Reconciling Stories

“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.”

—John 15:18

“If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.”

—1 John 4:20

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

—Romans 8:38-39

ReconcilingStories.org invites gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender United Methodists and their friends and family to submit stories about their faith journeys and their fights for equality and justice.

We’ll review your stories and get them up on the site so others can share in your joys, empathize with your struggles, gain insight from your lessons learned, and encourage you to press on.

We offer the entire scale of visibility, from secure, anonymous posting all the way to full contact information with your post. We now support the uploading of audio so that you can tell your story as well. Sharing should be easy, and we hope you find our process absolutely painless.

What is ReconcilingStories.org’s goal? We are working for a United Methodist Church that is fully inclusive of all our GLBT brothers and sisters. Changing hearts and minds in the church will happen, and it will take place one person, one story, one connection at a time. We offer up this space for those connections.

I am impinging on your world for a brief moment and don’t want to offend, but a few I shall. I have a story that I feel I must tell and share …

Once upon a time, there was a young woman named Loette. She had sought out the church at an early age, and knew in her heart that she wanted to be a preacher’s wife (contrary to popular belief, this is not a mental health condition … *smile*). One bright Sunday morn’, she went to Union Church with her uncle in the small rural town of Goggins. There that day was a young man named Huey Long, named after the governor of Louisiana who his good father admired.

Now Loette spotted Huey in a slick blue suit. Read the rest of this entry »

I went over the notes I made from Colossians through 3 John, with a smattering from Ephesians. What I was looking for were verses that spoke about:

Loving one another, working together, the kinds of work we are supposed to be doing together as Christians, the kinds of strife-filled conduct we are to avoid and the kind of loving contact we are to emulate.

My personal belief is that sexual minorities seeking a relationship with Jesus, coming to know God and the Holy Spirit and contributing to the life of the Church are doing what we are taught to do.

Those in the Church who seek to exclude sexual minorities from participation in the life of the Church are creating strife, which we are called to work against. Our enemies are not one another, our enemy is the Adversary, and we are to fight him, not each other.

Read the rest of this entry »

Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life. John 6:47

I am the living bread which came down from Heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world. John 6:51

I am the light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life. John 8:11

You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one.
John 8:15

Read the rest of this entry »

This story was told in November 2004 at Wallingford United Methodist Church at a service celebrating the 20th anniversary of the church becoming a Reconciling Congregation.

Hi! For those of you who don’t know me very well, or know my history with Wallingford, I was figuring this out in order to speak here and I realized that I’ve been attending here for about thirteen years, which, wow, astounds me. And, for a number of those years I was very active in the Reconciling Committee here at Wallingford. I could talk for a really long time, I’m sure you’d love that, [laughter] about the many many ways that this community has been so important to me for those years, not just in a reconciling sense, but I’ll stick to the reconciling sense right now.

When Jim asked me to speak, I have to admit I was reluctant, not just because I would have to get up and speak in front of everyone, but there was this part of me, and I wondered about it and kinda thought a lot about it, that feels like a little kid having to take a bath. You know, like, “I don’t want to talk about reconciling!”

And I thought, “What’s that all about?” And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I like to come here and pretend sometimes. Pretend that this isn’t such a special place.

Read the rest of this entry »

This story was told in November 2004 at Wallingford United Methodist Church at a service celebrating the 20th anniversary of the church becoming a Reconciling Congregation.

The first surprise was our conception of what it meant to have a church that would welcome other gay people to Wallingford. Perhaps a notion of gay people was that single gay men and lesbians from Capitol Hill would go to bars late Saturday night and then early Sunday morning on their way home would stop and have worship with us. [laughter]

The first pleasant surprise was all the gay families that came to raise their kids at Wallingford. Surprise number one.

Surprise number two would be, if you remember busing in the 60s and 70s, there was talk about what number of gay people would make us into a gay church and all the straights would want to leave. I think the pleasant surprise now is that nobody has a number for how many gay members we have here … it never gets tallied, it never really comes up. We’ve never had to deal with “when will all the straight people leave because they feel uncomfortable?” Pleasant surprise number two.

Read the rest of this entry »