An Open Letter to Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker of the United Methodist Church

Dear Bishop Whitaker,

Greetings in Christ as General Conference approaches. In this week in which you and the United Methodist Church prepare for this important event, I would like to share with you some reflections in response to your essay entitled “The Church and Homosexuality” (www.flumc2.org/page.asp?PKValue=967).

As the United Methodist Church continues to deliberate about how (or whether) to welcome gay and lesbian persons, many of us who are gay and lesbian have persistently sought to tell our stories to your church and other churches. We do so 1) because we are human beings who are frequently treated as less than human by the churches, and 2) since the churches often refuse to permit us to address church assemblies to tell our stories, faithful churchgoers remain in ignorance of the real, human, lived experiences of their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters unless we find some way to tell you our stories.

In what follows, I want to tell my story. I am doing so as General Conference approaches since, as you know, I worked for one of your church’s institutions of higher education in Florida in 2006 and 2007 (actually, I was doing work on a part-time basis for this institution some time prior to my full-time employment in 2007). You and I met a number of times, but never had a chance to share our stories in any way that allowed us to begin to know each other as human beings.

I do recall a conversation with you about your growing up in Mississippi. As I told you then, we have something in common, in that my paternal grandfather also grew up in Mississippi. I myself lived in Mississippi for several years as a child.

I also recall very well the initial screening meeting with the executive committee of the college’s board of trustees, at which the fact that Dr. Schafer and I are an openly gay couple was discussed by that committee, and our full-time hire was approved. I recall your welcome at that meeting, and how grateful I was for it.

Because you addressed the issue of homosexuality and the UMC in the letter to which I am responding several months after that meeting, and because what the president

became the basis for brutal, dehumanizing experiences at this Methodist institution in your pastoral jurisdiction, I want to speak a word of testimony to you in this week in which you prepare for the General Conference.

I am giving my testimony in this public way since, as you know, the United Methodist Church has unfortunately chosen not to provide an open forum to hear the testimonies of gay and lesbian believers, while reserving the right to define our lives by official disciplinary teachings formulated without our contributions or participation. In my view, this unilateral, top-down approach is unfortunate: a group subject to discrimination is being defined by another group in whose hands all institutional power lies; and, given the historic experience of discrimination on the part of those being unilaterally defined, there is no mechanism to address injustice when the voices of those subject to injustice cannot be heard.

Since you and I never had a chance to know each other as human beings before my job was ended precipitously and with no evaluation of my work at your Methodist college, I want to begin my testimony with some reflections on my own personal relationship to the Methodist tradition. As you know, I am a theologian, and a Catholic who has not found welcome within my own church.

The lack of welcome has everything to do with the fact that I am an openly gay theologian living in a relationship of some 40 years that I refuse to hide. I refuse to hide my life and relationship because, as all Christians do, I have an obligation to witness to the grace I find in my life—abundant, amazing grace. My faith compels me to give testimony to the grace manifest in my experiences as a gay believer in a longstanding committed relationship. It requires me to speak out, even when others—including church members and church leaders—seek to suppress my voice, or reduce my life (and thus my testimony of faith) to some imagined (and despised) “lifestyle.”

As a Catholic who has found my own church less than welcoming, I have taken advantage of the kindness of other ecclesial communities insofar as they have allowed me to share their fellowship and liturgical lives. As someone with deep historic family ties to Methodism, I was very appreciative of the welcome I experienced at one of your Methodist colleges in Arkansas, when I was invited to work there and to serve as academic dean of that college.

Before the president who had invited Dr. Schafer and me to work with her at the Arkansas college assumed the position of president of your college in Florida, she asked us to make her a promise that we would accompany her to the Florida college. I gave this promise, though I did not want to uproot myself and move away from my family, which includes aging relatives who need my assistance and young ones who need my guidance and support.

Nonetheless, because I had made a promise and was taught that honoring one’s word is among the most important virtues in life, I felt obliged to keep my promise. After taking a pilgrimage to pray about the invitation extended to me to serve as the academic vice-president of your college in Florida, I accepted that invitation as a calling to which I must respond, even if in doing so, I had to make sacrifices and uproot myself. Faith is, after all, stepping out into the desert in response to God’s call—as Abraham and Sarah stepped forth, as Jesus did before beginning his ministry.

My association with the Methodist college in Arkansas and your Methodist college in Florida enriched my life as a Christian, not the least because I found communities that seemed to welcome my gifts, in which I could exercise those gifts and give to people and causes that engaged my passion. In these Methodist colleges, I found a loving home in which I could pray, worship, and collaborate with others to serve those in need. As a non-Methodist who experienced an open-door welcome offered by believers with open hearts and minds, I was deeply grateful.

Since your Methodist college in Florida made a covenant with Dr. Schafer and me to welcome us, to provide a home away from home for us,

Perhaps you would agree that there can be few experiences in life more difficult than being expelled from the family circle.

When the experience of expulsion is attended by lies and demonization, it becomes even more painful. When those expelling a person and lying to and about that person while demonizing him claim to speak in the name of Jesus, the experience is excruciatingly painful, especially for those who find in the story of Jesus inspiration for a life of prayer, fellowship, and service.

Because a Methodist institution under your jurisdiction

effect on my life and that of my partner Dr. Schafer, I am calling on you as a brother in Christ to listen to my testimony. I am also calling on the churches to stop causing such harm to human beings, to brothers and sisters in Christ. No brother or sister in Christ should be subject to the humiliation of being lied to and about, and then savagely expelled from a Christian community, because of an inborn trait such as race, gender, or sexual orientation.

My connection to Methodism is very strong, even though I belong to another religious tradition. My family has deep historic ties to Methodism. These form the backdrop against which I am giving testimony to you as you prepare for General Conference.

Both of my grandfathers were Methodists. Both were members of families with generations of Methodist ministers. Because they took their faith seriously, some of these ministers showed conspicuous courage in combating slavery in the South. Stories of that courage were part of the heritage my mother and father both chose to share with me as I grew up. Through these stories, a Methodist ethos infused my upbringing. The Methodist emphasis on extending a helping hand to anyone in need, and, in particular to the least among us; on the obligation to provide hospitality to any stranger at our door; on the need to repay one’s employer with honest hard work equivalent to the wages one is earning; on the need to give sacrificially: all these emphases of my Methodist heritage were stressed by my parents, and are strongly woven into my own value system.

An 1899 book entitled Early Settlers of Alabama (New Orleans, 1899) by James Edmond Saunders contains a brief biography of my fourth and third great-grandfathers Lindsey. Col. Saunders (who was born in 1806) knew these ancestors of mine personally. His eyewitness account of their lives stresses their Methodism and their hospitality to the Methodist circuit riders who ministered in their region in the early 1800s. Saunders notes,

Mark Lindsey was a tall, spare, old gentleman, who lived on a branch of Flint river when I first knew him. He wore the round-breasted Methodist coat, and had a most excellant [sic] reputation. He was also noted for his industry and good morals. The venerable Mr. McFerrin rode this circuit when quite a youth, and still remembers and speaks of the kindness and hospitality he received from the Lindseys. Mark Lindsey was raised in South Carolina. He went to Kentucky when young, and lived there a long time. In 1827 [note: the correct date is 1817] he and his son Dennis (who was a second edition of his father, in person and character), came to Lawrence county, [Alabama] and settled in the place I have mentioned (pp. 122-3).

Because you yourself have ties to the South and know the Methodist history of the region, you will perhaps know that “the venerable Mr. McFerrin" is Rev. John B. McFerrin. You will also probably know of Rev. McFerrin’s missionary work among the Cherokees, who revered him, in part, because he encouraged their native preachers and defended their rights against those who treated them unjustly.

The strong work ethic (fueled by their Methodist conviction that one honors God by working and serving to the best of one’s ability) of my Lindsey forefathers is mentioned by another biographer who knew Mark and Dennis Lindsey personally. As he reminisced in 1889 about one of Mark Lindsey’s grandsons, Judge Henry Clay Speake, A.G. Copeland reminded readers that Judge Speake was a grandson of Mark Lindsey. Having said this, he added, "Intellect and energy will tell" (Alabama Enquirer, 18-19 October 1889).

(I mention the strong work ethic that has passed down in my family as part of its Methodist heritage because one of the shocking lies told to me and about me

This was the first time in my entire life that anyone has made such a claim about me. I find this charge deeply offensive. While I may have many faults, they do not include the failure to work hard. I have always worked as hard as possible at my assignments. I have done so precisely because it was instilled in me, from childhood forward, that a strong work-ethic was something my family had long cherished, something that springs from our religious commitments.)

Mark and Dennis Lindsey (I am named for the latter; Dennis is my middle name) were instrumental in forming the first Methodist society in Lawrence Co., Alabama. Dennis married Jane Brooks, the daughter of a Virginia-born Methodist minister, Rev. Thomas Brooks, who served churches in Kentucky and Alabama.

Though Rev. Thomas Brooks lived among slaveholding families (including the Lindseys), records indicate that he refused to hold slaves himself. In 1824, when his father-in-law Thomas Whitlock died, he willed to Thomas Brooks and wife Sarah Whitlock Brooks two slaves. Rev. Thomas Brooks immediately manumitted the slaves, and never bought others.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Rev. Brooks’s refusal to own slaves was an expression of his commitment to Wesleyan principles. When he died in 1838, his estate included the works of Wesley, bibles and hymnals, as well as various Methodist magazines.

Rev. Brooks passed on his strong commitment to Methodism to his daughter Jane, who bought several of these books and journals when her father died. As I have studied her life, I have come to admire Jane Brooks Lindsey as an exemplary Methodist. Her husband died suddenly of yellow fever in 1836, leaving her with many small children to raise, and an estate encumbered by debt.

Even with all of these struggles, in the two years following her husband’s death, Jane Brooks Lindsey took her aging parents into her household, nursing them to their deaths in 1837 and 1838. The estate records for these ancestors show that they died of painful illnesses, probably cancer, over a protracted period of time. Jane Brooks Lindsey is among several strong and faithful Methodist women in my lineage whose lives were held up to me as examples of Christian discipleship, as I was growing up.

The emphasis on hospitality is another emphasis handed down from generation to generation among my Methodist ancestors. When my third great-grandfather Mark Jefferson Lindsey left Alabama in 1849 to move to Louisiana, he immediately built a Methodist church near his house, for the use of Methodist slaves belonging to a number of his neighbors (I find no evidence that he himself owned slaves). My grandfather and uncle were very proud of this donation made by their ancestor to people without resources. They took me on several occasions to see this church.

Stories told at Lindsey family reunions about Mark J. Lindsey state that he would frequently invite home his entire Methodist congregation for Sunday dinner. A brief notice of Mark J. Lindsey in a biography of his son Benjamin Dennis Lindsey in Clarence R. Wharton’s Texas Under Many Flags, vol. 4 (Chicago: American Hist. Soc., 1930), speaks of Mark J. Lindsey’s assistance to widows and orphans during the Civil War (pp. 221-2). Mark J. Lindsey and his wife Mary Ann Harrison Lindsey (who bore the brunt of her husband’s generous invitation to feed their church each Sunday) raised her younger brother when her parents died young and brought him to Louisiana with them. She, too, is among those stalwart Methodist women in my lineage whose service to others has been held up to me in many stories as an example of how people of faith should give to those in need.

The emphasis on giving freely to those in need was passed to their son Alexander Cobb Lindsey, my great-grandfather. As a farmer in Red River Parish, Louisiana, in his forties, Alec Lindsey experienced a calling to go to medical school. After spending time in Memphis studying medicine, he returned home to provide medical care to poor white and black members of his community, who had little access to doctors otherwise.

I grew up hearing many stories of him. My uncle Dr. Henry Carlton Lindsey, who spent his life as an academic vice-president in church-affiliated colleges, wrote a memoir of his grandfather that speaks of my great-grandfather's motivation in becoming a doctor. This memoir was published in my uncle's 1982 book entitled The Mark Lindsey Heritage. Here is how my uncle remembered his grandfather:

Our grand-daddy Lindsey in addition to being a little quaint and eccentric in some ways, was a great man of service to humanity in Red River Parish, Louisiana. He felt a true call to be of medical service to sick and suffering people of any race or station in life who needed him. Instead of serving at his convenience as many doctors do today—who will not make housecalls and who will see a patient during usual daytime office hours—he would always respond at any time, day or night, rain or shine. I saw him many times get out of bed on a rainy night, put on his "slicker," take his doctor's bag and head for the barn to hook up his favorite horse, Dolly, to the buggy and head off into the lightning and rain to answer a call to help deliver a Negro baby or to try to go and help a child who had a serious case of whooping cough. Many times he would drive up to his house about daylight after being out on a call, eat breakfast and after a short nap, go out and begin plowing or working in his fields. During the years of the great Depression, the only remuneration he would get for visiting and treating the sick would be a couple of dozen eggs, a chicken or two, or maybe some vegetables, but he would never complain, knowing that his was a calling for healing sickness and suffering, not just a way of making money. I stand in reverence and respect to this man, my grandfather.

As I remember my great-grandfather, I would be remiss if I did not also remember his wife Mary Ann Green, whose intense Methodist faith, kindness and generosity, and sweetness of spirit were the subject of many stories I heard as a child. Even my staunch Southern Baptist grandmother spoke of her mother-in-law Mollie Lindsey as an angel. Her entire family marveled at the depth of her quiet trust in God when her beloved eldest son John Wesley Lindsey was killed while working as a young man while, leaving a young widow and infant behind.

This is my Methodist heritage, or part of it—a very significant aspect of my upbringing and of the values on which I have drawn throughout my life. Since I have much to share with you, I intend to write this public letter in installments.

Tomorrow's installment will continue the story of my Methodist roots, as a way of framing my testimony to you. In that installment, I will share with you the equally significant Methodist history of my mother's father's family, in which there have been many generations of Methodist ministers, some of whom were notable for the courage they displayed in challenging slavery in the antebellum South, in response to the urging of John Wesley that slavery be abolished.