'This Is My Church Too'

IN OCTOBER 2014, at the age of 35, Ingrid Olson stood before her church of many years. “I am loved,” she told the 80 or so members of her congregation seated in the sanctuary on that Sunday evening. “I am God’s child. I am accepted — completely.” Olson listed other parts of her identity: her curiosity, athleticism, passion for music, Swedish heritage, her tendency to be passive-aggressive. “I am a sister, a daughter, a niece, a granddaughter, a friend,” she continued. Then she added something most people in the church didn’t know: “I am a Christian, lesbian woman.”

Olson is a lifelong member of the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC), a denomination with Swedish-Pietist roots and 850 congregations in North America. Though the central identity of ECC churches is found in six “affirmations,” including the authority of scripture, the importance of missions, and the experience of personal rebirth, the ECC is not what’s known as an “affirming” church — one that encourages LGBTQ members to participate in the full life of the congregation, including marriage, church leadership, and ordination. Delegates at the 2004 ECC annual meeting voted to make binding a resolution that asserts the “biblically rooted” position on human sexuality is “heterosexual marriage, faithfulness within marriage, abstinence outside of marriage.” While the ECC might not say that being gay is a sin, it would certainly say that pursuing a same-sex relationship is out of the question.

I met Olson for coffee just under a year after she came out to her small Covenant church. She described the years of shame, prayer, therapy, and ex-gay ministry that followed her teenage realization she wasn’t attracted to men. “A miracle of God,” says Olson, when I ask how she eventually found the courage to tell her church she was a lesbian. “And I say that sort of kidding, but sort of not,” she adds.

Since then, Olson has experienced a few moments she describes as “pure redemption,” including the standing ovation and onslaught of hugs she received that night. And she definitely has a team of allies within the ECC, including people who disagree with the denomination’s official position. But just as often, Olson has found herself thinking, “I don’t know if I can deal with this.” Currently single but open to dating, Olson knows that if she were in a relationship with a woman, many people in her church would view it as sin and question her fitness for leadership.

Furthermore, in fall 2015, the ECC released guidelines that not only maintain heterosexual marriage as the only biblical norm, but also forbid ECC pastors from participating in same-sex marriages and prohibit ECC buildings from being used for same-sex weddings. Though the guidelines acknowledge some pastors might not agree, the document states that ministers who find themselves “in permanent on-going disagreement” have two options: “either yielding to the position and practice of the ECC, or concluding service with the ministry and/or the ECC.” In other words: It’s okay to disagree as long as you obey or leave.

‘I’m not going anywhere’

This is what I wanted to know from Olson: Why not just find a new church, one where it wouldn’t be complicated to serve on the leadership team, have a girlfriend, and maybe one day get married?

Olson has considered leaving, but for now, she explains, she has reasons to stay: She hopes to help the ECC become more welcoming to folks who aren’t straight — or, at minimum, at least make room for multiple opinions. As a layperson, Olson knows she can challenge the leadership of the ECC in ways pastors can’t. “I’m not going anywhere, so you’re going to have to figure out what to do with me,” says Olson, explaining the message she hopes staying sends to the denomination’s leadership.

Whenever she’s thought about leaving, explains Olson, she always goes back to the night when she came out to her church. Specifically, the moment right before she began to speak.

“I knew everybody there,” says Olson. “And it wasn’t just that I knew their name, but I knew their stories and their kids and their good and their bad and before I started talking, I just felt like I was supposed to look at everyone.” So as she surveyed those present—the people who had been her community, her family, ever since she arrived at the church 13 years earlier for a post-college ministry internship — she told them they were “her people” and she was sharing her story up front because she loved them.

“I really do believe that God gave me that moment to go back to so I won’t leave,” says Olson. So, at least for now, she’s staying put.

Disagreeing with the hierarchy

In a not-so-distant past, when “Christian” and “gay” appeared in the same headline, it was rarely good news for folks in the LBGTQ community. But in recent years, that’s begun to change. “Tennessee Evangelical Church Welcomes the LGBT Community,” read a 2015 headline. “Presbyterian Group Changes Marriage Definition to Include Same-Sex Couples.” “How Episcopalians Embraced Gay Marriage.” “Baptist Church Ordains Trans Woman.” And though some Christians have refused to change their tone, it’s now apparent that they don’t speak for all people of faith. “Right-Wing Pastor Tells Christians to Boycott Same-Sex Weddings. These Christians Disagree,” stated one October 2015 headline.

To be sure, the church still has a long a way to go to be fully welcoming. According to a 2013 survey, 29 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults had been made to feel unwelcome in a place of worship at some point during their lives. Not surprising, a survey conducted the following year found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults (the survey didn’t ask about transgender identities) were significantly less likely than the general population to identify as Christian.

But while headlines and polls are helpful for mapping trends, they never tell the full story. LGBTQ Christians who opt to stay in churches that aren’t affirming — and their varied reasons for this — often fall outside the dominant narratives.

Take Margaret Uselman, a junior at St. Norbert College, a Catholic liberal arts school near Green Bay, Wis. Though Uselman says she grew up in a conservative Catholic diocese where the bishop never missed an opportunity to emphasize that marriage was “between one man and one woman,” she says did not experience a major conflict between her faith and sexuality when she came out in high school. “I just never felt it was wrong,” explains Uselman, who now identifies as a bisexual woman. “I always felt that, no, this is who I am, and I should be accepted for that.”

Uselman credits her family, especially her mom, for teaching her that it was okay to disagree with the church’s hierarchy. Though her parents now attend a Lutheran church, Uselman still feels mostly at home in Catholicism. “I do think that’s kind of weird sometimes,” she admits. “This place that I know isn’t inclusive and I know is sexist, why does this feel like where I still want to be?” And though there is a lot Uselman likes about the Catholic Church, especially its social teaching on the dignity of people, she can’t always explain why she stays.

“This is my church too,” she says after a pause. “I don’t want to feel chased out.”

For other LGBTQ Catholics, the journey toward finding a home in the Catholic Church has been difficult. “There is no infrastructure within the church to support me as a gay man,” wrote Bill Dickinson, a former Roman Catholic priest who came out — and resigned from the priesthood — at age 54. “And the church is not at her best when speaking to and about people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or even questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Even though the Catholic Church shows little sign of changing its teaching on sexuality, Dickinson has remained in the church and wants to help Catholic leaders become better ministers to LGBTQ people. “As someone who was a Roman Catholic priest and who understands my own sexual orientation, I am offering to be a part of the solution for the church leaders in their struggling relationship with LGBT people,” wrote Dickinson in an op-ed for The Daily Beast.

Creating more intersections

It’s a strange time to be a queer Mennonite. Though there are certainly affirming Mennonite congregations, delegates at the denomination’s 2015 general convention voted to reaffirm guidelines forbidding same-sex weddings and upholding traditional marriage. Yet the delegates also resolved to “forbear” with congregations whose beliefs and practices regarding same-sex unions differed from the denomination’s guidelines. “Pick a category of people at the Mennonite Church USA convention,” began one report from the conference, “and you could identify their pain.”

But despite the pain, Christian Parks — who identifies as “a queer person of Choctaw and African descent whose faith is informed by Mennonite tradition” and serves on the leadership of Pink Menno, a group working toward the full support and inclusion of LGBTQ individuals in the Mennonite Church USA — has chosen to stay.

Parks’ reasons for remaining in the Mennonite church amount to something like an Anabaptist liberation theology of potlucks. “If there is nothing else the Mennonite church knows how to do, they know how to have a potluck,” says Parks. “That’s where we best meet Jesus.” Gathering at a potluck is really gathering at Christ’s table, “a table of fullness to radical love,” Parks explains. “And what Anabaptism teaches me is that liberation happens when my table starts looking vastly different from who I am.”

So for Parks, the denomination’s refusal to fully welcome and affirm LGBTQ members feels like sitting at a potluck while the people across the table refuse to pass the casserole. “You just want to turn your chairs around like we’re not there,” says Parks. “But we’re at the table going, ‘We can’t eat until you come back.’”

The conversation isn’t just about same-sex marriage or even sexual orientation, Parks reminds me. White supremacy, sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, classism, xenophobia—for Parks, they’re all part of what has kept Christ’s table from being a table of truly radical love and can’t be talked about in isolation. “This is what my queerness offers me,” Parks explained: “the ability to create more intersections.”

Should I stay or should I go?

Yet staying isn’t always the right answer. Almost everyone I talked with emphasized that just as they have found particular reasons to stay, there are plenty of reasons why it might be wise for LGBTQ Christians who find themselves in churches that aren’t affirming to leave and find a new church.

If one of Parks’ LGBTQ friends in the Mennonite Church felt they could no longer stay in the Mennonite community, Parks says he would certainly support them in finding somewhere new to worship. “If this isn’t the place where love is liberating you anymore, how can I help you find your liberation?” he says.

When Erica Lea, a pastoral resident at a Baptist church in Washington, D.C., talks with LGBTQ friends or parishioners who are thinking about leaving their church, she first tries to understand if it’s a situation of spiritual abuse. “If you’re in a context that is spiritually abusive, you leave,” says Lea. “Spiritual abuse is real, and I wish folks would recognize it and talk about it more,” she adds. “And LGBTQ and gender issues are not its only sources.”

But even when spiritual abuse isn’t present, Lea recognizes that there are times when it may be best for an LGBTQ Christian to leave and find a more affirming church. In making this determination, she stresses the importance of “deep personal discernment,” ideally with a spiritual director. Leaving just to make a big scene is probably not the most productive, says Lea. But leaving because you feel an authentic call to be somewhere else may make sense.

As a pastor who is publicly out and a dual member of the Baptist and Mennonite traditions—neither is affirming at the denominational level but both include many affirming congregations—Lea has wrestled with this discernment process herself.

For Lea, her decision to stay is ultimately tied to her vocation as a minister — something she’s spent a lifetime discerning. “Since I’ve come out, I regularly receive Facebook messages or emails from folks who say, ‘I’m gay and I’m Christian’ or ‘I’m transgender and I’m Christian,’” she explains. “And I’ve been able to have significant — and at least twice, life-saving — conversations with folks, mostly young adults, because I’m a pastor, because I’m serving the church, and because I’m out.” And that gives her a lot of energy for her work as a pastor. “I just feel like I’m on the right track,” she says.

Lea admits with a wry laugh that serving as a pastor in traditions that aren’t affirming isn’t — in her words — “all rainbows and unicorns,” but she’s found a great sense of peace in her decision to stay. “It’s not just a matter of how can I survive and serve a church and feel satisfied with my life,” says Lea. “It’s ‘how can I contribute and serve?’”