By Sarah Melotte for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for North Carolina News Service Service for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration
Reverend Katie Black had been serving her United Methodist Church (UMC) congregation for less than a year when a member knocked on her office door and told her the congregation had been praying about withdrawing from the denomination.
“I had heard a lot of stories about churches [disaffiliating] in bigger cities and it becoming a very contentious and ugly fight,” Reverend Black said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “But this is a small town. There is no room for us to be breaking up friendships and families.”
Reverend Black serves a church in Winnfield, Louisiana, a small town in the northern part of the state, about 100 miles southeast of Shreveport. When the topic of leaving the United Methodist denomination first came up during a meeting, Reverend Black could tell things might get too heated. Instead of stoking the flames of the debate, Reverend Black’s congregation stepped back from the fire to pray.
“We set off on a 90 day discernment period.” Reverend Black said.
Disaffiliation, the complex process a congregation may use to leave the United Methodist denomination, is a sore topic. Most churches that recently split from the UMC did so over concerns that the denomination may adopt a more affirming position on homosexuality. But everyone hurts when a church disaffiliates, even the people who voted for it, Reverend Black said. That pain can be particularly acute in a small town, where a church may be more likely to be the center of community activity, she said.
“I kept saying over and over, ‘Do not say something that is going to hurt your witness or that is going to hurt your relationship with your neighbor. Do not say something that you might regret,’ ” Reverend Black said.
When a pastor is ordained into the UMC denomination, they take vows to uphold UMC doctrine, and Reverend Black took those vows very seriously. Though she has always been committed to the UMC, not everyone in her church felt like it was best to stay with the denomination.
On March 12, 2023, when Reverend Black’s church in Louisiana held their vote to request disaffiliation, 60% of the congregation voted to stay with the UMC. Although Reverend Black and the members who voted to stay were relieved at the outcome, she said it was a humble moment.
“That’s a heavy room to be in,” she said. “There certainly wasn’t clapping, there wasn’t celebrating. It was just a very stoic and sobering moment.”
Since 2019, thousands of congregations have disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church (UMC) over predictions that the denomination might become accepting of homosexuality, but many rural churches found hope by offering refuge and reconciliation.
When a church splits in a tight-knit rural community, the pain can ripple throughout the entire town.
Leaving the UMC: Neither Cheap Nor Easy
Congregations in the UMC tradition don’t act independently. They are a part of a large international network of churches that elect representatives to the larger governing body of the denomination.
The church’s structure is set up similarly to that of the American federal government, with a representative democracy and checks and balances to power. The UMC has its own court systems and legislative bodies.
The General Conference is both a meeting that occurs every four years and a comprehensive governing body similar to Congress. Every four years, delegates elected by the annual conferences (geographic regions akin to states) from around the world represent their constituents at the General Conference to update legislation like the Book of Discipline. The Book of Discipline is a document that outlines official UMC policy, administration, organization, and doctrine.
Since 1972, there have been debates at the General Conference about whether the Book of Discipline should allow the ordination of homosexual clergy and the blessing of same-sex marriage. While the Book of Discipline currently states that “self avowed and practicing homosexuals” cannot be ordained or get married in a UMC ceremony, queer people can, however, attend worship, volunteer, and become members of the church.
Fearing what change might be coming in the church’s stance on homosexuality, over 2,000 UMC congregations have disaffiliated since 2019 when delegates at the General Conference voted by a slim majority (53%) to uphold the Traditional Plan, which affirms marriage as being between one man and one woman. But the margin of victory for the Traditional Plan was so slim that many conservative congregations worry it might be voted down at the 2024 General Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina.
In response, the UMC allowed disagreeing churches to preemptively disaffiliate from the denomination. Under paragraph 2553 of the Book of Discipline, the UMC states that “a local church shall have a limited right… to disaffiliate from the denomination for reasons of conscience regarding … the practice of homosexuality.”
To disaffiliate, a congregation has to do a number of things. It’s not a cheap or easy process. The first step is to facilitate a meeting in which every member of the church votes on whether they want to request the UMC to disaffiliate. To send an official request to disaffiliate to the UMC, 65% of the congregation must vote in favor of disaffiliation.
If a two thirds majority is reached during a disaffiliation vote, the congregation has to present other legal documents and proof of insurance to the UMC to officially start the process of disaffiliation. If all is in order, the UMC will allow the congregation to buy back the church property from the denomination.
Since the disaffiliation process began, about 6,240 UMC congregations have left the denomination, according to reports by UM News.
“More of the churches that are disaffiliating tend to be rural,” said Ken Carter, bishop of the Western North Carolina Conference.
Bishop Carter said that disaffiliation skews rural because of the cumulative effects of the pandemic and political polarization. Polarization worsened, for example, when debates flared about whether masks should be worn in church and how the church should respond to racism, if it should respond at all.
Lighthouse Congregations
“We’re a family,” Reverend Julie Wilburn said of her congregation in Boonville, North Carolina. “One of the hallmarks of the United Methodist Church is that, sitting in a pew, you have people who are going to agree to disagree. We’re making a choice to say, yeah, we don’t agree on all things, but that’s OK. We’re Christian. We love Jesus, and because we love Jesus, you are my sister.”
Reverend Wilburn’s church did not vote to request disaffiliation because there wasn’t any interest among the members. Instead, Boonville United Methodist was approved as one of many Lighthouse Congregations, which are churches in North Carolina that are dedicated to remaining UMC.
Lighthouse Congregations serve individuals or groups of people “who have become displaced or churchless because of closing or disaffiliation,” according to the lighthouse statement. People who move from a disaffiliated congregation to a Lighthouse Congregation don’t have to worry they are joining another church that is going to split.
“When they come into our church, they are not going to have to dive into the trauma they experienced,” Reverend Wilburn said. “This is a safe place. But becoming a lighthouse church is more than just about affiliation for us. It’s putting a stake in the ground and saying, this is who we are. We are welcoming.”
Churches that prioritize unity and cohesion are important in rural towns, where other civic and community centers might be limited. Rural congregations can fulfill multiple roles for their community in a single day. In addition to running their preschool during the school year, Boonville UMC hosts a summer literacy program sponsored by the Duke Endowment. And Bishop Carter once pastored a church that was responsible for establishing the first hospice service in their small town.
The disaffiliation debate can affect a church’s ability to service community needs.
“The division of those [rural] churches puts initiatives that are for the common good in jeopardy,” Bishop Carter said.
Rural churches provide services that hold the “community together in a kind of holistic way,” Bishop Carter said.
“I’ve seen rural churches be the community in ways that big churches can’t,” said Reverend Truman Stagg, a UMC minister in Louisiana. ”When I was at my previous church in Jena, Louisiana, a hurricane came through. And for five days, there was no electricity in our town except for our church because one person donated a generator.”
Jena is a town of about 3,300 in LaSalle Parish, Louisiana. It’s only a 45 minute drive down Interstate 84 from Reverend Black’s church in Winnfield.
“We started handing out bags of ice by the side of the road,” Reverend Stagg said. “People would come in to cool off or come in to charge their cell phones. We welcomed people. We didn’t care if they were Black or white, gay or straight, or how they stood on same gender marriage, or any of that. We were just taking care of God’s people.”
Like their urban counterparts, rural churches try to meet the needs of their community any way they can. But Reverend Stagg said there’s more at stake during a conflict in a rural church. The people you cut ties with in a rural church are also likely the people “you’re going to see in the grocery store, or that you’re in the garden club with, or whatever group you belong to,” according to Reverend Stagg.
In a smaller, tight-knit community, those ties carry a lot of weight. Someone who causes conflict in a big city church might have lots of other congregations to choose from. But that’s not always the case in a small town. When a church splits in a rural community, “it’s a loss to the whole town,” Reverend Stagg said.
“We should just stop it and just realize that it’s all about loving people,” He said. “Whoever you are, your sin might be the same as mine or your sin might be different from mine or what I call a sin. You might not. But that’s for God to straighten out.”
Bishop Carter said those ties in rural churches could be strengthened by fully including their LGBTQ members.
“Inclusion of everyone is what contributes to a healthy church,” Bishop Carter said. “I am for a church that includes everyone. As difficult as this [disaffiliation process] is, I do see it as a moment of justice. We’ve done an injustice to our own people who were gay and lesbian and transgender. We’ve singled them out. And that’s changing.”
Sarah Melotte wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.
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By Sara Youngblood Gregory for Yes! Magazine.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Commonwealth News Service reporting for the YES! Media-Public News Service Collaboration
In December 2023, Pope Francis announced that Catholic priests may bless same-sex unions-as long as they do not resemble marriage.
Despite headlines heralding a radical shift, the declaration notes Church doctrine "remains firm" on its definition of holy matrimony as the exclusive province of heterosexuals. One month prior, the Vatican also announced that transgender people can be baptized.
Though inclusive steps forward at first glance, both announcements sidestepped any tangible commitment to LGBTQ people. The documents were stereotypically vague: Both blessings and baptisms are permitted only if they carry no risk of public "scandal" or "disorientation" among the faithful, terms that are not defined in the documents.
In short, the Vatican's "progressive" moves perpetuate a long-standing trend within Christianity, where LGBTQ Christians are expected to be grateful for the table scraps of a well-fed faith-or at least feel sated with the rancid "hate the sin, love the sinner" ethos popular across Christian denominations.
"It's no question that religion globally has been used as a weapon, especially against LGBTQIA persons," says teaching pastor and theologian Roberto Che Espinoza, Ph.D. "But religion actually is rooted in the practice of re-connection or binding together. The Latin root for the English word religion is religio," a noun referring to an obligation, bond, or reverence.
And there is no shortage of LGBTQ people of faith. A 2020 study by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that nearly half the country's LGBTQ population-5.3 million people-self-identified as a person of faith.
So can queer people still hungry for spiritual connection-especially those who revere Christian traditions-find religious communities that recognize queerness as a blessing, rather than a sin? An emerging group of queer and trans faith leaders, activists, on-the-ground organizers, and people who simply refuse to give up their faith are already answering that call, carving out affirming faith traditions, building tools to remediate religious harm, and proving that it's possible to build a queer church.
Sanctified Discrimination
For many LGBTQ people, disconnection is a defining element of their faith, with a third of religious LGBTQ adults reporting conflicts between their faith and identity in a 2013 Pew Research Center study. Many experience rejection for the first time via their faith communities, or at least learn that their identities are inherently dirty or impure. As of 2018, an estimated 700,000 people have undergone conversion therapy in the United States, a practice involving forcibly "changing" someone's gender or sexual identity. Though widely discredited-and illegal to subject minors to in 22 states-conversion therapy is still used in some religious settings. According to research from the Williams Institute, 81% of people who underwent conversion therapy did so at the hands of a religious leader.
Even for those who escaped the direct impacts of religious trauma, current U.S. politics are deeply intertwined with weaponized Christianity, making it nearly impossible to emerge unharmed as an LGBTQ person-personally, politically, or spiritually. The Republican party, which has long-standing ties to the Religious Right, is increasingly overt in its embrace of Christian nationalism-the belief that the U.S. should be a strictly Christian country. According to a 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, more than half of self-identified Republicans currently sympathize with or explicitly adhere to Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism goes beyond the desire to create a Christian theocracy. It's about creating a country where certain people are privileged and others-LGBTQ people, people of color, and those seeking reproductive freedom-are punished. "When we say Christian nationalism, it's white Christian nationalism," says Maureen O'Leary, director of field and organizing at Interfaith Alliance, a religious freedom and civil rights advocacy network. "It's white Protestant Christians that are being elevated."
That exclusionary ethos can be found throughout the modern Republican party, which is, not coincidentally, the beating heart behind much of the anti-LGBTQ legislation currently circulating. In 2023, more than 525 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced nationwide, more than any other year on record, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Those bills included the implementation of Florida's high-profile "Don't Say Gay" policy, which restricts classroom discussions about sexuality and gender identity in public schools. Dozens of copycat bills have emerged since the Florida Board of Education approved the initial policy in 2022.
Florida, North Dakota, Missouri, Tennessee, and North Carolina all have restrictions on gender-affirming health care for minors, and at least five states are currently targeting gender-affirming health care for both minors and adults. Meanwhile, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a shadowy, right-wing legal organization, is using its deep pockets, allegiance to Christian nationalism, and wide reach to roll back civil rights in the courts. ADF is the legal powerhouse behind lightning-rod Supreme Court cases such as 303 Creative, Inc v. Elenis, where a self-proclaimed Christian website designer won the right to refuse to serve same-sex couples, in defiance of Colorado's nondiscrimination law, as well as the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Taken together, these attacks target the rights and dignities of queer, and especially trans, people on all fronts: restricting access to health care, public spaces like bathrooms, and education.
This discrimination is often legitimized through the guise of Christian morality and language. In practice, this frequently looks like portraying LGBTQ people, and progressive values more generally, as a threat to a Christian way of life. At the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference, former president Donald Trump told the audience: "School prayer is banned, but drag shows are allowed to permeate the whole place. You can't teach the Bible, but you can teach children that America is evil and that men are able to get pregnant."
Meanwhile, Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis used the words of Jesus Christ to woo potential voters and call for a "war on woke"-or more accurately, a war on LGBTQ rights, diversity and equity initiatives, reproductive and voting rights, critical race theory, and education. While speaking to a group of roughly 10,000 evangelical college students in April 2023, DeSantis said, "Yes, the truth will set you free. Because woke represents a war on truth, we must wage a war on woke."
As these right-wing politicians demonstrate, "Christian nationalism is a political ideology," says Interfaith Alliance's O'Leary. "It's not a religious tradition." But the conflation of the two mean that many queer and trans folks feel exiled from their faith. A truly affirming church must do more than skirt extremism or offer conditional shelter for LGBTQ people. It must imagine a God, a faith, and a tradition that engages directly with justice and queerness.
Sacred and Strange
Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart, a Christian minister, movement organizer, and professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and Harvard Divinity School, reasons that a God who disregards the most vulnerable in service of the most powerful is not a God who will inspire a congregation to change a world that already reproduces cycles of dominance and dispossession. "An affirming, radically hospitable, justice-oriented congregation has to reject an idea of God that reinforces the very thing that causes exclusion and non-affirmation and injustice in our world," Rev. Naomi says. "The conceptualization of God in an affirming, justice-seeking space has to be, first of all, radically inclusive."
The Rev. M Jade Kaiser envisions God, and spiritual life more broadly, as something literally of the flesh: bodily, pleasure oriented, and inseparable from material liberation. In 2017, Rev. Kaiser and Rev. Anna Blaedel co-founded enfleshed, a spiritual community that publishes resources for collective liberation, including queer liturgies, a podcast on trans spirituality, and poems and anthologies exploring ritual, blessings, and identity.
"Our greatest gifts to the world will not come through acceptance from dominant systems or those constructions of 'God,' but in recognizing how sacred it is to be strange," says Rev. Kaiser. "There is so much God in how we create chosen family, love queerly, resist compulsory gendering, and collectively organize with pride that counters shame."
Sacred texts and traditions, too, are ripe for reconceptualization. Theologian Espinoza, for instance, believes creating radically inclusive faith practices requires more than just reconciling a faith tradition with sexuality. It also invites us to identify where these traditions are already queer via destabilized, counter-hegemonic, and counter-normative narratives. "Queerness is wild and feral," says Espinoza. "[It] is an undomesticable animal that we have not yet been able to contain or domesticate out of the tradition."
Traditions like communion, for example, have the potential for queerness, Espinoza explains. Christians all over the world consume the actual or symbolic body and blood of Christ, and in so doing, engage with the (trans)formative potential of the body. Recently, one of Espinoza's students risked their clergy credentials by serving communion in drag. "The student embodied God by feeding people bread and wine in drag," Espinoza recounts. "[It was] a wonderful reminder that we are bound by our materiality, but when we imagine another possible world, shit gets real!"
For others, revisiting religious texts also means questioning-and reimagining-what is considered sacred. For Della V. Mosley, a healing arts practitioner and counseling psychologist raised in a Black Baptist church in Illinois, exploring their connection to faith meant finding truth in alternative systems and spiritual homes. "For me, that path led to Black feminism, justice and liberation spaces, and a deep connection with nature," says Mosley. "These spiritual homes resonate more closely with who I am, the realities of the world today, and who I aspire to be." Recently, Mosley used Black feminist writings as sacred texts during a Sunday service at NorthStar Church of the Arts in Durham, North Carolina.
Some spaces imagine spirituality outside of specific religious affiliation or institutions altogether. At The Greenhouse, a grief and healing sanctuary for Black, Indigenous, and other students of color at Harvard, the point isn't to emulate or become a religious institution. Instead, co-founder Frances S. Lee, a pastor's kid who is now an ex-evangelical, says The Greenhouse fosters spiritual leadership and moral boldness for those who are barred from, or simply uninterested in, traditional religious authority.
"The Greenhouse invites us to access emotional safety, wonder, and belonging outside of religious institutions," says Lee. "At the foundational level, it is a refuge of tenderness, laughter, and meaningful silence." The community meets twice monthly and offers dinner, ritualized reflection, grounding exercises, and emotional release. Like Mosley and Espinoza, Lee makes spaces for queer and trans interpretations of Christianity, while also incorporating new sacred texts and traditions. They've taught trans spirituality and shape-shifting bodily presentations in their Christian classes and preached with Audre Lorde's 1978 essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power."
Taken together, these three tools-the reconceptualization of God, the queering of sacred texts and traditions, and the incorporation of alternate practices-form a sort of holy trinity on which a queer church may thrive. And much like queerness, this church, this connection with the divine, can happen anywhere: on a subway ride, in the pews, in passionate debate with your pastor. It may happen with music, in the silence of nature, in scripture, in a glance. It can happen while reading radical trans scholarship or Black feminist poetry. Queer church might look like a dance floor, a kiss, good sex. It may be reclaiming a saint or simply imagining Jesus at a gay bar.
New Sacred Spaces
Spiritual organizer Bex Mui's queer church began on Instagram. Raised Roman Catholic by her Polish mother and introduced to Buddhist principles by her Chinese father, Mui left the church at 20, in large part due to her burgeoning queerness and growing critical eye toward religion. To manage her grief, Mui threw herself into LGBTQ activism.
"As a professional speaker and trainer, I delivered 'the Word' of gender terminology and the rituals of creating safe spaces," says Mui, who works as an LGBTQ equity consultant. But by 2020, Mui was burnt out. She knew she needed to reconnect with not only her spirituality but with other queer people as well.
Beginning in January 2021, Mui got on Instagram Live every Monday to share prayers, spells, and astrology readings and use tarot as a tool for reflection, a ritual she called Queer Church. While discussing the power of a lunar eclipse in October 2023, Mui recontextualized interactions between Mary Magdalene and the newly risen Christ. "He's often interpreted as saying, 'Don't touch me,' a slut-shamey interpretation perpetuating the stereotype that [Magdalene] was dirty and unworthy of his love and attention," says Mui. "In reality and the truer Greek translation, he says, 'Don't cling to me.'" From Mui's perspective, in that moment, both the gospel and the eclipse were inviting people to let go of what is ready to leave.
Eventually, Queer Church expanded to become House of Our Queer, a sex-positive and people-of-color-centered community for spiritual exploration and well-being. House of Our Queer offers spaces and tools for spirituality, including workshops, rituals, and in-person community gatherings. And the community has responded. Mui says around 200 people tune in to Queer Church every week, and as many as 500 people attend the monthly Queer Magic Dance Party in Oakland, California.
The focus of both Queer Church and House of Our Queer is to support people who were raised religious, or feel curious about spirituality, and affirm that queerness isn't just part of religion but a blessing all its own. Rather than a set religious doctrine or denomination, Mui uses reclamation techniques-like adapting a Catholic prayer into a queer activist spell or honoring saints like Mary Magdalene-to affirm queerness and incorporate her religious upbringing.
"Whether I like it or not, I was raised Catholic, and that's a part of my culture. Reclaiming [my spirituality] started for me when I realized that I was actually putting a lot of effort into keeping that door shut," says Mui. "Queer Church is needed because queer people are human, and we need, just like everyone else, a place to gather for celebrations, shared ways to mark the passing of time, and places to turn to when we're in pain."
Sara Youngblood Gregory wrote this article for Yes! Magazine.
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