Author Archives: Obie Holmen

The wait is (nearly) over & a radio interview

I’ve been frustrated the past couple of months when the target date for release of Queer Clergy moved from Nov 15 to Dec 1 to Dec 30 and then to Jan 15. Thus, I was relieved when I received an email late yesterday from my contact at Pilgrim Press, announcing, “Great news – advance copies of your book are here, so yes, they should be available by Jan. 15.” What has seemed hypothetical and elusive is about to become real.

About the same time, I received an email from Presbyterian clergyman and radio host, Rev. John Shuck. When I first started this blog nearly five years ago, his blog, Shuck and Jive, appeared on my first blog rolls. Last November, he moved his efforts to his new Religion for Life website that was centered around his public radio program of the same name. Religion for Life is carried by a handful of radio stations in Tennesee (Pastor Shuck’s home), Virginia, and Nebraska. Pastor Shuck uses his radio program to conduct interviews, and his impressive list of luminaries includes: Bishop John Shelby Spong, Reza Aslan (the Muslim author of the popular book, The Zealot), Barbara Kingsolver, Marcus Borg, Kathleen Norris, NT Wright, and many others.

And now me.

The email received from Rev. Shuck included a link to the interview he conducted with me that aired a week or two ago that is now available in podcast format. For better or worse, here it is. Click this link to listen to the interview.

Bishop John Shelby Spong: straight ally

In 1976, the Episcopal Church revised its canons to allow women to be ordained as priests. That same year, the Episcopal Diocese of Newark consecrated Rev. John Shelby Spong to be its bishop. For the next twenty-five years, Bishop Spong would be an outspoken leader of the progressive wing of the Episcopal Church, especially regarding LGBT issues.

Bishop Spong’s advocacy as a straight ally came to the fore in the late 1980s when he penned the progressive view in a running dialogue in the official Episcopal magazine, The Episcopalian. A gay man from Texas responded to the series by challenging the bishop to ordain him. Although there had been previous gay ordinations by sympathetic bishops, this one would prove different. Never a shrinking violet, Bishop Spong encouraged press scrutiny, and he carefully stepped over television camera cables during the December, 1989 ordination. CNN looped the story as its lead every half hour.

The following year was marked by reaction and fallout. “The seeds of anarchy are sown,” charged eight bishops in the Midwest. An “open and deliberate violation … a blatant disregard of the teaching of the Church Catholic,” cried a Texas bishop. A Florida bishop accused Spong of “an act of arrogance,” and the bishop of Northern Indiana suggested Bishop Spong was motivated by “publicity and little else.” At their fall meeting, the House of Bishops voted to disassociate from the ordination, but the four vote margin proved to be much closer than the conservatives expected. Following the vote, Bishop Spong blistered his opponents in a speech to the House of Bishops that he characterized as “forty-five minutes of what surely must be described as passionate purple oratory.” Late that night, two of his fellow bishops separately appeared at his hotel room door to confess that they were closeted gay men, one of whom had actually voted against Bishop Spong. “I am so afraid,” he said, “that I will be exposed. I cover that fear by being negative and harsh on this issue on every public occasion.”

At the 1994 General Convention, conservatives succeeded in watering down a document called the “Pastoral,” and Bishop Spong encountered the tearful leaders of Integrity (including Dr. Louie Crew) in the hallway outside his hotel room. Bishop Spong spent the night penning a response in longhand on a legal notepad. As dawn creeped through his hotel window, he awakened his wife and asked her to go the hotel business center to type up the document, which he called a “Statement of Koinonia.” At the plenary session of the House of Bishops the following day, Bishop Spong asked to raise a point of personal privilege. When the presiding officer recognized him, he strode past the floor microphones and proceeded to the main microphone at the platform, and he began to read the document as his wife and others distributed copies to the floor and to the press and visitors. After a few minutes, the presiding officer attempted to cut him off, but Bishop Spong held up his hand like a traffic cop and continued reading. When he finished, Bishop Mary Adelia McLeod of Vermont stepped forward saying she wanted to sign the document. Other bishops did the same disrupting the business of the day. Eventually eighty-five bishops signed the document, representing the largest dioceses in the nation and the greatest number of church members.

There is so much more to be told, and my book, Queer Clergy, does precisely that. Bishop Spong has written one of the endorsements that appears on the book’s back cover, and he states, “It is a story that had to be written … Obie Holmen tells this story in a gripping and fascinating way.”

This is the fifteenth installment in the series Cast of characters countdown. I will continue to post biographical notes about the iconic pilgrims and prophets on the road to full inclusion who are featured prominently in my soon-to-be-released book, Queer Clergy.

Here’s the list of prior posts:

1968 Troy Perry (founder of the MCC)

1970 Robert Mary Clement (gay priest who marched in the first Gay Pride parade)

1972 William Johnson (first out gay man to be ordained by a traditional denomination)

1974 James Siefkes (Lutheran pastor behind the formation of Lutherans Concerned)

1974 David Bailey Sindt (founder of More Light Presbyterians)

1975 Steve Webster (organized the first gathering of gay Methodists)

1975 Dr. Louie Clay (founder of Episcopal Integrity)

1976 Chris Glaser (longtime Presbyterian activist)

1977 Ellen Marie Barrett (first out lesbian ordained to the Episcopal priesthood)

1978 Loey Powell (early UCC lesbian pastor and activist)

1980 Mark Bowman (founder and leader of RMN and editor of Open Hands Magazine)

1982 Melvin Wheatley (Methodist bishop and straight ally)

1987 Ann B. Day (Led the UCC ONA for twenty years)

1990 Jeff Johnson, Ruth Frost, Phyllis Zillhart (Extraordinarily ordained Lutherans)

Jeff Johnson, Phyllis Zillhart, Ruth Frost: Lutherans on trial

The predecessor bodies of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) did not experience the conflict and controversy over LGBT issues that colored the sister denominations in the ’70s and early ’80s. In the early years, Lutherans Concerned (The Lutheran LGBT advocacy group) maintained a collegial posture toward the church with optimism that the soon-to-be-merged, egalitarian church body would be all things to all people. However, the great expectations that accompanied the formation of the ELCA (Jan 1, 1988 as the result of merger of predecessor Lutheran bodies) evaporated within months.

In the fall of 1987 (just before the merger), three senior seminarians from California came out, and their path to ordination was not immediately blocked. In fact, all three were certified for ordination by the appropriate committees late in 1987, with the expectation that the ELCA would routinely continue the process. But, it was not to be. One of the three, Jeff Johnson, quipped in February, 1988, that public attention “turned out to be a little bigger deal than I thought it would be.” Meanwhile, the first presiding bishop of the newly-merged ELCA, Herbert Chilstrom, suggested that the pending ordinations “set off an avalanche of letters and phone calls to parish pastors, synodical bishops and our church-wide office here in Chicago.” The fledgling denomination caved under public pressure, and the ordination approvals were withdrawn.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, a lesbian couple that had met while seminarians at Luther Seminary of St. Paul also had their path toward ordination blocked. Ruth Frost, the daughter of an esteemed professor at Luther, and Phyllis Zillhart, from Southwestern Minnesota, worked in non-ecclesiastical jobs after seminary graduation.

Then, ecclesiastical disobedience came to the ELCA, in the form of extra ordinem (extraordinary) ordinations. A pair of San Francisco congregations, part of a larger grouping of Bay area congregations (predecessor to what later become Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries–ELM), risked denominational punishment by calling and ordaining Jeff Johnson to one congregation and Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart to a shared call at the second. Here is a video that recounts these events of 1990, borrowed from the ELM website.

Following a highly dramatic ecclesiastical trial, the two congregations were initially suspended and later expelled from the ELCA. The ad hoc disciplinary committee that conducted the trials felt compelled to follow church policy, but their official decision called on the ELCA to reconsider the policy. Referring to the two senior pastors of the congregations who dared to call the gay and lesbian ordinands, the disciplinary committee chair wrote:

I could not help but believe that if Christ were with us now, in body as well as spirit, we would find him seated at their table. I regard myself fortunate to be part of a church that counts them as pastors.

Pastors Johnson, Frost, and Zillhart—and their congregations–provided pastoral comfort to the San Francisco gay community at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, offering their amens to the dying and their families even as the wider church was absent.

The postscript to the story includes the festive Rites of Reception of these three, and others, to the official clergy roster of the ELCA in 2010, as well as the invitation from the ELCA to the two expelled congregations, St Francis Lutheran and First United Lutheran, to rejoin the denomination, which both congregations accepted.

This brief account fails to do justice to this poignant story; Queer Clergy: A History of Gay and Lesbian Ministry in American Protestantism offers a greatly expanded retelling.

Ann B. Day and the first 20 years of the UCC ONA

Somerset, Massachusetts, is a working class community south of Boston. A 1970s neighborhood women’s softball team with “E R A” emblazoned across their T-shirts would prove to be far more powerful than mere athletic exploits on the field would indicate. They were not sponsored by a laundry detergent as many assumed; instead, they were feminists and supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment. The team included several women who would become major players in the LGBT movement for full inclusion: Carter Heyward, irregularly ordained as an Episcopal priest (one of the Philadelphia Eleven) and later a leading lesbian theologian; Mary Glasspool, the first lesbian to be consecrated as an Episcopal Bishop in 2010; and UCC pastor rosi olmstead (she prefers no capitals) and her partner Marnie Warner, the team manager, would pioneer the UCC Open and Affirming movement (ONA).

After the Presbyterians in 1978, the Methodists in 1982, and the Lutherans in 1983, the UCC would join the welcoming church movement in 1985. In this case, it was not the UCC that took the lead … or was it? The movement in the sister denominations was always an outsider program promoted by the various homophile organizations in critical tension with denominational policies. For the UCC, ONA would not be an extrinsic program of the Coalition–it would be an intrinsic policy of the UCC itself–though once established, it would be administered by the Coalition beginning in 1987. Marnie Warner and Pastor Ann B. Day were the delegates who shepherded a Massachusetts open and affirming resolution through the snares of General Synod in 1985. Later, the UCC LGBT advocacy group, the Coalition, provided the structure and the funding for implementation of the ONA program, and Pastor Day and her partner, Donna Enberg, became the face of the program, as well as its hands and feet.

Raised as a Southern Presbyterian and with Methodist and Lutheran family members from the Shenandoah Valley, Ann B. Day was ordained following graduation from Vanderbilt Divinity School in 1978. For the next three years, she served as associate pastor at First Congregational Church UCC of Holden, a small city located in the center of Massachusetts between Boston and the Springfield/Hartford area. In 1980, her partner, Donna Enberg, entered her life, and they would later be married after Massachusetts law changed decades later.

In 1987 when the Coalition assumed responsibility for funding and administering the ONA project, Day and Enberg took over and would serve as staff and inspiration for the next twenty years; they would be much more than merely the “keepers of the list.” Under their leadership, the movement established a structure, a network of ONA churches, and a method of joining. Along the way, Day and Enberg developed resource materials, including sample resolutions, films, study packets, books, and articles.

Mostly, Day and Enberg encouraged intentionality and articulated the rationale for joining the movement. To the oft-heard refrain, “our congregation already welcomes everybody,” Pastor Day responded that the actual experience of gays and lesbians had often been rejection, even when a congregation claimed “all are welcome,” and thus an intentional statement of affirmation was necessary to counter low expectations.

The ONA program has continued its vital ministry to the present, and currently numbers over 1,100 UCC congregations containing 275,000 members.

Methodist gays and lesbians surge forward on a rising tide

My soon-to-be-released book, Queer Clergy: A History of Gay and Lesbian Ministry in American Protestanti sm, chronicles the journey toward full inclusion in the five, principal mainline denominations of the US, including the United Methodist Church. Of the five, the Methodists have lagged behind, and I attended the 2012 General Conference in Florida, hoping to witness history and to be able to write a fitting final chapter for the book. However, a legislative breakthrough was thwarted due to the alliance of domestic gatekeepers with a swelling international contingent. Thus, my final chapter became How Long, O Lord?

Early chapters of the book chronicle the pan-denominational ecclesiastical disobedience that spurred change, including the irregular ordination of the Philadelphia Eleven. In 1974, eleven women challenged 2,000 years of church patriarchy and were ordained to the Episcopal priesthood, despite church canons to the contrary. In the buildup to that historic event, a rousing sermon of Dr. Charles Willie called for bishops to step forward.

And so it is meet and right that a bishop who believes that in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, ought to ordain any … person who is qualified for the Holy Orders. A bishop who, on his own authority, ordains a woman deacon to the priesthood will be vilified, and talked about, but probably not crucified. Such a bishop would be following the path of the Suffering Servant, which is the path Jesus followed. It requires both courage and humility to disobey an unjust law.

The church is in need of such a bishop today.

My book suggests that Methodist progress would similarly require the ecclesiastical disobedience of the UMC episcopacy.

At a gathering in the makeshift “Tabernacle” that housed the allied progressive Methodist groups that trumpeted change during that 2012 General Conference, retired bishop Melvin Talbert issued a call reminiscent of Dr. Willie’s sermon 38 years earlier. “Biblical obedience demands ecclesiastical disobedience,” he intoned, calling forth his own experience in the civil rights movement.

Each day, it seems, a new Methodist story of ecclesiastical disobedience hits the newswire. The list of clergy who have defied church policy against officiating at same-gender weddings includes: the retired dean of the Yale Divinity School, a collection of Pennsylvania clergy who jointly officiated at a same-gender wedding, and Rev. Frank Schaefer, whose ecclesiastical trial resulted in defrocking. Just in the last week, we witnessed the wedding of Methodist clergy, Rev. Joanne Carlson Brown and Rev. Christie Newbill in Seattle, and the officiant was none other than their district superintendent. Dr. Brown was the first (and only?) out-lesbian ordained as UMC clergy in 1982, which resulted in the 1984 General Conference enacting a restrictive ordination policy that remains in effect today.

Methodist ecclesiastical disobedience has moved upstream from pew to pulpit to district and now to the episcopacy itself. Though the Conference of Bishops voted to institute judicial proceedings against one of their own, retired bishop Talbert for officiating at a gay wedding in Georgia over the wishes of the local bishop, individual voices in the episcopal wilderness are crying out.

Sitting bishops Peggy Johnson, Rev. Schaefer’s Pennsylvania supervisor, and Minerva G. Carcano, bishop of the California-Nevada Conference, have openly decried the discrimination written into the Book of Discipline.

Listen to Bishop Johnson:

Several statements in our Book of Discipline are discriminatory (forbidding ordination of homosexual persons, forbidding the performing of same-gender marriages, and considering the practice of homosexuality incompatible with Christian teaching). There appear to be contradictions between the many affirming statements (mentioned earlier) and these statements.

In a watershed moment that goes beyond words to action, Bishop Carcano has invited the defrocked Rev. Schaefer to come and join the ministry of the California-Nevada Conference. Defying the action of the church court, this invitation amounts to ecclesiastical disobedience at the highest level. In issuing the invitation, Bishop Carcano writes:

[The UMC Book of Discipline is] an imperfect book of human law that violates the very spirit of Jesus the Christ who taught us through word and deed that all God’s children are of sacred worth and welcomed into the embrace of God’s grace. I believe that the time has come for we United Methodists to stand on the side of Jesus and declare in every good way that the United Methodist Church is wrong in its position on homosexuality, wrong in its exclusion of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and wrong in its incessant demand to determine through political processes who can be fully members of the body of Christ. Frank Schaefer chose to stand with Jesus as he extended love and care to his gay son and his partner. We should stand with him and others who show such courage and faithfulness.

Legislative change in the UMC remains uncertain. The General Conference will not meet until 2016, and the political alliance between international delegates and domestic gatekeepers may remain insurmountable. In the face of such realities, policy change must come through alternate avenues, including the direct action of local clergy, district superintendents, and conference bishops.

Ecclesiastical history is unfolding before us. In the words of Episcopal Priest, Dr. Carter Heyward, one of the irregularly ordained Philadelphia Eleven,

I believe (as do many others) that, for the Church to change, the Church must act its way into new ways of thinking. The Episcopal Church will not be able to think its way successfully toward an inclusive gay-affirming reimaging of Christian marriage until there are gay and lesbian Episcopalians who are married. People act–only then do laws change. The canons and liturgies catch up with people’s lives over time. That’s how laws get changed inside and outside the church.

So, too, the Methodists. Godspeed.

Melvin Wheatley: Maverick Methodist bishop

The Methodist ecclesiastical trial of Rev. Frank Schaefer has dominated the weekly news cycle. Rev. Schaefer has become the latest icon of resistance to oppressive Methodist LGBT policies after he was convicted of the heinous crime of presiding at the marriage of his gay son. Several weeks earlier, retired Methodist Bishop Melvin Talbert was the center of the news for presiding at a gay marriage in Alabama. For that, the Methodist Council of Bishops has decreed that ecclesiastical charges be brought against one of their own. I heard Bishop Talbert predict his own actions during a rousing speech outside the convention hall in Tampa that hosted the 2012 Methodist General Conference. “Biblical obedience demands ecclesiastical disobedience” he said then to a roused-up audience still smarting from legislative defeat the day before. Meanwhile, ecclesiastical charges are pending against esteemed Methodist ethicist and former dean of Yale Divinity School, Rev. Thomas Ogletree, for officiating at the legal marriage of his gay son. These three martyrs are the latest in a long line of straight allies who have incurred official Methodist wrath for daring to suggest that the emperor wears no clothes.

The first of these was Bishop Melvin Wheatley of Colorado. Bishop Wheatley was already a veteran of edgy social justice actions when he refused to assent to an onerous episcopal message (a collective statement of all Methodist bishops) at the 1980 General Conference. When the episcopal address parroted Methodist homophobia, “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching,” Wheatley responded, “I will not accept [this statement]. It states as an absolute fact what is an insufficiently documented opinion: that gay persons can’t be Christians.”

Earlier, he had moved into the home of Japanese Americans sent to an internment camp during WWII in order to protect the vacant home from vandals, and he also exchanged pulpits for a month with a black minister of a black congregation in Los Angeles in 1964 as racial unrest simmered, ready to boil over.

After publicly voicing objection to the 1980 episcopal address, Bishop Wheatley then acted on his own words. In 1982, he ordained an open lesbian to the ministry of word and sacrament. To the best of my knowledge, Joanne Carlson Brown remains the only out gay or lesbian ordained as Methodist clergy because the 1984 General Conference reacted to her ordination by expressly prohibiting ordination of “self avowed practicing homosexuals,” and this policy remains in effect today. Of course, there are countless gay or lesbian Methodist clergy, but most are closeted and none were out at the time of their ordination.

The LGBT activism of Bishop Wheatley wasn’t finished. That same year of 1982, a gay youth pastor was outed and lost his position with a Denver area church. Bishop Wheatley then appointed Julian Rush to an inner city congregation. Though the pay was miniscule, Bishop Wheatley attempted to preserve the clerical credentials of Rush. A Methodist pastor from the south attempted to bring ecclesiastical charges against Wheatley for this appointment, and Wheatley faced sharp questioning at a hearing. He did not knuckle under, and he pointedly told the panel, “Homosexuality is a mysterious gift of God’s grace.” Charges were dropped.

A significant component of Rush’s youth ministry was as lyricist, composer, and director of religious musical drama, and his youth group often went “on the road” to perform Rush’s creations.

Here’s a sample:

Being down is like down on the ground

With nobody, no place to go;

When the big creatures push you around,

And they make you feel … Oh, I don’t know,

It’s a feeling that’s more like a pain in your heart,

And you feel like … you feel like … a worm.

Now an ant is an ant

And a worm is a worm

But an ant has to crawl

And a worm has to squirm,

So an ant shouldn’t bother

Befriending a worm

Since a worm cannot crawl

And an ant cannot squirm

We’re different and different we’ll stay,

It’s just God’s will.

It’s just God’s way.

From The Resurrection Thing by Julian Rush

This is the twelfth installment in the series Cast of characters countdown. I will continue to post biographical notes about the iconic pilgrims and prophets on the road to full inclusion who are featured prominently in my soon-to-be-released book, Queer Clergy.

Here’s the list of prior posts:

1968 Troy Perry (founder of the MCC)

1970 Robert Mary Clement (gay priest who marched in the first Gay Pride parade)

1972 William Johnson (first out gay man to be ordained by a traditional denomination)

1977 Ellen Marie Barrett (first out lesbian ordained to the Episcopal priesthood)

1974 James Siefkes (Lutheran pastor behind the formation of Lutherans Concerned)

1974 David Bailey Sindt (founder of More Light Presbyterians)

1975 Steve Webster (organized the first gathering of gay Methodists)

1975 Dr. Louie Clay (founder of Episcopal Integrity)

1976 Chris Glaser (longtime Presbyterian activist)

1978 Loey Powell (early UCC lesbian pastor and activist)

1980 Mark Bowman (founder and leader of RMN and editor of Open Hands Magazine)

Mark Bowman: Pan-denominational leader

Reared in Ohio with a bachelor’s degree from Cleveland State, Mark Bowman entered Boston University School of Theology in 1978 as a married man with two daughters, but he soon realized he was gay. He came out with exuberant self-discovery and immediately became active with Boston area gay seminarians. In 1980, he attended the national gathering of Affirmation, the renamed Methodist Gay Caucus that was then five years old. He continued in seminary and was ordained a deacon in his home conference in Ohio, but word of his involvement with Affirmation filtered back, and an official inquiry resulted in revocation of his probationary status. Though he received his M Div degree in 1982, he would never enter ordained ministry.

Instead, he became one of the iconic, pan-denominational leaders of the welcoming church movement.

More Light Presbyterians, dating to 1978, served as the model for the Methodist Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN), originally called the Reconciling Congregations Project (RCP), and other denominational welcoming church organizations. Mark Bowman served on the task force that birthed the Methodist “program in which local churches will declare their support for the concerns of lesbians and gay men.” The Reconciling Congregation Project (RCP) was created in 1983, and Bowman, along with Beth Richardson, served as volunteer coordinators. The second choice for the name of the organization demonstrated a sense of humor: “Self-Avowed, Practicing Churches,” parroting the disciplinary terminology of the church

Their initial focus was simply the 1984 General Conference. Disappointment and rejection had jarred early Affirmation members, and RCP was a fall-back strategy to be implemented in anticipation of further legislative rejection. Indeed, the 1984 General Conference codified Methodist LGBT exclusion from the pulpit. Mark Bowman and his associates in the RCP were prepared; after the plenary defeats, they passed out endless flyers to conference attendees, encouraging local congregations to become reconciling congregations. After the Conference ended, two congregations signed up–Washington Square UMC in New York City and Wesley UMC in Fresno, California–and the movement that would become the Reconciling Ministries Network was off and running.

Bowman continued as volunteer leader. As the organization grew, his status changed to part time paid director and then full time. Along the way, the organizational publication, Open Hands Magazine, won awards and became a pan-denominational publication. Bowman was instrumental in arranging coordination between the various religious LGBT organizations, and he helped arrange two large ecumenical WOW Conferences (Witness our Welcome) that were held after the turn of the century.

By then, Bowman had moved on from RMN to spearhead a new project to preserve LGBT history. Bowman continues as director of the online compendium of LGBT history known as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Religious Archives Network (www.lgbtran.org).

I first met Mark for lunch near his northside Chicago home in 2011. After I explained my plans for a book, he commented, “That’s a huge universe you’re exploring.” Indeed. Despite that initial skepticism, Mark has been a huge supporter, and we have met face-to-face a couple of times since, and he has fact-checked my manuscript and offered suggestions. Mark is also an accomplished church musician and when he hasn’t been busy with LGBT concerns, he has worked in other social justice ministries including Bread for the World. He is also a doting grandfather to grandkids who live nearby.

He tends to understate his own contributions, but I hope my book will out him.

This is the eleventh installment in the series Cast of characters countdown. I will continue to post biographical notes about the iconic pilgrims and prophets on the road to full inclusion who are featured prominently in my soon-to-be-released book, Queer Clergy.

Here’s the list of prior posts:

1968 Troy Perry (founder of the MCC)

1970 Robert Mary Clement (gay priest who marched in the first Gay Pride parade)

1972 William Johnson (first out gay man to be ordained by a traditional denomination)

1977 Ellen Marie Barrett (first out lesbian ordained to the Episcopal priesthood)

1974 James Siefkes (Lutheran pastor behind the formation of Lutherans Concerned)

1974 David Bailey Sindt (founder of More Light Presbyterians)

1975 Steve Webster (organized the first gathering of gay Methodists)

1975 Dr. Louie Clay (founder of Episcopal Integrity)

1976 Chris Glaser (longtime Presbyterian activist)

1978 Loey Powell (early UCC lesbian pastor and activist)

Lois Powell: UCC lesbian activist

“What a beautiful, heady, exasperating, hopeful mix!” the pastor exclaimed. We are “a people of risky adventure.” These are the words of the pastor of a Boston congregation in a 1975 article in the UCC’s national magazine. The Rev. Oliver G. Powell lifted up images of sauerbraten and potatoes, long draughts of dark beer, romantic poetry and Bach chorales. He talked of New England boiled dinners and baked beans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and skylight filtering through clear, freshly-washed, church-window panes.

Later, Rev. Powell and wife Eleonore would be “people of risky adventure” who would “exemplify courageous leadership in Open and Affirming Ministry” as supporters of their daughter Lois (Loey) Powell, a lesbian ordained in 1978. Parents and daughter would each serve as highly visible leaders along the UCC journey toward full inclusion.

Loey Powell graduated from Pacific School of Religion in 1977, the same “rash and courageous” institution that had witnessed Bill Johnson’s dining-hall speech seven years earlier. Echoing her father’s “heady, exasperating, and hopeful” sentiment, Powell remembers her seminary days as filled with the exhilaration of movement politics. She had come out early in her seminary life, and fondly remembers the bay area UCC gay caucus that gathered for monthly potlucks and nationally at UCC General Synods: “incredibly spirit-filled worship, doing the justice-making work of advocacy, being there for those who were wondering about their sexuality.” Like the sun piercing the fog over San Francisco Bay, feminism, liberation theology, and gay rights burned through the timbered halls of the seminary. And it wasn’t just the seminary. The Northern California Conference of the UCC was in the vanguard of hope, alive with possibilities.

Powell was ordained with two other lesbian classmates, but they were not officially out to the candidacy committee although they were out to friends and the seminary community. Thus, the status of first open lesbian to be ordained in the UCC falls to Rev. Ann Holmes in 1982. Nevertheless, as the daughter of an esteemed elder, Loey Powell immediately became the “poster lesbian” of the UCC. By the end of the decade, she served as co-coordinator with Rev. Bill Johnson as the UCC Coalition grew in size and status.

However, it took a number of years before a traditional congregation took a chance on calling her to pastoral ministry. Then a breakthrough in 1989. For the first time in any ecumenical denomination, an openly gay clergyperson was called as sole pastor to a traditional ministry through the normal call process. Pastor Powell would remain at United Church of Tallahassee for seven fruitful years of ministry before accepting a position in the UCC home office in Cleveland, where she has continued to serve, most recently on the Justice and Witness Ministry Team as Executive for Administration.

This is the tenth installment in the series Cast of characters countdown. I will continue to post biographical notes about the iconic pilgrims and prophets on the road to full inclusion who are featured prominently in my soon-to-be-released book, Queer Clergy. Here’s the list of prior posts:

1968 Troy Perry (founder of the MCC)

1970 Robert Mary Clement (gay priest who marched in the first Gay Pride parade)

1972 William Johnson (first out gay man to be ordained by a traditional denomination)

1977 Ellen Marie Barrett (first out lesbian ordained to the Episcopal priesthood)

1974 James Siefkes (Lutheran pastor behind the formation of Lutherans Concerned)

1974 David Bailey Sindt (founder of More Light Presbyterians)

1975 Steve Webster (organized the first gathering of gay Methodists)

1975 Dr. Louie Clay (founder of Episcopal Integrity)

1976 Chris Glaser (longtime Presbyterian activist)

Chris Glaser: Presbyterian and pan-denominational leader

At the 1976 Presbyterian General Assembly, More Light Presbyterian founder David Bailey Sindt was joined by others, including seminarians Bill Silver and Chris Glaser. In fact, Silver’s candidacy for ordination through the New York Presbytery was on the agenda because the presbytery was uncertain how to respond to his ordination request, and they kicked it upstairs to the General Assembly for “definitive guidance.” The assembly responded by creating a task force to study, solicit churchwide input, and report back. Openly gay seminarian Chris Glaser was appointed to the task force.

The public hearings across the country were tedious at best and homophobic at worst, and Glaser later wrote.

Yet many of us on the task force found the hearings frustrating: we had already learned so much that we found ourselves astounded and exasperated by the ignorance of the majority of those who testified … Many attacked us for being on the task force, questioning our own morals, character, and judgment … Our faith and our intelligence were offended as person after person used their time (and ours) to read from a dusty Bible its handful of verses presumed to be about homosexuality–as if we hadn’t heard them before, as if we couldn’t recite them verbatim!

After more than a year of study and dialogue, it was time to prepare a report to be submitted to the 1978 General Assembly for consideration and action. Fourteen members supported an inclusive majority report

May a self-affirming, practicing homosexual Christian be ordained? We believe so, if the person manifests such gifts as are required for ordination …

Five dissenters supported a restrictive minority report:

That no possibility for the ordination of a self-affirming, practicing homosexual person should be granted …

When the report became public, conservative opposition mobilized and when General Assembly 1978 rolled around, they were ready. The majority report was quickly rejected, and the commissioners (delegates) went beyond the minority report, adopting a resolution with a 90% majority stating,

“homosexuality is not God’s wish for humanity” [and] “unrepentant homosexual practice does not accord with the requirements for ordination.”

This resolution would control Presbyterian policy for a generation.

Glaser’s path to Presbyterian ordination had encountered an insurmountable roadblock. He diverted into non-ordained ministry. He founded and directed The Lazarus Project, an LGBT ministry in Los Angeles. He remained an active leader of More Light Presbyterians and contributed as editor and writer for More Light Update and later, Open Hands Magazine, an award-winning pan-denominational publication. He also penned numerous books; to date, a dozen have been published. Finally, in 2005 he was ordained, but through the Metropolitan Community Churches rather than the Presbyterian Church.

Rev. Glaser continues to write, speak, and lead workshops and retreats, and his latest offerings can be found here. Chris has also been an invaluable source and fact checker for my own work, and his endorsement will appear on the book’s back cover:

Queer Clergy is a comprehensive, carefully documented, and highly readable account of a movement that transformed mainline Protestant denominations into more welcoming spiritual communities for LGBT Christians. There is still much work to do, but Holmen’s well-written history reminds us of our basis for hope.

This is the ninth installment in the series Cast of characters countdown. I will continue to post biographical notes about the iconic pilgrims and prophets on the road to full inclusion who are featured prominently in my soon-to-be-released book, Queer Clergy. Here’s the list of prior posts:

1968 Troy Perry (founder of the MCC)

1970 Robert Mary Clement (gay priest who marched in the first Gay Pride parade)

1972 William Johnson (first out gay man to be ordained by a traditional denomination)

1977 Ellen Marie Barrett (first out lesbian ordained to the Episcopal priesthood)

1974 James Siefkes (Lutheran pastor behind the formation of Lutherans Concerned)

1974 David Bailey Sindt (founder of More Light Presbyterians)

1975 Steve Webster (organized the first gathering of gay Methodists)

1975 Dr. Louie Clay (founder of Episcopal Integrity)

Catching up with two lesbian pilgrims: Amy DeLong and Lisa Larges

Rev. Amy DeLong and Lisa Larges, two pilgrims who are featured prominently in Queer Clergy: A History of Gay and Lesbian Ministry in American Protestantism, popped up in Facebook links today.

Methodist Pastor Amy DeLong, whose ecclesiastical trial fills later pages of the book, offered a Youtube video following her monitoring of the weeklong Methodist Council of Bishops. She was disappointed in their failure of leadership. “We need to start calling them followers and not leaders,” she said. In an earlier writing, which is quoted in the book, she noted ecclesiastical handwringing and used the metaphor of the “weeping executioner.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIW8Rh8fAHw

Lisa Larges was also the subject of ecclesiastical judicial wrangling—twice. Her path toward ordination in the Twin Cities Presbytery was thwarted by the Presbyterian courts in the nineties. Fifteen years later she tried again, and her attempt was bottled up in the courts once more, but then the General Assembly finally eliminated LGBT clergy exclusion thereby rendering the court case moot, and she is again on track for ordination. She penned a poignant retrospective in a guest blog post on ecclesio.com which reflects upon the Presbyterian wandering in the wilderness for forty years. Her post begins:

What I’m wondering now, some two years after the vote in my denomination, (the Presbyterian Church U.S.A.) to remove the bar to ordination for lgbt persons, what I’m wondering now as someone who is a part of that lgbt community, what I’m wondering now, even as we live out the denouement of that struggle, with churches leaving and the question of marriage for same gender couples still before us, what I’m wondering now, remembering those forty some years of conflict—remembering the parliamentary maneuverings and high stakes votes and judicial actions and attempts toward dialogue and church-wide studies and appointed task forces and—what I’m wondering now, feeling the weight of the needless pain that we, as a church inflicted, what I’m wondering now is: Could we have done it better? Across that forty-year span, could we have worked out our differences with less rancor and divisiveness and objectivizing and bad behavior and fear of one another?

Read the rest here.