In Oregon, United Methodists reflect on church’s decision to repeal anti-LGBTQ policies

The United Methodist Church recently wrapped up its general conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. At the gathering, delegates removed bans on gay clergy and officiating same sex marriages. The decision comes after decades of disagreement over those policies.

In the Pacific Northwest, the Oregon-Idaho Conference has already been a fully inclusive ministry.

Meanwhile, over the last few years, more than 7,000 congregations nationwide left the United Methodist Church. Many held more conservative theological views and largely left over LGBTQ-related policies.

Jan Nelson is a member of the Morningside United Methodist Church in Salem and attended the General Conference in Charlotte as a lay delegate. Reverend Ethan Gregory has been an associate pastor at First United Methodist Church in Portland and will soon head to Salem. They join us with details of what this historic change means.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. Earlier this month, United Methodist Church’s General Conference voted to remove multiple anti-gay bans that had been on the books for about 50 years. The rule stated that homosexuality was incompatible with Christianity. They also forbade same-sex weddings and the ordination of queer clergy. This vote won’t lead to huge policy changes in the Northwest. The western jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church, which includes Oregon, Washington and Idaho, had already been an inclusive ministry. But it’s a dramatic new chapter for one of the largest protestant denominations in the country and one that has seen a massive schism in recent years over LGBTQ policies.

Jan Nelson is a member of the Morningside United Methodist Church in Salem. She attended the General Conference as a lay delegate. The Reverend Ethan Gregory has been an associate pastor at First United Methodist Church in Portland. In a few weeks, he’ll take over at Salem’s First United Methodist Church. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Ethan Gregory: It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Jan Nelson: It’s good to be here. Good afternoon.

Miller: Good afternoon to you. Jan, first – what was it like to be at the General Conference this year?

Nelson: It was really amazing. I’ve been to a number of these going back to 2004 – they meet every four years – and every year there’s been a lot of tension. And those of us that believe in full inclusion have ended up with a lot of sorrow and grief. And this year was totally different. The atmosphere was very collegial and many times just very celebratory, and most of the people there were glad to see something new happening in the church.

Miller: When you talked about the tension that you experienced in earlier versions of this meeting ... It’s supposed to happen every four years, I guess it didn’t happen during COVID years. But, what form did that tension take? I’m just curious what it was like in 2004 or 2008, or other earlier times?

Nelson: In 2004, that was my first time. I was a volunteer. And one of the things that we did that year, as one of our advocacy organizations, was remind people to remember their baptism. And so some of us stood at the doors with bowls of water and invited people to just put their hand in the water and remember their baptism. And some of the people were glad to do that, and some people, knowing what we were representing in the big picture, would walk by and either give us a dirty look or not look at us. And that was kind of symbolic of the tension in the meetings. The votes pretty much all went in a conservative direction.

Miller: If I may, I think I may not be the only one who doesn’t totally understand what maybe was obvious to the people back in 2004. When you were giving them an opportunity to re-live or be reminded of their baptism, what was it that they disagreed with? I mean, how was it that they understood the political ramifications of what you were offering?

Nelson: Our position was that if all are welcome to be baptized, all are children of God and all should be equally valued, not only by God, but by the church. And so inviting people to remember their baptism was inviting them to remember that they were part of this family of humans. God loves all of us, but particularly the family of the church.

Miller: There was not a debate over getting rid of the ban on gay clergy, for example, just a few weeks ago, it was just an overwhelming vote – 692 to 51. What was the scene like inside the room?

Nelson: In the delegate section, it was not overwhelmingly excited. We’d been asked to remember how we felt when the votes didn’t go our ways, and to be a little bit subdued. In the visitors-observers section, there was a lot of excitement and hugs and tears and just a very joyful celebration. In the delegate section, we just kind of cried and held hands and enjoyed the moment.

Miller: Ethan Gregory, I gave the one-sentence version, but can you explain a little more fully, the actual rule changes?

Gregory: Yeah. In 1972, right after the merger of the Evangelical United Brethren Church and the Methodist Church, the church was still forming. And they were passing our new social principles, which are essentially just our statements of the United Methodist Church about a variety of social things. And they were wonderfully written. Then, at that General Conference in ‘72, someone got up to the microphone and through our process of amendments added the words, " ... and the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.”

That was 52 years ago, and over the course of numerous General Conferences, for instance, in the General Conference in 1984, because those words were in our social principles, and another portion of the discipline where it talks about the qualifications for persons into license or ordained ministry, there was a paragraph that was added “Because the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching, therefore, self-avowed, practicing homosexuals shall not be commissioned or ordained as clergy in our churches.”

And then that was this virus or thing that crept its way through the discipline. So we had, over time, a prohibition against clergy performing same-sex weddings. We had a prohibition against official United Methodist dollars being spent on things that advocated for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people. So just numerous areas of our life together were impacted by this. And through the work of the General Conference just a couple of weeks ago, those prohibitions and things were just, in the snap of a finger, removed from the discipline.

Miller: What went through your mind when you heard that news?

Gregory: I had been at the General Conference for the first few days in its first week, but then was back in Portland for the second week. Because they started at eight o’clock in the morning on East Coast time, this happened while I was still sleeping. So I remember waking up, I think it was Wednesday – the second week of the General Conference – to a number of texts, people saying congratulations, celebrating. I went through and read the Facebook and Twitter updates and had the livestream going, and just tears of joy and overwhelming excitement for what our church had done and for what it personally meant to me as an openly gay pastor in the United Methodist Church.

But most vividly, I remember later that morning I had gotten my coffee and I was walking to the church in Goose Hollow, and the New York Times notification came across my phone about the removal of the ban on gay clergy. And I just broke down into tears on the sidewalk – not because I didn’t know that news already but because our denomination was finally in the news for doing something good and for not hating anyone or being upset or in tension with one another. So it was a wonderful day.

Miller: You grew up in the church, as I understand it. How did you decide you wanted to be a pastor?

Gregory: I am a lifelong United Methodist. So I grew up going to church every Sunday with my parents and grandparents and family. And for me, it was a gradual thing around middle school, early high school. I had started to get more involved in my local church through serving on various committees, not just within the church but within our district and annual conference. So through those years of being empowered and trusted to be in leadership in our church, and affirmed through my peers and other youth workers and other clergy and my family, just gradually, I felt that this is what I am called to do, to be a pastor in the United Methodist Church.

Miller: How did you reconcile, for yourself, wanting to be a leader in a church that officially said that homosexuality was “incompatible with Christian teaching?”

Gregory: For me, it was a struggle. I didn’t actually come out, even to myself, until my first year of seminary, knowing that those words were in the book of discipline. But for me, it was all about integrity. This is my church, just as much as it was the church of the people who said that I was somehow incompatible. I had grown up every Sunday, from my family, from my extended family in the church, learning about this God who loves me and who loves all people. And I thought they were being serious about that.

I remember being in the sixth grade, of my confirmation, taking my membership vows to uphold the church through my prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness, and I wasn’t lying when I said that. So those acts of deeply caring about this church and knowing that people in this church deeply care about me, and that I am loved by God, those are the things that I grasped onto every time we started to debate or talk about this.

Miller: Did you have to be in the closet when you first applied to become a pastor?

Gregory: Kind of. I had some trusted colleagues in Texas who were very much allies, very much affirming. At the larger churches that I worked at in Fort Worth, my senior pastor knew. So it wasn’t a hidden thing, but officially, the words were that technically, you could not be a self-avowed, practicing homosexual.

That meant openly admitting in writing or out loud to your bishop, and then being in some kind of physical same-sex relationship. So, on a technical scale, I was not violating the discipline at that time. Actually, our ordination process is a two-step process. I was commissioned, first, in 2019 in Texas, actually by a bishop who is no longer a United Methodist, and is a part of the Global Methodist Church, now. But then thankfully, after a year, I was able to move to Portland and be in a much more affirming and inclusive space.

Miller: What was it like for you, professionally, to be in a place where you could be more open about the totality of who you are?

Gregory: For me, it was transformative. I was ordained midway through my appointment at Portland First, and it was not long after that happened, but I finally felt within myself like walls coming down that I had put up to serve out of necessity, to keep myself safe. And I could finally feel like I belonged and that I could just bring my full self to every interaction of ministry, to every place and space.

A couple of Sundays ago, I had my final Sunday at Portland First, and in the receiving line, one of our students who’s in middle school came up to me, and I was speechless when she said that because of my authenticity and because of my being myself and what I do, she was able to be herself as well. [She] told me about this crush she had on this girl in her class and how she was able to verbalize that to her. And it was just the most amazing thing.

Miller: Jan, how would you describe your own experiences as a gay woman in your Salem congregation?

Nelson: In my congregation, I have been able to be out as long as I’ve been out to myself. And it’s been the one place, sometimes, where I could feel totally affirmed and totally accepted with all of who I am. That has not been an experience that many people have been blessed to have. But I felt very, very fortunate to have landed in this place when I first moved to Salem many years ago. The whole congregation has been supportive of my work as a delegate and in other leadership positions, and very, very excited last Sunday when I came home and was able to share with them some of the stories they didn’t hear in the news.

Miller: Over the last five years or so, there’s been a real schism in the church. Almost 8,000 conservative congregations – about a quarter of US United Methodist churches – have disaffiliated, have left the church. What has that been like? Jan Nelson, first?

Nelson:  Previous to 2019, I was really part of the group that said, we need to find a way we can all live together. In 2019, there was a special session of the General Conference where we hoped to adopt something that would allow us to all live together. And instead, some even more conservative things were adopted. At that point, my feeling was, if you’re gonna go, just go, and let us get on with the business of the church. Maybe you have your own ways of reaching out to people with love but we need to be able to be free to do this in a way that fully includes everyone. We haven’t had many churches in our area leave. It’s hard to see them go, but it’s also very freeing.

Miller: Pastor Ethan, from your perspective as one of the official leaders of the church, what has this schism been like? I mean, it almost seems like a kind of divorce.

Gregory: Yeah, not unlike a divorce. It’s been heartbreaking. I’m on the board of trustees in our Oregon-Idaho conference, so helped to process the disaffiliation of the … I think it was something like only 11 churches that disaffiliated in our conference. But actually, I am currently in Texas right now and attended church yesterday with my family at my home church in Texas, in a conference in which over a third of the churches in the annual conference departed. So I remember over the last couple of years, being in Portland and just feeling kind of helpless about wanting to be there with my friends, as the conference was essentially decimated by these people who, one, had the discipline read their way, but were leaving at all costs and tearing apart annual conferences.

Where I am in Texas right now, there used to be three annual conferences, and by the end of this year, those three conferences will have merged into one simply because of the sheer number of departures and disaffiliation that happened here. I’m really sad to see so many people that I once called friends and colleagues depart and no longer want to be a part of our denomination. But at the same time, I know that schisms have been a part of the church’s history since its beginning. And those things have a way of coming back together sometimes. So, it’s not that the doors are finally closed. But, it’s that we’re all getting to live into the vision of ministry that we each have for ourselves in this season. And so, like Jan said, in a way that is free. At the same time, it’s sad to see this severance.

Miller: Pastor Ethan, what have services in Portland or in Oregon been like for you since the General Conference changed these rules?

Gregory: Oh, my goodness, they’ve been so celebratory. My final Sunday at Portland First was the Sunday following the General Conference. And it was just an immense joy and privilege to get to preach that sermon, to get to say from the pulpit that the prohibitions against gay clergy, the prohibitions against queer people, had been removed from the discipline.

Every time I preached at Portland First, I never took it lightly because I remembered the stories that I had been told when I got there of a senior pastor at Portland First in the late ‘80′s and early 90′s. Reverend Laron Hall was a closeted gay man who actually died of HIV/AIDS while still appointed to Portland First. And his death coincided with the time that Portland First became a reconciling congregation.

So they have been what we call reconciling and affirming LGBTQ people for over three decades now. And they’ve borne witness to what it means to be affirming in the world and in our denomination, and finally, at least in the US, the majority of our friends get to join us in this work of reconciliation and affirming ministry. So there was nothing but celebration. But it was also paired with the deep laments that we have lived through over these last decades, for instance, Laron and others who have been harmed by the church’s stance.

Miller: Ethan Gregory and Jan Nelson, thanks very much.

Gregory: Thank you.

Nelson: You’re welcome. It was a pleasure.

Miller: The Reverend Ethan Gregory is an associate pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Salem. Jan Nelson is a member of the Morningside United Methodist Church in Salem, and she was a lay delegate to the recent General Conference.

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