After reading James Schwartz’s book of poems, The Literary Party; Growing up Gay and Amish in America, I felt compelled to do a little more digging into organized religion and it’s stance on homosexuality.  While it would have been easy enough for me to produce a litany of facts and horrible things that religion has done to exclude or demonize the LGBT community, I chose to find a sure and positive voice in the world.

Germantown Mennonite Church (GMC) in Pennsylvania is the oldest Mennonite Church in the Western hemisphere.   I was lucky enough to get in touch with Amy Yoder McGloughlin, the pastor of GMC who recently gave a lecture with Randy Spaulding (former pastor of Covenant Mennonite, Sarasota) and John Linscheid (former Mennonite pastor and longtime member of the GMC),  at Princeton Seminary during their Gay Straight Alliance week.

The GMC was removed as a conference member in 1997 and again in 2002 for full inclusion of sexual minorities, once for baptizing a gay man and then for ordaining a gay man.  Pastor Amy dramatically describes in the speech she gave at Princeton how in 1997 the GMC congregation was originally removed from the conference by secret ballot-how Ken (the gay congregant) demanded he be walked out of the church by the conference ministers, and was.  GMC remains strong in welcoming all sexual minorities and honoring all monogamous covenants.   At this point the GMC has had preliminary conversations with other conference leadership about joining the denomination again, but GMC is cautious–they want to make sure that their removal will never happen again.  Doors are closed to the ‘Pastorship’ as a result -though other congregations and their leaders have privately voiced their support, conference and denomination structures are not yet ready to change their policies and confession of faith.  Pastor Amy describes being pastor of GMC like wearing scarlet letters (as in the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel).  When she goes to a Mennonite conference (uninvited of course- she just shows up) everyone knows who she is and either seek her out to argue with her or to privately say they are impressed with GMC.

Pastor Amy says “Religion should not be about a set of rules, religion and faith should be about having questions and feeling free to ask them, to have a sense of wonder about it.”

She went on to say that the Mennonite community can understand the Amish tradition, but the Amish tradition does not allow for questions and that sense of wonder.  She said there is a sense of fear that  marks the Amish tradition and the scripture is translated into rules for purity rather than seeing the value of social justice that Jesus brings to the table.

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