General Conference 2008

Testimony of a Young United Methodist

A Testimony of a Young United Methodist is the personal testimony of Joey Heath, a United Methodist who was denied membership because of his sexuality. This is the third section of the DVD Reconciling Ministries Network mailed to all General Conference 2008 delegates in the first week of March, 2008. All Bishops in the United Methodist Church also received the DVD.

For additional information about the issue of membership that will face the 2008 General Conference and for the written testimony of Joey Heath, please visit the 2/6/2008 Flashnet.

Youth and Young Adults: These Are Our Stories

"These Are Our Stories" is part of the MoSAIC witness to the 2008 General Conference of the United Methodist Church. This week we feature Jon's story. We did not embed the YouTube here because we wanted to send you over to the Youth and Young Adult Flashnet.

Youth and young adults are the future of the United Methodist Church. We invite you to read the Flashnet featuring the MoSAIC (RMN) and OnFire (MFSA) witness to the 2008 General Conference including detailed information about Young Adult Day. We also look at what young people think about the church and the challenges LGBT youth face living in our society.

4/1/2008 Flashnet

I joined a church today . . .

I joined a United Methodist church today . . .

I took the step of becoming an affiliate member of a wonderful congregation, the church of Saint Paul and Saint Andrew, in New York City.  It was the third time I have taken membership vows and become a member of a UM church.

The first time I took the membership vows, I was 13 and in the 8th grade.  It still stands out as one of the high points of my life.   

The second time I took the membership vows it was a transformative moment in my adult life.  I joined a church that had become a Reconciling Congregation and which had supported me in my coming out process.  I took the public act of truly formalizing my relationship with that powerful faith community - the First UM church of Vermillion, South Dakota.  It was a great celebration and one of those proverbial mountain top experiences. 

Today was supposed to be one of those pro forma, paperwork transfer, occasions.  I didn't expect there to be any emotional component, but then I got to the point in the service where I had to respond to the vows.

As I listened to the familiar language, which I have heard countless times in churches and repeated twice myself, I grew angry.  The anger really started during the powerful lines about resisting evil and injustice in whatever forms that they present themselves.  Then it outraged me when I was asked if I would be loyal to the United Methodist Church, and do all in my power to strengthen its minstries.

What?  It is almost laughable.  How could these two statements - that are in direct opposition to each other - both be answered affirmatively by me, a gay man? 

I heard and thought about these lines in the light of all that has happened in recent years.  Since the Judicial Council ruling 1032 allowed a minister to deny membership to a gay man.  I have heard the testimonies - some related on this blog - from those who ave been denied membership, just I as today was granted it.  The lines in the vow only served to remind me of my own second-class status in the UMC.  That somehow I should be glad I was able to join a church, because others like me have been turned away.    

Today, I joined a congregation that I love.  A wonderful community which loves me, which has taken the justice step of becoming a reconciling congregation.  I will faithfully - and joyfully - work to strengthen its ministries through my prayers, my presence, my tithes, and my service.

But also, today I realized that taking those vows was an act of defiance.  It was an act of civil disobedience against the UM church.  A body which has shown through its words and actions that I am unwelcome and unwanted. 

I joined a United Methodist church today and I publically took vows of membership.  I also privately committed that I will resist the inustice and oppression that presents itself in the United Methodist church.  Peace with Justice

“Fearfully and Wonderfully Made”

Being gay and Christian seems somewhat oxymoronic. Being gay and fundamentalist Christian borders on masochistic. But in high school anyway, I seemed to be entrenched in both lives. It took me a solid four years to come to terms with my sexuality in middle and high school. Even just acknowledging to myself that I was gay involved years of denial, lies to myself and others and trying to believe that I was straight, and then resignation that this is who I am. I think it took another four years for me to feel the grace of God afresh in my heart and feel like a child of God and not as a victim of an unjust world.

At the same time that I was coming into my own and growing into my sexual orientation, I was growing in my understanding of Christianity. In high school, I felt like my United Methodist church youth group was focused too exclusively on how to get youth to come to church by using secular activities such that they abandoned exploring what it meant to be Christian sufficiently. So, instead of regularly attending MYF, I attended Christian Fellowship – an evangelical Christian club at my high school that was not school sponsored due to Separation of Church and State “issues.” When I attended Fellowship, I felt energized by their contemporary worship service held in a U.S. History classroom and intellectually stimulated during our bible studies held in the Foreign Language department. Fellowship largely influenced my spiritual formation in terms of what it means to be Christian.

Barely three weeks into my senior year, September 11, 2001 occurred. As a Christian I felt immediately the need for us to offer students the time and space for prayer. I ran to my Fellowship co-leader and began to ask her when we could start planning some prayer services. Before I even finished my sentence, she informed me that she and the rest of the leadership team had discussed my “situation” and determined that although it was okay for me to be struggling with and resisting my unnatural lifestyle, it was unacceptable and inappropriate for me to be a leader within Fellowship as an “active homosexual.” I was speechless and felt betrayed by the faith community I had come to love more than my home church. Part of me died that day and I did not feel like I belonged to any church or as a child of God for the next three years of my life.

In 2003 as a sophomore in college, I lived in Spain and studied the religious confluence of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism during the Islamic polity of the Iberian peninsula from 711 – 1492. Before school started, two Catholic friends and I decided to journey along the pilgrim trails to Santiago de Compostela, where James the Apostle is buried according to legend. For two days we walked roughly 50 km of the pilgrim trails that start in France and Italy and traverse the entire length of northern Spain. We would spend an hour walking and talking – getting to know each other better. Then we would walk for an hour in silence – reflecting on ourselves, our lives, God, wherever our hearts led us. I remember feeling like I was walking on holy ground. As a Protestant, I am not one to venerate the saints or the apostles but there was something about walking the same pilgrim trails that Christians have traversed for nearly 1,200 years that enlivened me. I was in the company of brothers and sisters in Christ of ages past, present and future. It was here that – maybe for the first time ever – I really listened for God. And I know that in the silence of this our pilgrims’ journey, I heard the voice of God calling me home to the United Methodist Church.

When I returned to the States in 2004, I began church shopping. I knew that finding a church was going to be challenging not because of the lack of reconciling congregations as there are a dozen or so in the Chicagoland area but more due to my own standards. I am always troubled by congregations – and there are a lot of them – that in their journey to be inclusive, equate inclusiveness with not offending anyone and therefore water down Jesus and begin to dismantle the Holy Trinity. I needed a church that would accept me for who I am and not be afraid to claim the name of Jesus, the Christ. I wanted to feel the Holiness Movement in the 21st Century.

During Advent of 2004, I found Holy Covenant UMC and immediately fell in love. Here was a church that upon walking in the door welcomed me and treated me like I was a part of their family. The first two people to welcome me at Holy Covenant were Troy Plummer and Walter Treash, and I’m sure they knew I was already a part of their family. I was blown away by the passionate worship and music – songs of praise I had not sung since my days in Fellowship, which was a union of pain and rejoicing. It was my first experience of hearing God as Father and Mother of us all. If there is one thing that Pastor Trey Hall emphasizes at Holy Covenant, it is the Great Invitation and that all our welcome at God’s table. It was the first time that I had heard gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people named as called by God and welcome at the Banquet. Since that first worship service, I have been actively involved at Holy Covenant and became a member on Easter Sunday of 2005.

The primary reason I decided to run for election to the General Conference is my experience of Holy Covenant. Holy Covenant UMC has been such a place and a community of healing for me. Coming out as a gay man in retrospect seems for me to have been so much easier than reconciling my sexual orientation with my religion. For years I had not felt like a whole person and confused my relationship with the institutional Church for my relationship with God. Holy Covenant gave me a home to feel safe and proud of who I was and am: a fearfully and wonderfully made child of God. Holy Covenant has given me a glimpse of what the Banquet can be like. I want so much for the United Methodist Church to experience a revival of its roots, to claim God and God’s great, all-inclusive invitation. I ran in order to be a voice and a testimony of these things. As an elected alternate delegate from the Northern Illinois Conference, I pray for God's grace that I might be a humble and worthy example of Christ.