“Just from the first day I was there, I was met with nothing but kindness and people who were exploring just as much as me and trying to figure it all out, so it just felt like a safe place to bring all of the questions and all of the doubt and still have that core faith,” said Matty.
The next semester, Davidson, now 34, also became an associate chaplain at Millsaps and joined the Wesley Connexion as co-director.
When Matty began dating Myles, who had also grown up evangelical and attended another school nearby, they joined the student group, too.
“We always kind of joke (that) the Venn diagram of the Pride group on campus and the Wesley group on campus is kind of a circle,” Davidson said.
Many of the students in the group had had hurtful experiences when they came out in the faith communities in which they had been raised, Davidson said. Many had questions about faith and wanted to find their way back to it.
The clergy — Swaim-Presley is ordained as an elder and Davidson as a deacon — tried to create a safe space to ask questions.
“We were just really blessed,” Swaim-Presley said, “because our ministry ended up being with the kind of deep, thoughtful, searching, authentic human beings that every minister dreams of getting to pastor, and they happened to belong to the LGBTQ community on campus and in the wider Jackson area.”
When Matty and Myles asked them to officiate their wedding, she said, “it honestly never crossed my mind to even consider saying no.
“They were our students. They were our kids. And now they’re wonderful young adults.”
Both clergy had left Millsaps for nonprofit roles by the time they officiated the wedding in January.
After the complaint was filed, they said they began a supervisory process with Mississippi Bishop Sharma Lewis. But, the two claim, that process abruptly ended in late March when Lewis asked them to surrender their credentials or she would request that the conference’s board of ordained ministry place them on involuntary leave of absence and also appoint a counsel for the church to move toward a church trial.
Lewis could not be reached for comment.
Meantime, Davidson and Swaim-Presley maintain they were acting according to the Book of Discipline.
Swaim-Presley pointed out that, in addition to the right to follow their conscience, the rulebook dictates that elders must provide pastoral care and counsel. “I am not living into my ministry as an ordained person if I’m not offering these things to the people God has entrusted to my care,” she said.
Deacons also vow to keep John Wesley’s General Rules, which expect all Methodists to demonstrate their faith “by doing no harm,” Davidson said.
The Reconciling Ministries Network, a group of United Methodist congregations and individuals advocating for the full inclusion of LGBTQ United Methodists, expressed its support for Davidson and Swaim-Presley, as well as the Cafieros.
The group published a statement that reads in part, “RMN honors God’s calling, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the pastoral ministry shown by Rev. Swaim-Presley and Rev. Davidson in their decision to care for this couple. Through their participation in this wedding, they have aligned themselves with the truth that LGBTQ+ people are fully human, fully beloved by God.”
The organization is collecting donations to support the clergy’s defense through its Clergy Defense Fund.
Faith in Women — an organization concerned with “reproductive health, rights, and justice,” where Davidson is executive director — also released a statement standing with Davidson.
The Cafieros and the two clergy agree that the church’s disapproval is not what they want nonbinary and LGBTQ people to take from their story. They hope people will hear instead that God loves them, and there are pastors and other people in the church who believe the same thing.
“Matty and Myles are just like that. Their faith is such an integral part of who they are in their relationship, and their love really does carve a path — create a channel — for grace to be shared with other people in their lives and in their community,” Swaim-Presley said.
“It’s an image of what Christian marriage, I think, is meant to be.”
This article originally appeared here.
