A Church For Those Who Need It Most
By: Rob Carmack
Tags: Christianity, Storytelling, Life, Reaching Out, LGBTQ

I have told myself a lot of lies in my life.

When I was fifteen, I told myself that I could be a great guitar player one day if I just listened to enough Aerosmith and Tom Petty. When I was in college, I told myself that I could ace any exam if I simply memorized a random list of facts that I wrote in my notes during class. I continually tell myself that I don’t need to exercise because my metabolism “works just fine.”

But one of the most insidious lies I have allowed myself to believe was when I was working for a conservative megachurch and I told myself, “I can change this place from the inside.” I would regularly challenge the church’s antiquated notions of women in leadership and their lack of interest in recycling used paper only to be met with either disinterest or disdain.

One of the biggest points of conflict I faced arose when I began to rethink how same-sex couples were treated at the church. One of my job responsibilities was to help the pastor with his “personal brand.” This included managing his social media accounts, writing his sermons, and replying to a significant number of emails in his inbox. (I even ghostwrote is memoir, which he self-published and never paid me for.)

One day, he received an email and asked me to write a reply (as him). The email was from a woman who lived nearby and wanted to know how our church felt about same-sex couples. I could tell from the way she was writing that she was looking for a safe church where she (and I assume her partner) could attend and feel welcome and affirmed. The pastor wanted me to write a response that was “kind, but clear about our position on this issue.”

At first, I tried to get out of doing it at all. I asked him if it wouldn’t be best for him to write this himself. When that didn’t work, I started writing drafts of a possible response that would hopefully not make this woman feel terrible, which I now realize was probably impossible. This pastor was never going allow me to send a response on his behalf that didn’t condemn same-sex relationships, even in the gentlest possible tone.

Eventually, I wrote and sent the worst email I have ever penned with my own fingers. I told them woman (behind the guise of the senior pastor) that while everyone is welcome to attend our weekend services, the official position of the church was that anyone who was “in a practicing homosexual relationship” could not join the church and that the church did not believe that way of life “offered God’s best” for people. I sent the email, and the woman never replied.

That was almost six years ago, and it still haunts me. I wish I could find that woman and tell her I’m sorry.

Learning to Listen

After that experience, I began to seriously doubt a lot of things about my own faith and how I had ended up where I was. To be perfectly honest, as a straight guy, I had never spent much time thinking through questions about the theology of same-sex relationships at all, so my opinions were pretty shallow, to say the least.

So I started reading. A lot. I started with Justin Lee’s powerful memoir Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs-Christians Debate, which remains one of the most life-changing books I have ever read. I went on to read Washed and Waiting by Wesley Hill, Does Jesus Really Love Me? by Jeff Chu, Love is an Orientation by Andrew Marin, and a handful of others. I read blog posts by gay Christians, and I started paying attention every time a new voice would enter the conversation.

All of this was happening while I was writing sermons for a pastor who was as homophobic as any person I have ever met. After I read Justin Lee’s book, I went to the pastor and asked him if he might consider reading it and even possibly beginning a dialogue with the senior staff to rethink how the church interacts with local people who identify as LGBTQ.

He told me that he liked the idea of having someone come to speak to the staff and told me that he had a friend who worked with a local of chapter of Exodus International (for real, I am not making this up). This was a few months before Alan Chambers would publicly confess to Lisa Ling that Exodus International was a total sham and had harmed countless gay teens in the name of “praying the gay away.”

I protested to the pastor that Exodus International would probably not help us learn anything new or get better at treating our LGBTQ neighbors with dignity and respect. He accused me of being closed-minded and abruptly ended the meeting.

I spent the next few months growing increasingly frustrated by my lack of progress and the church’s lack of change. I began to deconstruct my entire faith system, wondering if I really believed in God at all anymore.¹ In September of 2013 — about six months after I had raised the question to my senior pastor — I was fired from that church. I was shocked at the time, but in retrospect, I probably should have seen it coming.

The official reason for my firing was bizarre. I wish I could tell you that it was because I took a stand on LGBTQ issues or demanded that we start letting women preach, but it was nothing that cool or noble. Here’s what happened: The church installed a new — and very expensive — high definition screen (actually, THREE of them) in the new sanctuary. When I was preaching my first service after the screens had been installed, I made a joke about how weird it felt to see my giant face on those screens and how I assumed everybody else probably thought it was weird, too.

Most people in the room laughed, but there were a few people who did not find it funny — specifically the senior pastor, the executive pastor, and one of the church’s largest donors who had put up the money for the screens. Four days later, I was called into the pastor’s office and told that my “joke” about the screens was disrespectful and insubordinate and that they felt I was “begging them” to fire me.

I left the building that day feeling like a failure; I was disoriented and hurt. The church would go on to publicly call me a heretic and warn my friends to stay away from me, all the while using sermons that I had written for them. It took them eight weeks to run out of my content.

They were calling me a heretic six days a week and then preaching my sermons on Sundays.

What are you going to do next?

That was the question I heard most during those first few weeks. I knew I could never go back into the world of megachurches. Once I was out and able to see what should have been obvious to me — all of the ways I had ignored my principles in the name of keeping my job — I knew I could not go back.

I thought about why I had originally wanted to be a pastor and how that had evolved over time. At first, I just wanted to do work that people could benefit from — to do a job where I could be of use to people. As I was hired by larger churches, I became more interested in self-promotion and climbing some kind of ladder. Having a microphone and thousands of people listening to you is a specific kind of drug that is tough to kick.

But in that season just after I was fired, I realized how shallow my motivatio had become. That my need to keep my job and my access to the stage was actually keeping me from being of use to people, especially the kinds of people who need Jesus the most. I felt ashamed of myself, and I felt like a sellout.

A couple months later, some friends with my wife and I hosted a one-time gathering for people where we served pasta and I preached a sermon. It was small, but I loved it. Afterward, people started asking if we were starting a church. That had not been the plan when we started, but it became an idea we started to take seriously. That was at the end of 2013.

I am now pastoring a church that I started in 2014. My hope for this church has been that it could serve as a refuge for people who have felt marginalized by other faith communities — people who have deep scar tissue from the spiritual abuse and malpractice performed against them in the name of dogma. This isn’t only for people who identify as LGBTQ — my hope is that we can serve women who have been silenced by the toxic masculinity that flows so freely through our churches, people who suffer from mental illness who were told that they are being punished for their lack of faith, people who suffered domestic abuse and were told by church leaders that they should go home and quietly submit, and so many others.

Do Something About It

When we first started the church, two young women who were in a committed relationship started attending. They told me that their last church (which, not coincidentally, was the same church that had fired me) had told them that they were not allowed to attend the small group for college students unless they both signed a celibacy pledge and promised never to sit together during group time. They told me this story and wondered if our church would treat them the same way. I told them that I was so sorry that had happened to them and I promised they would never receive that kind of treatment here.

A year later, an older man who had been attending our church with his wife sent me a Monday morning email. He was angry that there were “two girls holding hands in the front row” during yesterday’s church service. He wanted to know if I was going to “do something about it.” I was angry and not completely sure how to respond. On one hand, his email was hateful and ignorant, and I wanted to tell him so. On the other hand, this guy was also part of my church, and I wondered if I had an obligation to pastor him with as much grace as I wished my previous church had shown people who were LGBTQ.

Ultimately, I wrote him back and told him that I knew who he was talking about. I told him the names of the “two girls” he was referring to, and I told him that they were part of our church family, and I was so glad they felt safe enough to sit right in the front row and hold hands. I told him that he had taken communion alongside them several times without realizing it and that they were part of the Body of Christ just like he was. I told him that my hope for our church is that more people would feel as safe as those two young women do. I thanked him for being part of our church and wished him grace and peace for his day.

He never responded and never returned to our church.

I have to be honest: As a pastor, I want to feel successful and well-liked, and that means that whenever someone gets angry and leaves the church, I feel sad and a little bit like a failure. To be honest, I do not regret my response to that man. I have no doubt that there are lots of churches where he can go and feel welcome and affirmed.

However, if I had said or done anything to alienate those two young women, they would likely have nowhere else to go in our area. They would be alone, and I am not okay with that.

I know that there are people in my church who are fully affirming of the LGBTQ community; I also know that there are people in my church who aren’t quite there yet. And it is my job to pastor each of them, no matter where they are on their journey.

It is my job to remind people that they are loved by God and that they have value in this world AND that the other people in the room are just as loved and valued as they are.

I am going to make mistakes. I know that our church has not met everyone’s expectations (the man who sent that email, for example). I am fully aware that I have a lot to learn as a pastor and there are countless ways that I can be better than I am. I am on a journey, just like everybody else. I don’t want you to think I’ve created some kind of Utopia Island of Misfit Churchgoers. We have our problems, too.

But I am hopeful that one of our problems will not be that we lack grace for those who need it most.

To be fair, my crisis of faith was not completely the result of my evolving views on LGBTQ issues and the church. I was questioning everything, and this was one piece of a much larger puzzle.

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