DURHAM, N.C. (RNS) — On the same day that United Methodist delegates voted to repeal their denomination’s condemnation of homosexuality from its rulebook, the Rev. Charles Daly drove a big hulking church bus to the Charlotte Convention Center with a handful of church members in tow.
Maneuvering the bus into a parking lot that Thursday was tricky. The bus was too tall to clear the overhang at the entrance to one lot, and he had to carefully back out, allow his passengers to step off, and search for another lot.
The end run appeared in his Sunday (May 5) sermon at Epworth United Methodist Church, a suburban congregation in Durham, as a metaphor for his denomination’s predicament.
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“After an unbelievable amount of moving traffic and backing and forthing, finally, the General Conference of the United Methodist church was pulling around and driving out of a place that had been stuck for 52 years,” he told his congregation. “The big bus of the denomination is now free from the alley that it backed itself into.”
In Charlotte, members of Epworth United Methodist watched history being made when their denomination repealed a declaration that said the practice of homosexuality was “incompatible with Christian teaching.” A day earlier it also dropped a ban on the ordination of gay clergy.
But for Daly, a 42-year-old gay man, the actions of his denomination carried personal symbolism, too. As the first same-sex married minister in the North Carolina Conference or region, he was freed of the heavy burden of having to negotiate his identity in a denomination that until last week officially sanctioned and censured people like him.
The Rev. Charles Daly gives the benediction at Sunday services at Epworth United Methodist Church in Durham on May 5, 2024. RNS photo by Yonat Shimron
There are an estimated 324 clergy, including candidates for ordination, in the U.S. -based United Methodist Church who identify as LGBTQ+. Of those, about 160 are in same-sex marriages, according to the Reconciling Ministries Network, an advocacy group for LGBTQ+ people.
These gay clergy were allowed in stealthily, as attitudes toward LGBTQ+ clergy candidates began to change among some church leaders.
“A lot of people who I worked with did their very best not to treat me as a special case,” said Daly. “But it felt like an elephant in the room sometimes.”
On the first Sunday after the conclusion of the denomination’s General Conference, many United Methodists celebrated their release from those tight and narrow spaces that had confined so many queer members and clergy.
Others settled into the realization that despite the dramatic votes to expunge all punitive measures against LGBTQ+ people, not all United Methodists were happy.
Over the past five years, some 7,600 more traditional U.S. churches, or about 25% of all U.S. congregations, voted to leave the denomination, fearing the church was about to lift the LGBTQ+ bans.
Some have remained in the pews.
