, my first introduction to the United Church of Christ (UCC). I loved being a pastor – at 20 years old, preaching every Sunday, marrying, burying, counseling the grieving. Why they listened to me, I don’t know. God was kept busy helping me. And then I went to seminary – as an out gay man.
Ordination in the UCC wasn’t an easy path, but at least the possibility existed. Whereas in 1972 the United Methodist Church declared “Christianity is incompatible with homosexuality,” the UCC ordained the first openly gay man in 1972. I am grateful that the UCC became my home. I have worked and served on every level of the church from national to local and been a pastor for over 30 years. All that service and devotion would have been in the United Methodist Church. I say this with no bitterness. I just want people to know that the decision of the General Conference just made wasn’t about “other people” from some place far away. It directly affected one of the Sunday School children who was nurtured and formed in a country church, who enjoyed listening to Bible stories and watching them illustrated with figures cut out of flannel, who went forward to the altar one night when I was seven years old, and who, at age 16, 42 years ago, God called into ordained ministry.
Is it too late to get my picture on the wall outside the sanctuary? My parents would be very happy.