This year at Annual Conference, our bishop, Bishop Cedrick Bridgeport, shared a white stole with us and asked us to write names on it of people we know who have left the church or who have been prevented from being an ordained pastor due to our “old” United Methodist denomination’s exclusive practices concerning our LGBTQIA friends and neighbors. As he shared this news, my heart became heavy with thought and memory as a host of names and faces passed through my heart (almost like an arrow). All of these wonderful and loving friends and neighbors had been harmed by the now infamous words in our UM book of discipline: “INCOMPATABLE WITH CHRISTIAN TEACHING” and the resulting practice of denying the LGBTQIA community from being able to become Ordained Elders and Deacons. That language, thanks to years of tireless work by a host of saints (both alive and no longer with us in body) working from within the church and from the outside, has now been removed, and our LGBTQIA friends and neighbors are no longer prevented from become ordained Elders and Deacons! Can I get an amen?!!!
The bishop shared that the white stole would be placed in the prayer room. As I headed back to our Airbnb (Cyndy came with me this year), I shared about the stole with Cyndy, and we started making a list of all the folks we knew of who were harmed. There were 6 or 7 young men and women that we knew that most certainly would have followed a calling into ordained ministry, but either couldn’t, or who had moved to a new denomination to be faithful to their calling from God. There were many people we so loved who were early warriors in the fight for inclusion, who had gotten so disenfranchised because of the “slowness” of this fight that they had either quit the church entirely or moved on to other more inclusive denominations.
As difficult as these names were to place on our list, the next part of the list brought tears and more as we recalled several dear friends, high school and college soul mates, and of our youth groups, who had been so devastated by the rejection of their church and communities, who had been so totally alone because they were taught that God didn’t even care for them, that they had taken the most desperate step of all...they had taken their lives.
The next day I placed the first name of some of those souls on that white stole. And as I did, I found myself watermarking my love for them into the stole with my tears.
Many years ago, I was given the opportunity to speak to a small group of the LGBTQIA community as a pastor. As I stood before this group, I was more than aware of the language in our Book of Discipline and of the pain it had caused. Even though I totally disagreed with the language, it was language that my community had unfortunately embraced. As I stood before these beautiful and bruised people, I shared my struggle with that language. Frankly, I was embarrassed by it. And I was ashamed by it. And so, I turned to them, those left out by my church community, and looking each one of them in the eye, and I apologized for that language, and I vowed to do everything I could to have it removed.
I have never felt the power of God’s spirit more than I did at that moment. As I spoke those words, I realized they weren’t my words, they were words that came to me from the basement of my existence. They were words that were spoken into me at my baptism through the waters of all of my ancestors. And in those words, were the gift of God’s healing. A healing especially for me.
After I shared that, a pastor from another denomination came up to me and asked me how I could actually say those words. “You are a United Methodist, Brook, you aren’t allowed to say that! That’s your community and your community says homosexuality is not compatible with Christian teaching!” I thought about that for a moment and then said, “The heart of who I am is way bigger and deeper and wider than the United Methodist Church, my friend. My love comes from the grace born in and through the story of Jesus, and that apology has never been truer to who I know and believe Jesus to be. Therefore to “not” speak that apology would be disobedient to the love I know in Jesus.”
That was a watershed moment for me. It felt good to speak the truth in love that night. Just as it felt good for me to write those names on that stole and weep.
Your friend and pastor, still trying to walk the truth in love, Brook
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