Methodist Meltdown – Memories of a Broken Heart

I have watched with great sadness this week as the church of my childhood chose to go the way of the dinosaurs. Faced with an opportunity to grow as a denomination, to live and let live over the question of the place of LBGTQ people in its midst, the convention chose to retrench to the muddled thinking of the 1950s. In the end, it chose dominance, control and a gospel of largely unrecognized homophobia over a significant segment of its own people.

Truth be told, even as I am saddened by this development, I am hardly surprised.

I watch this meltdown with a modicum of detachment. My own Larsen Cow moment (Grass, we’ve been eating grass all this time!) with Methodism came in 1973 when I was an undergraduate at the University of Florida. But the seeds for my ultimate departure had been germinating for quite awhile prior to that.

Social Consciousness, Social Respectability

In Bushnell, Florida, the Methodist Church in which I grew up was the church that most of the town’s college educated people attended. It drew a large number of teachers like my Dad. For most of my childhood the sermons were moderately provocative, calling us Methodists to lives of sanctification, perfecting that which G-d had created in each of us individually beginning with the image of G-d all living beings bear from their creation and growing evermore into the likeness of G_d.  

We were also called to act collectively for the benefit of others. I grew up constantly aware of the Methodist concern for the poor, a concern that the Wesley brothers readily embodied. I have long felt that the Anglican Church committed a major error in judgment by ignoring John Wesley’s concern for the working poor of Britain, essentially standing by as what would become the Methodist movement gave up on a church dominated by an indifferent if not hostile gentry and went their own way. 

It was a major loss for Anglicanism from which it still suffers today.

The ethos of the Methodism of my childhood was social consciousness. That readily played out in a palpable awareness of a world which needed our compassionate care. For my long life of concern for the world and resulting social activism I am indebted to my Methodist roots. I will always be grateful for that gift.

But social consciousness like this can play out in less noble ways as well. It readingly devolves into concerns for social respectability, the consummate middle class obsession. At the congregational level that appeared in a competitive spirit that manifest itself in the clothes attendees wore to church, the cars in which they arrived there and the dishes they brought to the fellowship suppers. In the process it revealed some of the worst aspects of middle-class self-focus and the banality that flows from it.

At a basic level, Methodist perfectionism was always the Achilles heel of its own movement, the inevitable grounds for critique of its practices in light of its stated beliefs. Given such lofty goals, it has always been easy for Methodism to become hoist on its own petard.

What Was Missing Disturbed Me

By the time I had become a senior in high school, I had become sufficiently conscienticized to the world to realize that the tenor and content of the sermons I was hearing each week had begun to disturb me. There was more focus on comfort, the cardinal virtue of a consumerist culture. Correspondingly, the references to the problems of the world had become increasingly scarce. There was lot more of “Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior” and a lot less “When I was in prison you visited me."

Around our nation the campuses of the colleges, one of which I would soon be attending,  were embroiled in protest against a barbaric war in Southeast Asia. The streets of our nation’s cities had become war zones as a people fed up with three centuries of slavery and its legacy lost the patience to endure any more.

Many of those sitting in the congregation had watched their older sons and neighbors march off to war, some of them never coming back, many of them coming back very different people from those who left. Young males my age anxiously awaited our turn in that lottery of death. But one would have never known any of that on Sunday morning at First Methodist.

In what would prove a parting grace, the new pastor of the church in Bushnell, a rural “hardship post” in the Methodist conference in Central Florida which prompted changes of pastorates every two to three years, agreed to offer the counseling for conscientious objector status that the Selective Service was now requiring prior to classification. I will always be grateful for that kindness on his part. He did not have to do that and I was never sure exactly what he thought about it. As it turned out, an end in the war in Vietnam and a draft number pulled midway through the lottery prevented me from ever having to test those credentials.

He Wouldn’t Even Look at Me

Thus my relationship with Methodism was already tenuous by the time I reached the University of Florida in 1973. Sought out by its campus ministry, I attended there intermittently my first turbulent semester. But by the end of that semester, I found myself in crisis and turned to the only place I knew to go, the Methodist Church. It would prove the last time I ever did that.

The campus minister was happy to see me that afternoon. My presence at Sunday worship at the campus chapel had been erratic at best. Most Sunday mornings I was in my dorm room across campus sleeping off the effects of the party from the night before. Playboy Magazine had declared UF to be the Number One Party School in the Nation in 1973. It was a title hard earned and well deserved.

Yet he knew from my face that I was troubled. “Sit down,” he said. “Let’s talk. “

As I began to relate a semester of deepening depression, heavy drinking and more than one round of suicidal ideation, his face darkened. It was clear I was in trouble. My grades had suffered as I incurred the first Cs of my college career. The worst aspect was that I did not know what to do to pull myself out of this free fall. But I did have an idea of how I got there.

“What seems to be the problem, Harry? What is troubling your soul?”

I knew the moment of truth had finally come. And so for the first time I had ever been able to speak these words out loud to another, I blurted out, “I think I may be gay.”

There are moments in your life when time seems to stand still, when the wheel of life spins so abruptly you can feel the breeze of the passing spokes as they go by. This was one of those moments. And in the next three minutes, my life would change irrevocably forever.

The pastor turned away from me, back to his desk, looking at the stack of papers sitting upon it. He never looked at me again after that moment.

“I think you are studying too hard. I want you to go home and get some rest. Come back and talk with me again when you return for the spring semester if you want.”

And that was it. He never turned from his desk. No handshake. No acknowledgement of my humanity. Just a deafening silence that filled the room quickly.

I got up. Waiting. Hoping for some affirmation of my humanity before I left. Silence. I turned to the door. “Well, goodbye then,” I said.

Silence.

When I closed the door to the pastor’s office I stood there for a couple of minutes. I was stunned that the person I had trusted, the person I hoped could help me feel for just one moment that my life was actually worth continuing to live, the person I had – wrongly – assumed spoke for G-d, had just completely shut down and blown me off like that.

I stood looking at the wooden door, its faded fire engine red paint starting to chip and peel revealing several prior coats and colors, the wounds of countless thumb tacks visible among rusting staples whose important notices had long since gone away. I reached out and touched the splintering wood of that door and then stepped back and turned to walk away.

“Goodbye,” I said as the tears began to spill down my cheeks.  And as I walked away from that chapel that chilly December afternoon in Gainesville, I knew that I was walking away from a Methodist Church that was once my spiritual home but no longer could be.

Difficult Choices Ahead

I understand only too well how many in the Methodist Church are feeling this week. We are long past the days when pastors couldn’t even look their gay congregants in the eyes. The love that once dared not speak its name has become one of the most frequently spoken topics of the common discourse in virtually every religious tradition around the world. And yet today many Methodists find themselves standing on the outside of the door of church leadership, staring at the aging, scarred wood of a once noble church, cast out of the inner sanctum of full membership by a church that refuses to even look at them.

I know only too well the hopefulness so many felt going into this conference. If the evangelicals in America and their allies in Africa could simply agree to live and let live, those who have learned to celebrate the wide diversity that is G-d’s human Creation could minister as they saw fit even as others would not. But that was not to be.

I also know the feeling of rejection and the questions that automatically arise: What do I do now?

When I left the Methodist Church, I was clear that the way forward was all that was available to me. Like the angel with the flaming sword at the gate to Eden, the way back was no longer a possibility. Unlike many who find themselves dispossessed of their church homes for any number of reasons and simply give up on organized religion altogether, I felt a strong enough need for spiritual community that within a year I had begun to seek out other possibilities.

While I had always been drawn to the Episcopal Church, one of the primary reasons I eventually began to attend there was its location near my apartment across town from the university. As I began to attend evening services there, I remembered the things I had long found appealing in Anglicanism: the rich Elizabethan English of its services; the traditional hymns we sang, many of them the same hymns from the Wesley brothers I had grown up loving;  a level of intellect that did not require me to wince at mundane sermons preaching gospels of comfort and denial.

In the long run, Anglicanism became a home for this former Methodist who had outgrown his roots. In some ways, my rejection by the campus chaplain served as the necessary impetus to make a move that had been brooding in my soul for a long time. Though it was painful, that moment at the office door was necessary to mark the death of one era of my life and the beginning of a new era. Given the symbolic value of doors, I consider that moment my liturgical rite of passage.

Whether this is an appropriate path for the many Methodists currently reeling from their leadership’s decision to return to the 1950s is ultimately a question of individual conscience. On the one hand, it is clear that as long as social respectability and the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator in the church prevails, Methodism is unlikely to evolve. That leaves many with the Hobson choice of remaining in their church homes under a tyrannical leadership or either engaging in civil liberty that will ultimately lead to a schism or simply packing their bags and leaving now.

First same sex marriage, St. Richard's
Episcopal Church, Winter Park, FL, Feb. 16, 2019 

From my own experience, I would offer the following. There were many dark moments in my subsequent journey as an Anglican that found me in the same place many Methodist find themselves this week. The evolution from a church marked by institutionalized homophobia, the Republican Party at Prayer, to a church which at least on a national level practices a genuine “Open hearts, open minds, open doors” policy was slow and painful. From the first resolutions recognizing “homosexuals” (note the reductionist term here) as children of G-d meriting the love of the church in the 1960s to the most recent votes to make same-sex marriage available to all couples, the struggle continued over 50 years and still continues to be contested in a handful of backwater dioceses like Central Florida where I live.

What kept me going all those years, the last 40 of which were within the Episcopal Church, was the sense that the church was edging ever closer to the goal of full inclusion, slowly but surely. One of the ways we knew that was the sharp increase in shrillness and acrimony in the debates and public pronouncements of conservatives who recognized early on that they were on the losing side of history.

I have no way of knowing how to read the evolutionary track of Methodism. If the latest vote itself is any indication, it would appear the church leadership is engaging in a retrogressive devolution, returning to harsh and hurtful positions once seen as common sense but today recognized as the minority position among most thoughtful and prayerful people. For this former Methodist, that is truly sad. For a church with so much potential and insight, this represents an abject failure to realize it.

To all those Methodists who are feeling rejected, unwanted and dispossessed in the wake of this meltdown, you have my heart. I suffer with you and I know first-hand what your pain feels like. You are facing a very difficult period of discernment. I wish you well in finding your way. And I share your prayer that perhaps someday, the Methodist Church that we both once loved will also find its way.

(Adapted) Collect for John Wesley commemoration, March 2:  

O God, who plucked as a brand from the burning your servant John Wesley that he might kindle the flame of love in our hearts and illuminate our minds: Grant us such a warming of our hearts of stone that we, being set afire by holy love, may come to embrace all our fellow children of G-d as equals both within our ranks and around the world. Amen.

-       Original by J.E. Rattenbury, (1955)

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

 © Harry Coverston 2019

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