As most people are aware, the United Methodist Church’s board of directors recently voted to uphold that body’s ban on performing gay marriages and ordaining gay pastors. For a church that once touted a slogan of “open hearts, open doors, open minds,” it seems to me that they have proven they espouse none of those things.
For a season of my life (mostly because it’s where my parents belonged) I was a card-carrying member of the United Methodist Church. In fact, my senior year of high school I was president of my Methodist Youth Fellowship. I was a closeted kid in a corn field in Ohio and just beginning my spiritual journey. I even went to a United Methodist liberal arts college, Otterbein University in a suburb of Columbus. Today I hardly recognize that earlier version of myself. As I matured and got “outer and outer” I became aware of the church’s official position on gay people, a lifestyle they said was incompatible with the life and teachings of Jesus Christ in their Social Principles document. It didn’t take long to find out that Jesus never taught anything about homosexuality. He never even mentioned it. I realized that the church was rejecting me and lying about the reason why, which is homophobia plain and simple. It was the beginning of my long journey to find a spiritual home unencumbered by that kind of bias.
For several years after graduating college I actually traded Christmas cards with some of the adults who had been friends of my parents and advisors to my youth group. Unfortunately, when they found out that I was gay, the cards started including rambling letters designed to save me from this demonic life I was choosing. I sent a few return notes telling them I had never been happier and that I wasn’t going to let any church or its well-meaning but misled members stand in the way of me becoming what God had intended for me to be. The cards stopped coming after that.
The church itself spent the next five years sending me letters, trying to get me to become a member again. My response, which was probably too-strongly worded, was a letter stating that I was a flaming queer that would start coming to services in full drag unless they backed off. They did.
Over the course of the next 35 years I finally found the Quakers, a spiritual fellowship which believes that there is God in everyone, including gay people. My Quaker Meeting in St. Pete is so outspoken about LGBTQ rights that they started offering to marry same-sex couples in the 1970s.
A few years ago we went through a similar experience that the United Methodists are going through right now. There are two major branches of Quakerism: a liberal branch that is very universalist in their beliefs and another branch that is more conservative. St. Pete and most of the meetings in the Southeastern U.S. are part of the former. There are also two global Quaker organizations, one dominated by the liberals and the other by the conservatives.
For many years St. Pete and the Southeastern meetings were actually a part of both organizations, until the conservative branch decided to start putting into place regulations designed to preclude LGBTQ members from service in leadership roles and finding other ways to exclude us. We objected. We objected A LOT. After nearly 10 years of discussions between us and them, all of the meetings in the Southeastern U.S. withdrew from that organization. I fear a similar schism is coming between the more progressive Methodists and those holding the church back from entering the 21st century.
The two experiences—both Methodist and Quaker—were also similar in that the force driving the homophobia was coming from African congregations. I said when we were going through our challenges that we can’t expect to put 21st century values on a 16th century culture. Perhaps the United Methodists need to learn the reverse lesson, that you can’t put 16th century values on modern 21st century America.
My heart mostly breaks for those progressive United Methodists like the amazing congregation at Allendale UMC here in St. Petersburg. They are performing same-sex weddings and are generally acting in open defiance of the stance of their church. They risk excommunication and their delightful minister could be defrocked. After the most recent vote by their leaders, Allendale took out a full page ad in a local newspaper apologizing to our community for the actions of their church, a smart move in overwhelming gay friendly St. Pete. Their minister also gave the eulogy for the victims of Pulse that we had here in Gulfport, where he also apologized that his denomination had alienated so many members of the LGBTQ community.
Many United Methodists are stepping forward to speak truth to power. I was delighted for example to see a full page ad from the First United Methodist Church in Orlando in this publication with a simple yet apparently provocative message for their church leadership: “God Loves All People. So Do We.”
Open hearts. Open doors. Open minds. Perhaps one day the slogan will truly live up to reality of the United Methodist Church. I know God hasn’t given up on them and neither should we.
