Dallas Voice: Local church ready to confront UMC over discrimination

Northaven UMC, a reconciling congregation, were featured in the Dallas Voice in connection with the upcoming General Conference. According to the Dallas Voice:

FORT WORTH — The only thing Mary Lowrance ever wanted to do was be a minister in the United Methodist Church.

Mary Lowrance says she believes she cannot be part of the efforts to change the United Methodist Church’s anti-gay policies unless she remains engaged in the church.

In 1994, after graduating from Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University, Lowrance said she answered God’s calling and was ordained a UMC elder.

Lowrance married a man who was also a Methodist minister, and she served various congregations in the Fort Worth area over the next decade.

“My awareness that I was a lesbian, I buried that as deep as I could, because I knew what the church’s position was on that,” Lowrance said. “For a while, I thought I’d live in the closet until the day I died.”

But after Lowrance and her husband were divorced in 2002, she said she gradually began to come to terms with her sexual orientation.

As a result, she was overcome by a deep sense of guilt, as well as the fear of a church trial, and especially the impact it would have on her now-10-year-old son.

Ultimately, Lowrance opted to surrender her ministerial orders.

“If I hadn’t given them my orders, they would have come after them,” Lowrance said. “I felt like the church I fell in love with didn’t love me anymore.”

Lowrance left the denomination briefly to become a minister at Dallas’ Cathedral of Hope, a predominantly LGBT church. But eventually she took a position as a lay staff member at Northhaven United Methodist Church, an LGBT-“reconciling” congregation in North Dallas.

Now, Lowrance and others from Northhaven — where nearly half of the 600 members are gay or lesbian — find themselves on the frontlines of what she called a fight for the survival of the denomination, the second-largest in the Protestant faith after the Southern Baptist Convention.

Next week, almost 1,000 delegates from throughout the world will gather in Fort Worth for UMC’s two-week General Conference, the legislative session held every four years during which the denomination considers changes to its governing document, the Book of Discipline.

And once again this year, LGBT issues will take center stage.

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Local church ready to confront UMC over discrimination
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Northaven UMC
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