Conversion

When I was running to be a delegate for General Conference, I was distraught by all of the politics involved. I guess I somehow forgot that as a nearly 300 year-old institution within a 2,000 year-old tradition and institution, even the Methodist church is not immune from politics. Call me naïve …

There was a moment, sometime after the 15th round of balloting and after numerous caucusing of the Common Witness strategy team, I felt immensely dejected. And it wasn’t because I hadn’t been elected but I felt sick to my stomach that this - OUR Church - conducts business in such a way that so frighteningly parallels partisan politics within secular government. Are we not the Church? Are we not called to a higher order of business and conduct? To this so-called practice of “holy conferencing?”

I apparently wasn’t the only one annoyed at the conference. Seated to my left was a charming woman, not quite middle-aged – still young with a husband and young children. This was my first annual conference and the conference was trying to help guide “newbies” like me through the process by partnering us up with veterans or at least those who had been to conference before. This woman had attended several annual conferences and was partnered up with another newbie but I still chatted with her throughout the conference.

We talked about our experiences in the church. I talked about coming from a conservative Christian background, longing for progressive social justice but also my deep desire for progressive Christians to reclaim the name of Jesus, reclaim the Bible, and spread the Good News that Jesus came for all people to transform all lives so that we could also transform others.

At some point there was a proposed petition requesting our conference to support secular legislative efforts to amend the Illinois State Constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman and go even further by prohibiting the creation of institutions such as civil unions.

Trembling, I walked to a microphone and waited for the Bishop to call on me. Thankfully, I had a friend in the Conference Secretary, Harriet McCabe, a woman of good Christian faith who reminds me of my grandmother. I told her that if I were to ever speak before the assembly that I would be looking to her for strength and prayer.

When the Bishop announced, “Microphone 4, are you in favor or opposed to this petition?” all I remember is looking at Harriet in the eyes. With a smile and glow on her face, my hands and arms were trembling, but my voice and the words exited my mouth with assurance and strength. I spoke something of my faith and journey as a gay man and what it would mean for me to one day be able to walk down the aisle of my church and swear before God, my family and faith community, that my partner and I dedicate our lives to each other and to God. And at some point I sat down.

At the very end of the conference, as we all prepared to leave the convention center and head home, the woman next to me pulled me aside and said she had to tell me a story. She told me that for all of her life she had been on the other side of the fence pertaining to homosexuality. Everything she had been taught and from her own reading and thoughtful interpretation of the Bible told her that homosexuality was wrong. She felt that she was still called to love homosexuals but that the Bible was unequivocal about homosexual acts.

Then she told me that she had had a conversation with her brother about homosexuality immediately before leaving to come to annual conference. In that conversation, she told her brother that she knew that homosexuality would come up yet again in legislation this year and she still struggled with it. She confessed to her brother that the only way she could imagine ever changing her mind and ideas about homosexuality would be for her to meet a homosexual. And here, for four days, she sat next to a gay man who she saw no difference in orthodoxy, we shared a belief in the centrality and power of Christ to transform lives, and how after four days she had gone from believing all homosexuality to be immoral to now believing that there could be something loving and something having to do with God in gay and lesbian relationships. She didn’t know what to do next or have everything sorted out about what she did and did not believe. But we both hugged and cried in each other’s arms.

During the 20th Laity Ballot, I was elected as an Alternate Delegate to Jurisdictional Conference. But it didn’t matter to me. I had experienced a conversion that day.