I have been an advocate for the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ folks in the life of the church as long as I have been a follower of Jesus. As news broke of the changes to The United Methodist Church, a friend asked me how long I have been working towards this goal. I had to think, because this became something that I was committed to in high school. You see, when I began to deepen my faith and spirituality and develop the relationship with Jesus that has grounded my entire life, I realized something: I was very sure that using slurs for gay people as a way to insult my friends was a deeply sinful act, but that my aunt and her partner raising a family together was anything but sinful.

I have never been shy telling people that I have earnestly sought the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ folks in the life of the church. Yes, that includes being honest with beloved members of the church I currently pastor and the church where I was previously an associate pastor who feel differently about the interpretation of scripture than I do. It’s always been important to me in my ministry to acknowledge that people do not have to agree to exist in community.

Because I am a happily married straight man, I’ve been able to advocate for a vision of an inclusive church from a place of privilege. Unlike the countless friends and mentors I’ve met in my life who had to leave the UMC, move across the country, or abandon their hopes of ordination or marriage in the church that they love, I was always safe, even if I was sad or angry.

But for almost twenty years, most of my decisions and work and life have been aimed at trying to get The United Methodist Church to look a little more like the vision of the Kingdom of God that God put on my heart when I started wrestling with a call to ministry as a teenager. It has shaped my relationships and work, it has caused me to often bite my tongue when I didn’t want to (shocking to many of you, I know), it has caused me to step away from writing here for a number of years and focus on other aspects of the work, and it has been the source of some of the most unexpected wonderful and horrible and beautiful and ugly moments in my life.

I have cried big, ugly tears these last couple days, as this work on formal institutional change has come to a wonderful end. As Sarah told our three month old son as I wandered around the house crying, “You have a dad with very big feelings about the world…and pretty much everything else.”

The United Methodist Church is not perfect, and because it’s a human institution, it never will be. I generally have a very low view of human institutions; I expect them to do poorly and am not surprised very often. But one of the most important things a large organization can do is get out of the way and let good happen. The changes made to the UMC, which allow for much greater autonomy internationally for churches to match their contexts and also pave a way for fuller inclusion of queer folks, include provisions by which churches and pastors are never asked to be inauthentic and do things they don’t believe in. That’s great! The changes also don’t undo the harm caused by our previous policies or the five decades of ugly and dehumanizing debate. But it’s over, so mission accomplished, right?

I thought I’d feel this way. I even shared a clip from my favorite movie with a few of my friends.

While Wesley suggests to Inigo that he consider piracy, that thought didn’t really cross my mind. Instead, I was struck by feeling like I was at the beginning of something rather than the end of something.

Some of the folks who have left the UMC and some of the trolls who love to comment on news articles on the internet anonymously point out that the mainline church is in decline, and that churches that have moved to full inclusion (including but not limited to The Presbyterian Church (USA), The Episcopal Church, The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, The United Church of Christ, and The Disciples of Christ) are all in membership decline in the United States. They seem to think that the reason we’ve decided to extend our welcome to queer folks is church growth. They are right in the sense that full inclusion does not magically create a church that will grow. They are wrong, though, because most of us engaged in this work have done it out of theological conviction rather than as a way to put some more butts in some seats on Sundays.

At least for me, I now have no excuses to keep me from fully living into my call. I can look into the eyes of my 3 month old and tell him that whoever he grows up to be, the God who loves him invites him to full participation in life and leadership in The United Methodist Church. Our church is not the General Conference or its policies. It never has been. It’s the people. Changing policies doesn’t create God’s preferred world, but it does make it all easier for us to do so. The growth of ministry depends on us seeking God.

I was never in the revenge business, but like Inigo I spent an enormous amount of time obsessively engaged in a particular task, and need some guidance on what to do next. I’m not going to be a pirate. As I have prayed these last couple days about what’s next, the still small voice of God has been pretty clear in telling me that I already knew the answer. God didn’t put on my heart changing words on a page, but rather connecting people to authentic community. The visions I see, and have always seen, of what the church could be doesn’t look like paragraphs and documents, but like people forming the Beloved Community. In a sense, we have more to do now than we ever have. For that, I’m grateful.

(I updated the title 5/3, which I thought I did before I published. Oops.)