According to the introduction to the booklet entitled Listen to Their Hope: Hear Their Faith:

The Joint Synod Committee for Inclusivity is a Committee of the Minneapolis and Saint Paul-Area Synods that has been helping to extend the Church’s welcome for over twenty years.  Trusting the reconciling grace of Christ, who has overcome all divisions, we provide support and opportunities for growth in faith and understanding to persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities, their families and friends, and to the Church and its members. Programs have included Caring Family and Friends, Walking the Talk of Welcome, a workshop on “What Is God Doing with Marriage? ” and annual scholarships. We are pleased to publish these stories of what God is already doing in our midst through the lives of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgendered (LGBT) people.

As the ELCA moves toward a potentially historic Church Wide Assembly beginning August 17th in which issues of gay marriage and gay clergy will be considered, this blog will offer one faith story per day from the booklet.  The stories are written by Kari Aanestad, a seminarian at Luther Seminary in St Paul.

This is also an opportunity for you, the reader, to offer your faith story by adding a comment.

Listen now, to the story of Cindy and Bev:

Cindy answered the door wearing an oversized sweatshirt and blue gym shorts. Her right knee sported a bandage from an injury sustained during a game of balloon volleyball with her 6½-year-old son, Josh. Her partner, Bev, bounded up the stairs skipping every other step, as if to run away from the business proposals she was editing in the basement. She shook my hand, picked up Josh by the waist, and the two returned downstairs. Cindy and I sat on the overstuffed, tan leather sectional in the living room.

At five months of age Cindy was adopted through Lutheran Social Services. Her two loving parents raised her in a Minneapolis suburb and attended their Lutheran church regularly. Cindy, Bev and Josh attend that same church to this day. According to Cindy, she got married when she was too young, and the marriage didn’t last for long. She had a difficult time understanding what she wanted to do and who she was. In her free time she enjoyed sports and has been involved in various athletic activities her entire life. To fuel her athleticism, Cindy joined a local softball team
where years later she met her partner of 15 years, Bev.

“Fifteen years give or take a few days,” Bev shouted from the basement.

“I remember the first time I realized that I had feelings for a woman,” Cindy said. “She was a friend, and I realized it one night when we were all out dancing. It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized how comfortable I felt in that environment and how strong my feelings were for that type of a relationship. I was confused and had this questioning feeling of: Who am I? ”

The circumstances in which Cindy came out to her parents were not what she had planned. Some twenty years ago her cousin hosted a Christmas party. At the end of the party, her cousin accused Cindy in front of everyone of being involved with her boyfriend earlier in the night. Cindy was shocked. Her cousin refused to believe Cindy’s innocence and proceeded to tell all of the extended family. When Cindy finally decided to “come out” she knew she had to tell her mother the full truth and felt she needed to do it right away. Her mother came to have lunch with Cindy at work.

“I was so nervous and I only had a 30-minute lunch. Right after we sat down at a table, a friend of ours came over and proceeded to tell us every detail of the doctor’s appointment she’d just had.
I watched the minutes tick by.” With two minutes left in their lunch, Cindy finally got to tell her mom, “I don’t do boyfriends. I’m a lesbian.”

After being together for over 10 years, Cindy and Bev decided to adopt a child from Russia. They weren’t able to go through Lutheran Social Services or a Catholic organization because the two agencies do not facilitate adoptions for same-gender couples.

“It’s so important to have an agency that supports our relationship, because adopting is such
a life-changing process,” Cindy said. “You really need that systemic support.”

When their son Josh successfully arrived in the States, he was immediately welcomed into Cindy and Bev’s church. Josh was baptized, and soon after, a group of women held a book shower for the new family where Josh received many new books. Josh is currently a kindergartener at a local public school and spent four years at the Early Childhood Center at their church. The director and all the staff of the center were very supportive and Josh thrived there.

Cindy and Bev were able to be open with their life style and the other families were accepting. One day when Cindy picked up Josh from school, some of the children crowded around her and asked who she was. She told them she was Josh’s mom, to which the children responded,

“You can’t be. Josh already has a mom — Bev.”

Cindy said to them, “Well, some kids have a mom and a dad, others have two moms, others have two dads, and some kids have only one parent.”

According to Cindy, the kids thought about it for two seconds, shrugged, then kept on playing. “It didn’t even faze them.”

Josh, upon hearing his name, came running up the stairs, jumped over the back of the couch. His body fell limp onto Cindy’s lap. They begin speaking a secret language of gurgling sounds and giggles.

“Did you tell your friend that you have two mommies yesterday?” Cindy asked Josh.

Josh dove into a pile of pillows next to her, peeked his head out and said, “Uh-huh.”

“What did your friend think of that?”

“Nothing.”

“Our church never became a Reconciling in Christ (RIC) church,” Cindy said, “but Bev and I are very out at the church and I feel like we have good support there now. We believe Bev’s election as current treasurer for the congregation symbolizes a majority of support. However, sometimes I wonder if our church is really accepting, or if we are simply supporting a ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture.” I can’t believe that after spending all of my life in this church — being both baptized and confirmed here — that I’m asking you at this point to accept me as a child of God.

Cindy’s questioning of her church’s openness has legitimate roots. Many years ago the congregation started to discuss becoming an RIC church. A handful of members were so upset that the church was even considering writing a statement of welcome that they left to attend a more conservative Lutheran megachurch in a neighboring suburb.

“I understand people’s fears. They back off because they don’t know how to deal with a
same-gender couple,” Cindy said. “It’s just so painful for me sometimes. I guess I’ve always
treated homosexuality like it’s a non-issue because it is to me. I’m starting to realize that it is in fact an issue for some people, and that makes it not a non-issue.”

On one night in particular, some of the members and church leaders were discussing the possibility of becoming an RIC church. All of the pastors were there, along with the president of the congregation. Cindy noticed one of the pastors hadn’t been talking so she asked him what he thought.

She asked him, “If you were in this beautiful building with a roaring fire, hot coffee, and all of these people were in there together, and then you saw me walking down the street without a coat in
40-degree-below weather, would you invite me in?”

His response was, “It would depend on what the congregation said.”

“I just kind of lost it. I got teary and said, ‘I can’t believe that after spending all of my life in this church — being both baptized and confirmed here — that I’m asking you at this point to accept me as a child of God.’ It was pretty tough.”

Even though the church never officially became an RIC congregation, the community slowly became more accepting of LGBT people. One pastor held a four-week session on homosexuality at the church in hopes of not necessarily changing minds but of broadening perspectives. He hung up five different posters. Each poster had a statement that expressed a different attitude toward homosexuality such as “I have a lot of homosexual friends,” “I know a few homosexuals,” “I
don’t know any homosexuals,” and “The idea makes me uncomfortable.” At the beginning of the session the pastor asked the participants to read the posters and silently consider which one they identified with the most. He then began to discuss the biological and sociological complexities of human sexuality. At the end of his presentation, he asked participants to read the signs silently and think about whether or not they identified with a different sign.

Cindy said, “It was a very gentle, subtle way of beginning to talk about things.”

Cindy has been able to take part in a few trips to Tanzania with her church. During her first trip there, the group almost immediately faced the same issue that had previously caused some members to leave their church.

“One of the first things a Tanzanian person said to us when we arrived was, ‘We hear you have a problem with homosexuality in your country.’ No one knew what to say or how to respond.”

“I have a strong spiritual connection and a love amongst my friends in Tanzania that I have not been able to feel anywhere else. Those people are my brothers and sisters, yet they don’t know I’m gay. I don’t like that they don’t know, but I have not been able to figure out whether or how to talk to them about that yet.”

Cindy learned from an early age that family is what you make it. As an adopted child she found unconditional parental love from two wonderful people. As a mother of an adopted son, she is now able to share that love with him. Cindy only hopes that the Lutheran church can continue to adopt all of God’s children into the family.

As reported earlier, the two Minnesota metro synods of the ELCA have a joint inclusivity committee, and the committee’s website offers a booklet for download entitled Listen to Their Hope: Hear Their Faith.  The author of the booklet, Kari Aanestad, is an Augsburg College graduate and currently preparing for the ministry at Luther Seminary in St Paul.  Kari has compiled ten stories that:

portray the joy, the pain, the struggle of loving, committed individuals who love their church, but do not always feel welcomed or affirmed in who they are. We believe that God loves every person and that each person bears the image of God. Their stories are signs that the Spirit has been working in our midst, often undetected.

One story a day will be published here as we march toward the historic church wide assembly of the ELCA to take place in Minneapolis beginning August 17th.  Here is story number one about Glen, a Wounded Healer.

Standing at nearly 6’5”, Glen Wheeler is a gentle giant, but not simply because of his height. As an ordained Lutheran pastor for more than forty years, Glen continues to lead publicly even in retirement. As we walk toward an empty room on campus at Luther Seminary for our interview, he knows and greets nearly every person we pass. They respond to him with warmth and, having seen him, seem happier. We find our room and begin talking.

“I grew up in the oil fields of northwestern Montana,” Glen said. “My family had homesteaded in the Valier/Birch Creek area in 1912 after arriving from Canada in a covered wagon. The first nine years of my life I lived out in the oil field in very sub-standard housing.”

“When I was seven, the Presbyterians picked me up in a school bus and took a few of us to Vacation Bible School held on the dance floor of the Santa Rita Tavern. They also took me to Bible camp at Lake Five near Kalispell, Montana. Growing up, I didn’t have any consistent experience with church or Bible school. I liked a girl that I followed to Sunday school every now and then, but nothing consistent.

Glen’s family didn’t belong to a church. His grandfather felt the Bible advocated slavery. So Glen’s grandfather remained an agnostic throughout his life.

“My sister, who was ten years older than me, became a Christian during military service. She always wanted us to say grace before a meal or go to church on Sundays, but we always went trout fishing instead. Trout fishing was my first religion.”

When Glen reached high school, however, he became anxious about his own salvation. He started to become curious about religion and wanted to explore his own faith. At this same time he noticed his friends were involved with alcohol abuse and sexual promiscuity. In response to his peers, he had to decide who he was and if he was going to join in destructive habits.

“I decided I wasn’t going to, but I needed some reasons not to.”

He began reading scripture to look for moral guidance, but instead he found much more: a calling to Christian faith and ordained ministry. “I read Romans 10, where it says, ‘If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart Christ was raised from the dead, you shall be saved.’

That scripture captured me. So there I was: a believing Christian who had no faith community.”

He was not going to be without a community for very long.

“When I was a senior in high school, I took a speech class. I looked at all of my classmates and friends who were having moral struggles. I decided to give a speech on the value of reading the Bible and almost chickened out. After I gave the speech, two Lutheran boys, whom I had previously teased for wearing white dresses to light the candles at church, told their pastor about my speech, and they invited me to a Valentine’s party at the church. That was my first entry into Christian worship. I started going to worship that spring.”

Glen went to Concordia College in the fall and was baptized at Christmas time of that year.

“I had officially made it into the Lutheran church five days before I became 18 years old.”

Throughout college he continued to develop his faith and explore his call to ministry. As an outsider to the Lutheran faith, Glen entered seminary with an open mind. During his first two years he took a course on urban ministry, which inspired him to serve in an urban setting for his internship. The academic year of 1964–65, Glen interned at a church in Detroit, Michigan. At the height of the civil rights movement, Glen found himself in a church primarily composed of young, gang-affiliated black teenagers and their families. He had quite an internship experience.

“One Sunday the senior pastor left to take part in the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama. He left for the march and told me I had to stay home and take care of the congregation.”

There was certainly a lot to take care of. To compound the intensity of the church’s urban setting during a social movement, Glen became aware that his prophetic senior pastor was a gay man. There were also young adults in the congregation who were beginning to understand themselves as gay.

“We had a bright teenager in our congregation who was very close to his mom, and the kids teased him about it. He was beginning to understand himself as a gay man. He eventually went to the Juilliard School of Music and is serving the church today as a wonderful church musician. But in watching this man and others struggling with similar issues I began to realize that ministry happens not when you think about what people ‘should be’ or ‘ought to be,’ but when people are ‘who they really are.’”

After internship and the completion of seminary, Glen was ordained and called to urban ministry in Milwaukee for 8 years. Then, following a year with the Ecumenical Institute in Newark, New Jersey, Glen was called to a congregation in Iowa, where he served for almost 20 years.

“Four years into that call, I became a divorced Lutheran pastor and a single parent of three little kids. When my wife left that marriage, I soon discovered that if I was going to continue in that ministry, the only thing I had going for me was the grace of God. I didn’t see any other reason to be there as their pastor or to continue in ministry. For four years, I had served the congregation as a teacher of theology through adult education, and my approach to theology was pretty cerebral. As soon as I became a divorced pastor, I began to see that the congregation wanted a wounded-healer ministry from me. They were also wounded. They saw me as someone more approachable now, someone different than the theologian, preacher, or teacher. That was one of the beginnings of change for me in the focus of my ministry. Three years after the divorce, I remarried, and my wife and I raised six teenagers together.”

Later in that same period, the Lutheran church was faced with a dilemma of how it should respond to people who were diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. Glen received his answer.

“I can still remember where I was driving on a road in Iowa when I heard on the radio Mother Teresa’s response to the question, ‘How should the church respond to victims of HIV/AIDS? ’ She just said, ‘The people who are dying need to know the unconditional love of God and that we love them also.’ She was so clear about the church’s role — at a time when many of us were still trying to figure that out.”

Glen discovered that his ministry had taken the focus of helping others learn of God’s unconditional love and also encouraging others to love one another unconditionally. Soon after he’d heard Mother Teresa’s words, his Iowa congregation chose to celebrate the lives of two members who lost their lives to AIDS.

“It was a hard time for our church, but it was good to see us begin to make the transition to celebrating the lives of all of our members.”

Glen’s challenge to help others know the unconditional love of God continued. In 1994 Glen took a call to a Minneapolis church as a solo pastor. He quickly felt overwhelmed. The church decided to provide a part-time visitation pastor to help serve the seniors.

“After interviewing multiple candidates, we found someone whom we thought was the perfect candidate. At the end of this pastor’s interview, however, the candidate said, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m gay. Is that a problem?’”

Glen said he didn’t believe it was a problem, but he needed to consult the Administrative Board. They were not ‘calling’ a pastor, but were offering a contract for a part-time position. All of the Administrative Board agreed that having a gay pastor was not a problem, but they couldn’t offer the contract yet because one member was absent. When Glen contacted that board member and told him about the situation, his response was, “It’s not a problem to me.” The pastor was offered a contract and was later extended a call as part of the ministry team, where he served for nine years until his retirement.

“We later learned that this final board member and his wife had a daughter who was in a same-gender committed relationship and was expecting twins. Fortunately, our congregation had completed the process of becoming a Reconciling in Christ (RIC) congregation before the twins were born. The board member and his wife, who was the president of the congregation, were able to share with the other elected leaders the joy of becoming grandparents,” Glen said. “It was interesting that all of us took the risk of calling a pastor who is gay without knowing how others would react or who might be in each other’s families. It demonstrates that we don’t know who is sitting in our congregations — who has gay family members or not.”

Glen started as an outsider to the Christian faith and community and has become a powerful advocate for Lutheran congregations to become Reconciling in Christ congregations. His ministry, which first focused on racial social justice, has now led him to be an advocate for welcoming gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people and their families to our communion tables as members of the Body of Christ.

“Our identity in Christ comes to us through the gift of our baptism and not through our gender identity or sexual orientation. Young gay and lesbian Christians in my congregation in Iowa took the risk of trusting me as their pastor when they began to come out of the closet. The trust of those young Christians coming out to their families, to their church, and to me has motivated me to do all I can to make sure they will be welcomed as members of the Body of Christ. The promises we made to them in baptism require it.”

“I don’t think I chose this role — I think it came to me through ministry. Once you get past the moralism that leads to people feeling like ‘I should feel this way’ or ‘Other people shouldn’t do this’ — once you get past the ‘shouldas’ and ‘oughtas’ — then I think the grace of God has a chance to enter in and transform us and take over.

“Christ is present here in our lives and in our ministry, and the only thing any of us has is the unconditional grace of God. If we think we’ve got something different or that some are bigger sinners than others, then we’ve got theological baloney.”

Are there gay persons in your church?  Do you know who they are?  Do you know their stories?

There are 65 regional synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), 5 in Minnesota alone, including one each for Minneapolis and St Paul.  These two metro synods have formed a joint committee on inclusivity with a website and a booklet entitled Listen to Their Hope: Hear Their Faith.

It is with a spirit of hope and gratitude that the Inclusivity Committee offers this
booklet to all members and clergy of the ELCA. The stories presented in this booklet represent the journeys of LGBT folk, their parents, and non-gay persons, all members of the two Twin Cities synods that our committee serves. They represent a much larger collection of narratives that one can find in every congregation, many of which have never been told. We share these stories with you as evidence of what might be called “realized ecclesiology”, the future already happening through a God who draws us into the future — a God that invites us to pursue our hopes rather than our fears.

The 49 page booklet may be downloaded in PDF format from the website.  There is a foreword from Bishop Craig Johnson of the Minneapolis area synod and a preface by Bishop Peter Rogness of the St Paul area synod.  The booklet invites us to forget the politics of gay marriage and gay clergy for a moment and just listen to personal faith stories.

“It is always of utmost importance for us to hear the stories of the Baptized that live among us and have also suffered among us.”

(from Foreword by Bishop Craig Johnson, Minneapolis Area Synod, ELCA)

In this book, you will be immersed in this invitation to step back from the hysteria and the debate and meet some people. Hear their stories. Understand their journey. Listen to their hopes and struggles and values — and, in the midst of it all, hear their faith.

Throughout history the people of God have been at our finest when we, like Jesus, have been caring for the hurts of the world. We have been at our worst when we have mounted platforms of self-righteousness and made judgmental pronouncements that, ultimately, are best left to God and humble human reflection.”

(from Preface by Bishop Peter Rogness, Saint Paul Area Synod, ELCA)

There are ten stories in the booklet, and I will publish one a day for the next ten days. Sign up for an RSS feed if you want them to download automatically into your feed reader.

On August 17, the ELCA will meet in biennial assembly in Minneapolis.  In a previous post, a pre-assembly primer, I mentioned the conservative group, WordAlone, and its opposition to the gay marriage and gay clergy proposals that will be considered by the assembly.  WordAlone laments a perceived “theological drift” in the ELCA and offers judgmental accusations in a speech printed on its website:

[T]he ELCA has drifted further and further away from her great Lutheran heritage, to the point that some things being taught and done within our denomination are difficult to recognize as fully Christian, much less solidly Lutheran.

It’s not enough to say “I disagree”; no, it’s better to challenge the Christian heart of others.   Heretics we are, it seems, if we don’t teach and do as they would have us.

WordAlone’s fellow travelers, the COALITION FOR REFORM, Lutheran CORE, promotes the same agenda but seeks  to avoid the possible stigmatizing effects of WordAlone’s conservative history and reputation.  From the “about us” page of CORE’s website:

Lutheran CORE is closely allied with the WordAlone Network for mutual support. However, Lutheran CORE is a broad based coalition and is open to those individuals and congregations who do not choose to affiliate with the WordAlone Network.

Lutheran CORE claims to be the “vast middle” of American Lutheranism, “the solid, faithful core that is the majority” (mindful of Nixon’s silent majority or Jerry Falwell’s moral majority).  Moderate reformers they are not, despite their attempt to claim middle ground.  Their reform is a retrenchment behind conservative pillars.  According to their website, at the top of their list of concerns is the affirmation of “the authority of the Word of God” and “our profound concern over changes in doctrine and practice regarding marriage and sexuality.”  Their website offers a critique of the use of reason in moral deliberations.  In apparent opposition to the ELCA’s  fifty days of prayer initiative, CORE offers its own forty day program.

Their website contains an open letter to assembly delegates that not only opposes the sexuality statement but questions … “if indeed the assembly should be voting on these matters at all.”  Harrumph!  As protectors of the purity of the pulpit and the morality of the marriage bed, theirs is truly a higher calling.

In his characteristic understated manner, the original presiding Bishop of the ELCA, Herbert Chilstrom, has taken CORE to task.  Rev Chilstrom now resides in retirement in St. Peter, Minnesota, and he has penned a letter to assembly delegates in which he rebuts the open letter of CORE, point by point.

First, “I find major problems with the CORE Letter when it speaks about the Word of God,” Chilstrom writes.   “At best, this section is confusing; at worst, misleading.”  Chilstrom points to the recent history of the church allowing the ordination of women despite certain negative Biblical texts and despite long standing church tradition.  “We believed there were deeper streams in the Holy Scriptures that we needed to listen to,” Chilstrom writes about the experience of ordaining women. 

Deeper streams in the Holy Scriptures: the essence of a sophisticated understanding of “The Word of God” and of Luther’s notion of “the canon within the canon.”  Proof texting not allowed.  Questioning the authority of culturally conditioned texts is not rejection of the Word of God.

Second, Chilstrom supports a decision by a majority vote and rejects Core’s call for a supra-majority.  “And why does 2/3 plus one make us more certain the Holy Spirit is guiding us?”  Why not 90%?  Will the naysayers be convinced by any margin?

Third, Chilstrom scoffs at the notion that the assembly risks ecumenical relationships with Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical Christians, again citing the experience of ordaining women. 

Do you not realize that [ordaining women] was the first nail in the coffin of further ecumenical progress with certain churches? Do you therefore regret our decision to ordain women? Would you support revisiting that decision in order to foster better ties with the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches? 

In his bluntest statement, Chilstrom asks, “How long are we going to live with the illusion that Vatican II is alive and well in Roman Catholicism?”

Fourth, the fear of a double roster, one gay and one straight, is bogus, Chilstrom suggests.  The church has always understood that local parishes have the final say on calling their pastor, and he jokes that there was a time when “just being a Norwegian or a Swede put one into a separate category! Yet, in spite of those multiple ‘lists’ we never forced a congregation to call someone it did not vote to call.”

Fifth and lastly, Chilstrom acknowledges the shrinking membership of mainline denominations but argues that allowing gay clergy will not aggravate the problem; instead, he suggests “a reformation that focuses on the offense of the Gospel of the crucifixion and resurrection and advocates unapologetically for justice for the poor and the disenfranchised.”

When the ELCA came into being in 1987 as the result of merger, Bishop Chilstrom was the church’s first pastor, the first shepherd of a flock of some five million.  Thank God for his pastoral leadership then and now.  He concludes his letter:

And that’s why I strongly favor the Statement on Sexuality and the Recommendation coming to the Assembly.  I pray for its passage. I pray it will be a strong message to the world that we are a church that includes rather than excludes those who love our Jesus as intensely as I do – and as you do. Yes, and a church that welcomes as pastors those whose only difference is that they are gay or lesbian and long for a faithful relationship. Binding us together is the sure and certain promise that it is the Holy Spirit who calls, gathers, enlightens and sanctifies the church. We can move through these next weeks with that assurance.