General Conference 2008: Delegates

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.

I’m a General Conference delegate who is under thirty years old. “Under thirty years old” isn’t one of the first ways I usually categorize myself, but it seems to be appropriate in this context. I’ll turn twenty-eight during General Conference. You don’t need to get me anything; just don’t make it illegal for me to be a member of your church, that’s really all I want.

As part of my preparation to be a delegate, I’ve been picking up old Books of Discipline and Books of Resolution on Amazon and seeing where we’ve been in the not too distant past. It’s a good education, also I’ve always been impressed by pastors who have complete collections of old Disciplines on their shelf.
To summarize what I’ve found- the insides of those books is even more impressive than their handsome spines. In some instances it isn’t so much what is printed as what isn’t. For example, in the nineties there was no ban on me getting married, for a time in the eighties there was no ban on me being ordained and for the present (as alluded to above) there is no ban on me joining the church.

But it isn’t all just grace by omission. Today I was reading from the 1980 Book of Resolutions (that’s one year before I was born and baptized) and I’m a little shocked by the report on human sexuality. Would we be ready to affirm the following language today? - “Too often men and women who are genuinely struggling with problems in their sexual relationships or with ambivalences in their sexual orientation have had their concerns met with rigidity and simple moralisms, if met at all.” Wow, rigidity and simple moralisms were understood as bad things 28 years ago! Now it feels like people are trying to put them into our vision statement.

Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to turn back the clock. (I recently heard a keynote speaker claiming a new direction for the church say We need to turn time back to how things were in the 18th century. My Annual Conference had paid money for this person to speak to us.)

I’m sure there was plenty going on in the United Methodist Church of 1980 that was problematic, but I’m inspired by the trust and respect implicit in the study document on human sexuality. The tone is calm and caring, compassionate and concerned. Some of this is the special privilege of being a study document and not a resolution. We forget how hard it is to warm the heart when the word “whereas” appears fifteen times and we bring the good news home with the phrase Therefore be it resolved…

But for your own inspiration, read these words from our United Methodist tradition:

“Why do we do this to one another? What is it about our view of sexuality that causes us, more often than not, to approach it negatively rather than positively? Are our expectations and experiences about human sexuality bound up with a culturally restricted view of humanity, full of “holy negatives”? Often we are subject to distorted and misinterpreted biblical, theological, and ethical interpretation. We are called to examine the biblical and theological roots of our understanding of human sexuality. Careful consideration should be given to the context in which Scripture was written. The emphasis on sexuality as limited to procreation is particularly in need of examination. Additionally the biblical teaching must be related to understandings provided by the human sciences and both should be applied to personal and corporate experience of contemporary Christians.”

I could post a lot more of this document, maybe I will if people want to see it. It’s pretty much all this good. There’s nothing in these words that we can’t agree with. So why couldn’t we agree on these words today? I don’t want to suggest that we go back to the way things were. We can do better. But in Fort Worth, I’ll at least try to remember how good we’ve done in the past. I’m not even thirty yet, so I don’t know any better.