Park Slope United Methodist Church

PSUMC’s Reconciling Committee has once again had a very active year. We have built on the previous year’s work to increase our ministry to LGBT people in Park Slope and New York City, and to make our holy union policy (until all can be married within our church, none shall be) a more powerful witness for inclusion. We were active once again in conference-wide reconciling work, and helped found a new reconciling organization, Methodists in New Directions (MIND), in the New York Annual Conference (NYAC) of the United Methodist Church (UMC). We have also taken on mission work in partnership with the Church of the Village and its shelter project for queer youth.

We noted in our last charge conference report that PSUMC had begun in the fall of 2005 to promote and discuss the church’s holy union policy within the congregation in preparation for a possible wider campaign. As a matter of policy, PSUMC does not conduct weddings or holy unions because we refuse to endorse the exclusionary basis on which this sacrament is recognized by the UMC. “As a inclusive Christian community, we refuse to discriminate against one another” our policy, adopted in 2001, states. Following a well-attended all-church forum on November 6, 2005, the Reconciling Committee implemented several concrete steps in response to the congregation’s call to better publicize the policy and to use it as a tool in our witness for the loving, radical inclusive Gospel. We began simply by posting the policy on the fence outside the church and including it on the back of the weekly bulletin. We also included the policy in our ads in Gay Pride guides and in a prominent display at the Brooklyn Pride Festival. And we have printed it on the back of the new version of our outreach palm cards, over 10,000 of which were handed out during Gay Pride month (June 2006).

The palm cards (which grew out  of a study group looking at what the Bible does—and doesn’t—say about homosexuality) list a few Bible verses that reflect the radically inclusive love of God with a two-sentence introduction about how the Bible is a book about love, compassion, ethics and justice, not a textbook on sexuality or biology. With the holy union policy now on the other side of the palm cards, they also demonstrate how one Christian community is trying to live the Gospel. The cards were conceived as an antidote to the prejudice against lesbian and gay people that far too many Christian institutions perpetuate with their doctrines and policies. In the last year we have kept supplies of the palm cards in community spaces—bookstores, cafes, bars, our local food coop, the gay Community Center, etc.—in addition to the wide distribution at Gay Pride events.

PSUMC members have also been central to the growing reconciling activism throughout the New York Annual Conference (NYAC). The work of the past year built on the efforts begun at the annual conference meeting in 2005 and the gathering of reconciling NYAC Methodists during the Reconciling Ministries Network’s (RMN) national Convocation in September 2005. This work culminated in a letter to our bishop, Jeremiah Park, with 290 signatures of NYAC members requesting a meeting with him. “As United Methodists committed to reflecting God’s love for all people in the practices of the church, we are deeply disturbed by recent developments in our denomination and are writing you today to ask how we can work together to make the New York Annual Conference a powerful voice for inclusion,” our letter said. “The recent Judicial Council decisions allowing a minister to deny membership to a gay man and upholding the removal of Beth Stroud’s ordination credentials have brought new urgency to the struggle to end discriminatory and exclusive policies in the UMC. As it stands now we cannot claim with any integrity to be a church that has ‘open hearts, open minds, open doors.’” In response, the bishop met in March 2006 with a delegation of six, led by PSUMC Reconciling Committee chair Dorothee Benz .

During the winter and spring of 2006 dozens of activists from all over the conference also held several meetings and planned a for the annual conference meeting in June 2006. As a result, we had a strong, visible witness at annual conference, including hundreds of   t-shirts (“closed doors, broken hearts, we mind”), thousands of flyers, a packed luncheon, and crucial language amending a resolution committing NYAC to defy the bigoted Judicial Council ruling by welcoming all into membership who are willing to affirm the vows of the church.

By the end of annual conference, it was clear that reconciling activism in NYAC had outgrown its ad-hoc structure, and this fall we began the work of establishing some formal organization so that we have a solid foundation on which to build our future work. PSUMC members were intimately involved in the process. Six PSUMC members attended the founding meeting of Methodists in New Directions (MIND) in November 2006, and two were elected to its initial steering committee—Jim Harvey as an at-large member and Dorothee Benz as chair. The new organization has initiated a grassroots-intensive membership drive linked to a commitment to support and nurture reconciling ministry in local congregations.

In the meantime, the new visibility of the PSUMC holy union policy attracted media attention and resulted in two very favorable feature stories on PSUMC’s reconciling work and the policy. One was story that aired on WNYC/NPR’s “Weekend Edition” in April 2006, and the other was a short independent documentary about diversity and religious tolerance in Park Slope that showcased our church. That piece is now on the Current TV website, and we are initiating a viewer campaign to “greenlight” it to air on Current TV’s cable station (see http://www.current.tv/watch/13619301).

As PSUMC members gathered in September of this year to plan the coming year’s reconciling work, we were heartened by the many people that made this important ministry happen in the last year. But once again, we were simultaneously heartbroken and outraged that nothing has changed in our denomination, that the church still excludes God’s lesbian and gay children. Searching for a way to live reconciling ministry that didn’t feel like continuously banging our head against the wall (and aware that MIND’s founding would strengthen the UMC policy work), we decided to expand and refocus PSUMC’s direct reconciling work on outreach and ministry in our own community. Building on the palm card effort, we are working on new ways to bring healing and the message of God’s truly radically inclusive love to those who have been abused in the name of our religion. The Reconciling Committee has reached out to other faith groups in the LGBT community, most notably Out and Faithful and Soulforce, and we are planning to use the secular queer infrastructure to amplify the countervoice against religious intolerance.

This fall, PSUMC’s Reconciling Committee has also gotten involved in service mission work to reach out to LGBTQ homeless youth. We are working with both the Interfaith Task Force on LGBTQ Homeless Youth and the Church of the Village, which is providing a winter shelter for six young adults as part of its mission work. In particular, we have made a commitment to the Church of the Village to work with them on their shelter project. On December 2, 13 PSUMC members—including several youth group members and members of other committees—joined about eight Village Church members for a day of fixing up the space that will be used for the shelter.  We cleaned windows, dusted and cleaned shelves and baseboards, mopped floors, cleared out and cleaned up the pantry, cleaned the refrigerator, cleaned the bathroom, scraped walls and ceilings and painted, hung curtains and set up cots. It was satisfying to see a home emerge from these efforts – a home that six young people will have for two months to keep them off the streets and give them shelter and safety, and we deepened our connections to another reconciling UMC church. It was truly a day of “faith in action.” PSUMC members will be attending a training for the shelter next week. Our Reconciling Committee is working together with our Mission Committee on this project, and along the way we have also committed to expanding PSUMC’s shelter work in other ways.

As we’ve begun this shelter work, we have learned some deeply disturbing facts. One in four kids that come out to their families is forced to leave home. An estimated 25-40% of the homeless youth on city streets are queer. And in New York City , where there are 7,000 LGBTQ homeless youths, there are only 70 shelter beds designated for this population. These shocking statistics demonstrate—as does the recent hate crime murder of Michael Sandy in Queens—that queer people in the United States continue to face hostility, hatred and danger. And while the UMC says it “implore[s] families and churches not to reject and condemn lesbian and gay members and friends” (Book of Discipline, paragraph 161G), its doctrinal condemnation of queer people and its exclusion of them from the full life of the church model and excuse the rejection and abuse that so many young people face.

And so, weary as we may be from fighting to change our own church, we must and will continue our reconciling ministry. Because not only is the soul of the church and its faithfulness to Jesus Christ at stake; so are the lives of millions of LGBT people, both inside the church and beyond its doors.