David S. - Atlanta

David S. is a former Southern Baptist pastor who found God's love in a Methodist church. He shares his story below.

I am a relatively new Methodist.  I came to know and love United Methodists one day about ten years ago when I stepped into St. Mark United Methodist Church in Atlanta  for the first time.

Church wasn't  a new idea to me.  I was raised in a Southern Baptist Church and home...they kinda went together.  My family was in church every time the doors were open: twice on Sunday, Wednesday night, Mission groups, two full weeks of revival in the summer twice a day.  I loved the church.  I loved God and Jesus.  I remember with joy the family devotion times with my mother  reading the Bible and praying for us.  I learned to sing in those family devotion times.

It was later in life that I tried  more and more to please God.  I earned my Master of Divinity  Degree  and became a Southern Baptist pastor serving two churches with distinction.  Even that though was not  enough to make me feel at ease with my relationship to God.  Because at age 45 after struggling  for most of my life to figure out who I was I came to understand that I was a  a gay man.  When that happened  all  the rest of my life made sense.

But now I am OK with who I am but now I don't fit into the church hierarchy anymore.  I had heard it  plainly since  my earliest days that  you cannot be a  homosexual and  a Christian-those two ideas are incompatible.  But how could this young man who loved God and people with all his heart, mind, soul and body (and that is all that Jesus required) not be loved by the God who made him.  This was incompatible for me in my head.  So I had to be reconciled to the fact that I was going to be outside the loving arms of God whom I love and adore.  I felt that God created me just the way I am.

At that time I wasn't in a relationship.....this was just who I am as a person.  Four years went by and  I wandered around from church to church and then even stayed out of the church for awhile. But I needed to be in a church ...in a worship hour...be around other  Christians.   So one day, I  was on my way to try an Episcopal church and was late and I drove by Saint Mark  noticing  their service started at 11:15.  I stopped.  When I walked through those red doors I was greeted by people who acted like they had known me forever.  I really felt like I was Home.

One of the Hymns we sang that Communion Sunday was This is a Day of New Beginnings by Brian Wren. It’s hymn #383 in the Methodist Hymnal if you want to read it.  I was told that day that I was welcome no matter where I had come from or who I was , because this was the Lord's table, not even a United Methodist table, but the Lord's.  And I was His, so I belonged here.  This is a day of new beginnings, time to remember and move on, time to believe what love is bringing, laying to rest the pain that's gone.

I don't remember crying through an entire worship service ever but that day I did. My heart was so broken. That night My mother asked me on her regular Sunday night call, Son, did you go to church today?  I had been lying to her for years, but today I told her that I had found the most wonderful body of believers  ever.  I talked about Saint Mark for  30 minutes.  She couldn't believe that I was that happy over one visit to a church service.  Later after I was member she would say "i wish I were able to  come and experience  that with you, Sounds like a wonderful place."  I am 59 now and Mom had been gone for four years but would she ever be proud that her boy  is an active part of an alive church that loves people and actively seeks to serve God in all of His creation.

Whosoever really does mean me.  It has been over ten years and I cannot find enough ways to serve God in the church that loved me  back into the waiting arms of God.  Every United Methodist Church should be a place of acceptance and healing  for broken hearts.  I am so eternally glad that  there was one on the corner of 5th and Peachtree in Atlanta that day that lives out our motto Open Hearts, Open Minds and Open Doors - wouldn't you like to be part of that kind of fellowship?

Harvey O. - Atlanta

Harvey O. is a member of Saint Mark United Methodist Church in Atlanta who made the following comments at the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church Listening Sessions for delegates to the General Conference:

One night when I was younger, I awoke to the sounds of breaking glass and screaming. I ran to the kitchen to find my mother and the guy that she was with at each other’s throats. It was a horrible scene. So, as “the man of the house” I decided that I needed to jump in and help protect my mother. In the process, I was thrown against the wall and was banged up pretty bad. Then at one point, the couch fell back on top of me and I was pinned to the ground under it. At that moment, I prayed to God to protect my family, hoping for a miracle.

Well, of course, that man left our lives and we were left to fend for ourselves. After selling most of our earthly possessions, my single mother of two boys, in a small rural town of West Texas, was forced to make it on her own. That is when our church stepped in. The people of our United Methodist Church took us under their wing and helped provide. They became for me a loving extension of my family. As I grew up, I saw Christ’s love played out in my own life from the people of this church. They didn’t seem to care if my mother had been married and divorced several times or if her sons were cheerleaders, they loved us because Christ loved us.

This is part of the reason I am here today. I am greatly concerned about the issues that face our denomination especially as it comes to full inclusion and membership for all people.

As I got older, I was able to attend a United Methodist university and even had the honor of serving as a youth director for four years at a local church. Throughout this time, the ideas of love, service, and acceptance where pervasive in and around the life of the United Methodist churches I was a part of. It was during this time, that our motto “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors” came out and I knew that this was a phrase befitting the United Methodist Church.

I then moved from there to Austin, to North Carolina, back to Texas, and have now found myself here in Atlanta, GA. In each of these moves, I searched fervently for a church home that showed me love, service, and acceptance for me, just as I am. As I searched in Atlanta, I was blessed to attend a larger church in downtown Atlanta.

The first Sunday I was there I listened to people speak about their experiences in summer mission projects both youth and adults. Here again were people who not only believed in God but acted out Christ’s love just as my church family had done to me so many years ago. Then it came time for the sermon. The three ministers got up and did sermonetts. The first spoke about how to have loving committed heterosexual relationships and be in communion with God through Christ’s love. The second spoke passionately about how this same commitment could be found in a life of singleness. And, then the third spoke about same-sex relationships, how to have that same loving commitment and communion with God through Christ’s love.

As I sat there, I realized that this church not only preached the Gospel but lived the ideals of Christ I had searched for since leaving my home church; love, service, and acceptance regardless of who the person or persons might be. The United Methodist Church--a place that my grandparents who have been married for 53 years can be accepted, my single mother could be accepted, and me, a young gay man could also be accepted. All of us, loved by Christ and a part of His flock.

So, I come before you today asking you to truly look at the legislation that comes before you this year at General Conference. Policies that exclude people from the United Methodist Church and ultimately from the Body of Christ do not support “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors” and should not be a part of our Discipline. Full inclusion of all people in all aspects of our church is vital to the mission of Christ. At the same time, pastoral authority and giving them the right to decide who is and who is not worth of becoming full members of the Body of Christ is not in any way what Christ has called us to be about.

After General Conference, it is my prayer that I will still be allowed to be a member of the church that helped in forming me into the man that stands before you today. A church that truly is committed to loving, serving and accepting all of God’s people; black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, the youth and the elderly; women and men---all of us.

Matthew M. - Atlanta

North Georgia Conference Listening Session Testimony of Matthew M., Lay Leader at Saint Mark UMC, Atlanta Emory District, March 9, 2008

My name is Matthew M. and I have been in a loving and supportive relationship with my partner Bill W. for almost 35 years. You can imagine that we have a lot of stories to tell in our 35 years together, but I want to share one of them with you.

When we first came to Atlanta in 1984 after living in New York City for 10 years, we decided to find a church home. We are an interracial couple and were members of a Baptist congregation in Harlem while we were in New York. So we decided to join a predominantly black Baptist congregation here in Atlanta. It soon became apparent that we were going to be the subjects of an antigay campaign at the church, so we left shortly after joining.

I decided to do a little exploring around our neighborhood in Cascade Heights to see what churches were available close to our house. I visited a number of churches up and down Cascade and finally settled on Cascade United Methodist which at that time was located at 875 Cascade, a couple of miles from our house. After visiting Cascade for awhile I asked Bill to join me, and he agreed that it seemed like a warm and loving congregation, so we met with the pastor, Rev. Walter Kimbrough.

I wanted to get a sense from Rev. Kimbrough about how the congregation would feel about a white guy joining, and he was very supportive and shared with us how he came to Cascade when it was transitioning from a white congregation to a predominantly black congregation. So he personally was happy that I wanted to join and encouraged me to do so.

Bill wanted to know how United Methodists regarded gay people since we did not want to put ourselves through the ordeal that we faced at the Baptist church. Rev. Kimbrough laid out what the Discipline has to say about the issue of homosexuals in the church stressing that gay persons are individuals of sacred worth no less than heterosexual persons. He said that the church is still wrestling with the issue (this was back in 1984) but that he saw progress in the time that he was a minister and that personally he was very supportive of our rights as gay persons who are children of God. He also said that as long as he was Senior Pastor of Cascade we would never have to fear being subjected to antigay sermons from the pulpit.

Well that’s all we needed to hear before we decided that this was the church for us! Shortly after we joined, we invited Rev. Kimbrough and his wife Marjorie to dinner. Rev. Kimbrough accepted (Marge did not make this dinner but did join us for a subsequent dinner). It was a wonderful evening of fellowship, and before he left we asked Rev. Kimbrough to bless our house since we had just moved in. Not only did he bless our house, but he asked God’s blessing on us as a couple. So we felt affirmed and blessed as a couple and continued to grow in our knowledge of God at Cascade serving on various ministries including Trustees, Hospitality, Homeless, Sunday School and by singing in a number of choirs.

After 16 years at Cascade where there was tremendous growth in membership, we decided, after much prayer, to find a smaller supportive congregation. A friend of ours who we met at Cascade, Rev. Bridget Young, who currently serves on the staff at Emory University, suggested St. Mark. We had friends who attended St. Mark and after visiting and meeting with the pastor at that time, Mike Cordle, we decided to make the transition. Of course we spoke with Rev. Kimbrough, and he gave us his blessing and a wonderful letter of introduction to St. Mark.

On the Sunday we joined (we were the first members of the Millennium in 2000); we were introduced to the congregation. When Rev. Cordle finished giving the congregation our background as a couple, the entire congregation stood and welcomed us with sustained applause. So we have been there ever since, Bill serving on the Administration Board and me as a Lay Leader, also as leaders of the Couples Sunday School Class and with the Homeless Ministry’s Breakfast Club. Our current pastor, Jimmy Moor, has become a spiritual bulwark for both of us as well as a dear friend.

I wanted to give you an idea why we have been so happy to be part of the United Methodist Church and why we personally feel that the United Methodist Church should be inclusive of gay persons. It seems to me that this is what God would have us to do and where we should naturally be moving as a denomination. Rev. Kimbrough told us back in 1984 that there would be many hurdles ahead, and I believe we have managed to overcome some of those challenges. But there still remains a major stigma against us as gay persons within the structure of the UMC.

I would encourage all of you to vote for full inclusion by restoring membership rights to gay persons, removing the incompatibility clause, repealing the prohibitions against funding, ordination and marriage of gay persons. I know that this cannot be done overnight, but I think it’s time for us to begin this process. Please be prayerful about your decision.