Friday, April 18, 2008

North Dallas church to fight Methodists over discrimination

By John Wright of Dallas Voice

John Wright/Dallas Voice

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.

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

Since the 1972 General Conference, the Book of Discipline has stated that homosexuals are “individuals of sacred worth,” but that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

This “incompatibility clause,” as it’s commonly referred to, has been used as the theological basis for subsequent bans on gay clergy and same-sex marriages.

In 2006, the UMC’s highest court, the Judicial Council, upheld a pastor’s decision to deny church membership to a gay person.

This year, delegates again will consider whether to get rid of the incompatibility clause, as well as whether to strike down the Judicial Council’s ruling. They’ll also likely decide the status of transgender clergy, which isn’t currently addressed in the Book of Discipline.

But the ramifications of the conference extend beyond the denomination.

As the country’s largest “mainline” church, with 8 million members in the U.S., UMC historically has occupied the religious center on social issues. So it’s considered a key battleground between conservative and progressive forces.

“The right wing is trying to take that center and move it just a little more to the right,” said Steven Webster, a longtime Methodist from Wisconsin who helped start the UMC’s first gay group, Affirmation, in 1975. “I think there are people who are using this wedge issue to try to break the denomination up one way or another.”

Webster will be attending the conference on behalf of Soulforce, a national LGBT civil rights group that staged a demonstration resulting in nearly 200 arrests at the UMC General Conference in Cleveland eight years ago.

Northhaven members, meanwhile, will be teaming up with other UMC churches from around the country that are part of the Reconciling Ministries Network, an independent Methodist group that advocates for LGBT members.

A committee of about 20 people from Northhaven, a thriving congregation with a new $5 million sanctuary, has spent the last year meeting one-on-one with delegates to next week’s conference from North Texas.

Eric Folkerth, senior pastor at Northhaven, said he hopes the congregation can serve as a model for the future of the UMC.

“I know that we have a lot of our members who will be over at the conference every day,” Folkerth said. “The fact that it’s in our backyard means that everybody’s going to be paying attention, everybody’s going to be reading stuff in the media. I think our church is at a place where we’re very confident about the witness we can make.”

In addition to concerns about a potential split, Folkerth and others say they’re afraid UMC policies on gays are alienating young people in an already-aging denomination. A major study published last year found that a majority of people ages 16-29 have negative attitudes about Christianity due in part to its teachings on gays.

Drew Phoenix, a transgender minister who’s pastor of St. John’s UMC in Baltimore, Md., faces the prospect of being defrocked if the General Conference bans transgender clergy this year. But Phoenix, who survived disciplinary charges after coming out two years ago, said his chief concern is for the future of the church.

“Kids aren’t going to tolerate intolerance and disrespect and exclusion, so I hope that we choose to open the doors a little wider and stop the discrimination that we’ve been guilty of for decades,” Phoenix said.

As for gay clergy, LGBT Methodists and their supporters say it’s doubtful the ban will be overturned at this year’s conference. Instead, they’re hoping delegates will revisit the Judicial Council’s ruling in Decision 1032, which upheld a pastor’s decision to deny church membership to an openly gay person.

Lowrance said even if the ban on gay clergy is overturned, she’s unsure whether she’d want to be a minister again. For one thing, she said, it would mean being assigned to a different congregation, and for now she’s happy with where God’s put her.

“The experience at Northhaven has been so wonderful and so incredible,” she said. “Instead of running away, I’m willing to love the church in spite of what it’s done to me, and I don’t think I can be a part of the solution without being engaged.”

Pegasus News content partner - Dallas Voice
The community newspaper for gay & lesbian Dallas.

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