Dear United Methodist Pastor,
I hope this note finds you well. You may remember me from my grandmother’s’ funeral at Pleasantdale last year. I was the grandson who played the piano for her service there. I was prompted to write this note to you by the notice of the congregational meeting that I saw on your church’s Facebook page. Much to my own surprise, the notice hit me like a ton of bricks to the point that I almost had to leave work. As a member and pianist at Mt. Calvary – St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in Harlem, NYC, I know that the development in the United Methodist Church that is occasioning such congregational meetings relate to the provision in the Discipline that, for a limited period of time, allows congregations to break fellowship with the United Methodist Church over the specific issue of homosexuality. For most folks, this issue is more theoretical and ideological than it is a matter that affects their personal life, but for me it is literally a matter of life and death, and even perhaps a matter of eternal life and second death.
Both Pleasantdale United Methodist Church and Poneto United Methodist Church have left an indelible and positive, life-changing mark on my soul for which I will be eternally grateful. It was in these holy places that I first learned about and observed what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ in a broken world. Pleasantdale has an indescribable place in my heart, for that was where I was baptized, participated in communion for the first time and where 4 generations of my family worshipped, and which even today affects the lives of some of my second/third cousins. It is also a special place because one could not participate in the life of that church for any period of time without receiving from the strong faith and example of the saints there, the knowledge that God is real, that he loves everybody, and that this love by grace through faith has the power to transform lives. I could never mention by name all the holy saints in that place whose example forever transformed my life and led me to enter a lifelong relationship with Jesus.
One of my earliest memories of church is the frequency and power of the spoken testimonies of Ralph Koger, Sr., who seldom let a time for sharing one’s joys and concerns pass without testifying to the goodness and power of God. I will always have fond memories of Junior Church with Ilene Hornbaker. I will never forget an older gentleman named Carl, who like Zacchaeus was of very small stature. He was hard to understand because he had a very severe stutter. I learned one time when he and my dad were doing work in the multi-purpose area of the church that Carl had a very hard life. People believed he was stupid and defective because of his stutter, so while the other kids were being educated at the one-room schoolhouse, he was told to do manual labor related to the coal-fueled stove instead. If I recall correctly, he was also treated poorly because of his polish ethnic heritage. He never came to church with any family, and he lived alone. Pleasantdale was his family. He showed up early every Sunday and greeted everyone as they came in the front door of the church. At Pleasantdale, he was loved as a human being with sacred worth and value. He was a child of God and his life had meaning and purpose there.
At Pleasantdale, I learned my love of church music. My earliest memory of music is standing on the blue pew next to my grandma Betty Shores holding a hymnal and singing songs that later carried me through some of the darkest hours of my life. I loved the unique honky-tonk style with which Vera Williams played the organ while Dwight Bell led the singing. As a 5-year-old, I would anxiously watch the door of the church to see if this Sunday would be one in which Vera would be at the organ. My eyes would light up every Sunday this elderly, blue-haired woman with an outfit and glasses straight out of the 1960s would hobble in with her cane followed by her very elderly and ornery husband, Leroy. She is the sole reason that I taught myself to play the piano. The elderly black women at the church where I now play for Sunday services would be amazed to learn that the “soul” with which I play the hymns was learned by listening to an elderly white woman from rural Indiana play the organ at Pleasantdale.
I cannot mention Pleasantdale without remembering the godly example of my grandparents, Bud and Betty Shores. One could not ask for a better example of what it means to love God and neighbor as taught by the Bible. Anyone who remembers them would know they would give their last dollar to help someone in need. They loved everyone and they loved Pleasantdale. My grandpa Bud would climb on roofs and perform manual labor to help someone free of charge well into his upper seventies. It was the holy example and unconditional love modeled by such Christians, and many others who remain unmentioned, that gifted me with faith in Jesus and which got me through some very dark and painful hours that threatened my very life.
I knew that I was gay long before I even knew what the word meant. This reality was something that I never asked for, nor was it a sinful lifestyle that I chose. Yet notwithstanding my childhood innocence, I knew from a very early age from my family and my church’s teaching that this was a very wicked and awful thing for which I would be damned to hell for eternity if God did not somehow fix it—if he did not somehow miraculously make it go way. I could not even begin to count the number of hours I spent praying and begging God to take this curse away from me. The tears I have shed over this could fill an ocean or at least a very large lake. I would cry myself to sleep almost nightly from the 7th through 9th grades, often begging Jesus to let me die or pleading him to hurry and come back and rapture me away so that I would not have to live through the silent turmoil and hell one goes through being born gay in rural, Christian Indiana. It was an emotional hell that I had to bear alone, without the aid of family or church, for I could never let them know who I was. Notwithstanding, I clung silently to Jesus, sang church hymns while in anguish in order to fall asleep, and remembered the love of God I had learned about at Pleasantdale and Poneto churches. There are multiple times in my life where that was all that kept me from killing myself.
It is not my intent to go into my whole life’s story, other than to mention that the only reason I married a woman and started a family was because of the church’s teaching about homosexuality and what I then believed the Bible required of me if I were to be accepted by God. Needless to say, it did not end well. How can one even write about the inner turmoil and lifelong psychological damage one suffers living most of their life as a lie while fighting an inner war that is unwinnable, no matter how many times one cries out to Jesus. How does one put words to what it feels like to sit your wife down and tell her after 9 years of marriage and a child that you are gay. How can I convey to anyone who doesn’t already know for themselves the loneliness and sense of failure and shame one feels after having blown up a straight marriage because one is secretly gay. Who does one turn to for comfort, for hope, for love in the aftermath of the human wreckage that creates. Not a Christian church…. I have written a blog entry about my life that attempts to capture in some literary form the inner turmoil one experiences when trying to reconcile one’s identity as a homosexual with one’s identity as a Christian. The weblink is here if you desire to read it, but I warn you it is emotionally raw and has very strong language: https://cairnsofstone.com/2018/03/02/stones/
Nor is my story an isolated incident. I could recount for you the individual stories of about a dozen of my gay and lesbian friends in New York City who suffered their own trauma from being raised in one brand of Christianity or another while gay/lesbian. Each of them has spent the entirety of their adult lives trying to repair themselves from the emotional and psychological damage this has caused them. Of these friends, I am the only one who still actively participates in a Christian church as an adult. Some of them express their spirituality through private practices such as prayer and Bible reading. Most of them avoid even that in order to protect themselves from the PTSD-like symptoms religion triggers in them. A few are adamant atheists who cannot even discuss the subject of God without burning with anger, tears welling up in their eyes from the hidden pain. Many of them fell into severe drug abuse at some point in their lives (meth is usually the drug of choice because it heightens the sexual experience); most at one time or another sought the love and acceptance they were deprived of by the church through high risk and frequent sexual experiences. As a result, some have acquired HIV. Others have experienced periods of homelessness and poverty. None of them had a church they could turn to for love, acceptance or support—at least not a church that wouldn’t also glibly inform them that the church loves the sinner but hates the sin. Such churches condemn them to earning their salvation by committing themselves to a life alone through celibacy, thereby depriving them of the mutual aid and support of the institution of marriage that straight Christians are permitted to enjoy, even when they are married for a second or third time after divorce. I have searched the internet far and wide and haven’t found any United Methodist churches that have left their denomination because it ordains divorced persons who have remarried, even though it is a longstanding traditional belief based on Bible teaching that such a second marriage constitutes the sin of adultery.
I do not want to take up too much of your time reading this message, which has already turned into a lengthy novel. But I feel compelled to mention a friend of mine from Nigeria whom I met through the internet last April. He is a young, closeted gay man who lives in the predominantly Christian, southern part of Nigeria. He found me through social media, presumably from a post I made utilizing a #gay hashtag. He subsequently read my blog post, which I shared above. Social media is generally the only safe space for gay and lesbian Nigerians to openly express who they are. Being gay in Nigeria can result in a prison sentence of up to 14 years—though most often it just results in harassment from the police, who extract a costly bribe to spare them the trauma and isolation of being “outed” to their family and community. We bonded when he found out that I play the piano for a United Methodist congregation. Every Sunday he attends a congregation of the United Methodist Church of Nigeria with members of his family. He can identify most hymns he hears me practicing during our video calls and can even recite their correct page number in the United Methodist hymnal without looking in the index. During one call, he showed me a calendar he has from a conference of the United Methodist Women in Nigeria. His family and his church do not know that he is gay. The day he found out I was United Methodist, he asked me to marry him, and he was very serious. One can only imagine the trauma he experiences as a closeted gay man in a country where being gay is a criminal offense—to be willing to leave his friends and family behind without a second thought for a chance to have a life in a country where he will be permitted to love free of fear and have a family, something which is very important to him. He often asks me about New York City and what it is like to be able to dance openly with other gays at gay bars.
When members of United Methodist churches debate leaving the denomination over the “gay issue”, I often wonder whether anyone is thinking about my Nigerian friend. Does anyone care what their decision means for someone like him, for people like me, for people like my gay and lesbian friends, for people whose pain is so deep that the very discussion of God is a trigger of PTSD like symptoms. Do we matter. Does anyone know what they are doing to the silent members sitting in their pews listening to all their words, quietly being subjected to the soul crucifying consequences of their deeply held beliefs, not a single soul in their church knowing they are talking about one of their own who is presently wishing they were dead behind a silent, churchy smile. Would it make a difference to that discussion if they did know? Before church members vote on such a decision, did they give serious study and prayerful consideration to works of biblical scholars who are “gay affirming”, not in spite of but because of their life’s work studying the biblical languages of Greek and Hebrew and commitment to understanding the ancient historical context in which the Scriptures were written. Did their shepherds exhort them to consider such scholarly arguments before hastily deciding without further thought, that this is what the Bible says. Is what the Bible says on this issue really so clearcut? Would it matter if it is at least arguable. Did any pastors tell their congregations to first read Matthew Vines’ “The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality” before making up their mind (https://matthewvines.com/transcript/). Before asserting an unshakeable conclusion that homosexuality is a sin that must be condemned by the church, did anyone read, “Romans 1:26-27: A Clobber Passage That Should Lose Its Wallop (https://unfundamentalists.com/2013/10/romans-126-27-a-clobber-passage-that-should-lose-its-wallop/). Did their shepherds read it before preaching and teaching them on such topics and passages. I wonder if any of them know that there are ancient liturgical manuscripts scattered in various museums and libraries across the world dating from the 7th through 16th centuries containing copies of what clearly appear to be Christian same-sex union ceremonies that parallel the heterosexual marriage ceremonies contained in the same manuscripts, or at least a very strong argument can be made that that is what they are (see John Boswell, Same-Sex Union in Premodern Europe, c. 1994). Perhaps it is irrelevant.
I have shed enough tears while trying to compose this message for which I have little faith even matters to anyone. I may never be able to bring myself to find out if Pleasantdale UMC and Poneto UMC remain United Methodist congregations after this time of discernment in our denomination. Nothing will ever change the gift of faith in Christ that these places have given me. Without it, I would not be alive, nor could I have endured the suffering of the cross I was given to bear in this life. I will never cease praying for these churches, that God would bless and revitalize their ministries so that their lampstands will remain burning, giving light to their respective corners of the world, offering love and grace to all, until the day the Bridegroom appears. May God bless you and your efforts as you lead this holy place through such difficult and conflicted times.
Your brother in Christ,
Justin Gardner
Cairns of Stone 