Church Defied as Three Gays Are Ordained

Twenty years ago, the Simi Valley families of Pastor Lyle Miller and Dale and Betty Johnson were close. They camped and spent vacations together, and by 1973, Miller had started young Jeff Johnson toward confirmation at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church.

But as much as it personally pains him because of past ties, Miller--now a bishop presiding over Lutheran churches in Northern California--is refusing to ordain seminary graduate Jeff Johnson, 27, to the ministry.

And the bishop says he will discipline two San Francisco congregations that Saturday afternoon defied the 5.3-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America by ordaining Johnson, who is gay, and two lesbians, Ruth Frost, 42, and Phyllis Zillhart, 32.

The three, ordained by nearly 40 sympathetic pastors here, joined a growing number of gay and lesbian aspirants for the clerical collar who believe they should be open about their sexual preferences and not have to swear to celibacy. But, like the other major denominations, their church follows a centuries-old ban against ordaining practicing homosexual clergy.

The dilemma is worsening, and the San Francisco congregations’ decision to risk expulsion from the denomination over the issue is a defiant test of church discipline. The conflict may set the tone for a wider, bitter struggle that is spreading through much of mainline American religion over the acceptance of gay ministers.

Seven Lutheran churches in Seattle, Chicago and other cities were linked by telephone to the two-hour ordination ceremony at the packed, 750-seat St. Paulus Church in San Francisco. The otherwise traditional service included an all-male drum corps, a male dancer in leotards and the Lord’s Prayer addressed to “Mother, Father” in heaven.

After vowing faithfulness to Scripture and church creeds, and to support gay and lesbian rights, “relationships and marriages,” the three were proclaimed to be Christian clergy by Lutheran minister Lucy Kolin of Pacifica. Cheers, applause and accompanying drumbeats resounded through the Gothic-style church for nearly two minutes.

“When a major denomination does this, it’s a breakthrough. . . . It’s an enormous step,” said Southern California Episcopal author Malcolm Boyd, a pioneering gay priest who acknowledged his life style in 1976.

Ordinations like the ones in San Francisco, Boyd believes, will happen “more and more often in neighborhood churches . . . until it will gradually become a non-issue. It will begin at the bottom instead of the top.”

Those like Boyd who favor the ordination of gays say a homosexual life style is a valid option for sincere Christians and that, just as church attitudes toward the rights of minorities and women have changed during recent years, attitudes toward homosexuality are also beginning to change. If this shift doesn’t take place, they argue, the spiritual leadership of the church will be impoverished.

Although no exact figures are available, religion experts agree that there are many “closet” homosexual ministers in the Protestant and Roman Catholic faiths.

Kim Byham, president of Integrity, the national organization for gay and lesbian Episcopalians, said that since 1977--when lesbian Ellen Barrett was ordained in a highly publicized service in the Diocese of New York--”an average of at least five open, non-celibate lesbians or gays have been ordained every year in (Episcopal) dioceses from coast to coast.”

Saturday’s ordinations follow one last month by maverick Episcopal Bishop John Spong in Newark, N.J., who ordained J. Robert Williams, 34, a gay man with a male mate. Spong called the ordination “a step of honesty and integrity” for the church.

But 14 Episcopal bishops from nine Western states were among those who strongly denounced Spong’s actions. In a statement, the Western bishops said Williams’ ordination had led “toward more polarity” rather than his apparent intention to “force dialogue.”

“We recommend that Bishop Spong make an apology to the church or else that his actions be censured so that their inappropriateness be known,” said the statement, which included the signature of Los Angeles Bishop Frederick H. Borsch.

This morning in San Francisco, Johnson is scheduled to be installed as a minister on the staff at First United Lutheran Church and the two women from Minnesota, the heartland of American Lutheranism, will be installed as ministers at St. Francis Lutheran Church.

The two churches, both with heterosexual senior pastors and one with no known homosexual congregants, have assigned the three to a joint ministry to the gay and lesbian community. According to Johnson, their ministry will include blessing same-sex relationships.

The churches admit that their actions violate the denomination’s constitution, but their pastors contend that Lutheran tradition allows for such extraordinary steps. A letter supporting the ordinations from widely respected scholar Krister Stendahl, retired Lutheran archbishop of Stockholm, was read at the ordination ceremony.

The Rev. Carter Heyward, a lesbian activist and professor at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., delivered a sermon that contrasted, in her words, a fearful society and church hierarchy with “erotically empowered gay men and lesbians” who have had “the audacity to hold onto the church.”

Heyward herself was ordained a priest in a disputed 1974 ceremony with 10 other women two years before the Episcopal Church ended its ban on female priests. Their ordinations were then affirmed as valid. Only later did Heyward talk publicly about her lesbian preferences.

Soon after the installations, Bishop Miller said his office will issue charges against the two churches, perhaps leading to their dismissal from the nation’s largest Lutheran body.

The San Francisco ordinations, said the Evangelical Lutheran Church’s ranking bishop, Herbert W. Chilstrom, “undermine the unity” of the church.

Added Miller: Though some think “homosexuality is part of the rainbow variety of God’s creation, the ELCA does not. The issue is the nature of the church; we are not a church of individual congregations, but a national church.”

Ordinations of homosexuals will not quickly change the minds of religious Americans, the majority of whom oppose the idea of homosexual ministers, several prominent religious analysts said. “The vast majority of the laity and local pastors aren’t ready for it,” said Martin Marty of Chicago, a Lutheran scholar and author, citing recent surveys.

A scientific national poll of Presbyterians shows that three-fourths of the members and two-thirds of the pastors of the mainline denomination disapprove of the “ordination to the Christian ministry of a person who engages in homosexual activities.”

Marty said that, while “the vast majority of serious Christian people today are close to and sympathetic toward someone in their family, circle of friends or church who is gay,” they are not ready to endorse ordained leadership for homosexuals.

“The ministry is supposed to be an exemplary way of life, and they can’t make the move to say the homosexual life style is an exemplary model,” Marty explained in an interview.

The homosexual ordination controversy is rooted in biblical and historical tradition: The Old Testament book of Leviticus says a man should not “lie with a man as a woman” and prescribes a death penalty for offenders. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul appears to condemn homosexual behavior as a sin.

Proponents of homosexual ordination, however, argue that many harsh biblical strictures were conditioned by a bygone culture and are not followed today. The central biblical message is that God’s love is given to all people, they say.

Contending that homosexual orientation is not a matter of choice--a view still lacking a consensus--ordination proponents say that a homosexual cleric who has a committed, same-sex relationship is no less a role model for integrity and faith than a divorced heterosexual minister with impeccable credentials.

But the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus of New York, an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America minister noted for his conservative commentary on American religion, contends that homosexuality is an aberration. And Neuhaus said he thinks the drive by gay activists for acceptance as clergy will fail even as it “simmers” during the 1990s.

“Once the gay activists’ demands that the church abandon its biblical doctrine are repulsed, then I think things will settle down,” said Neuhaus, director of the Institute on Religion in Public Life.

One consequence of the current developments, he said, may be that most bishops and church-goers, who once turned a blind eye to gay seminarians and pastors, feel the situation can no longer be ignored. “Now, all of sudden it is not something that can be passively tolerated when it becomes militantly active,” he said.

“In terms of mainline, or old-line, churches, we are probably seeing the last spasms by people” who see they are not going to sway fellow church members, he said in an interview.

The Rev. Troy Perry, founder and president of a 45,000-member denomination of churches with predominantly homosexual memberships, disagrees.

“Lutheran and other churches are going to be faced with ordinations in defiance of church rules,” said Perry from the Hollywood office of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches. “The issue will not go away.”

Perry, a one-time Pentecostal minister, started the first gay congregation in Huntington Park in 1968 and soon founded branch churches around the country. His group became a haven for homosexual Christian clergy and seminary graduates who knew they would face problems in Establishment denominations.

“Today we accept about 40% of our clergy from outside our denomination, and 60% are trained by our own seminary,” Perry said.

The Episcopal, Presbyterian (USA) and United Methodist denominations have policies prohibiting ordination of practicing homosexuals. But they are also studying sexuality issues in the church and have extended full church membership rights to homosexuals.

No Methodist or Presbyterian units so far have overtly defied denominational sanctions against gay ordination, spokesmen said. Complaints were filed in 1986 against the Rev. Julian Rush of Denver, an acknowledged homosexual United Methodist minister. But he refused to answer questions about his sexual practices, essentially sidestepping the issue and technically remaining within church rules.

Several denominations have no explicit, national regulations on gay ordination. Notably, the United Church of Christ, which says it has ordained 10 acknowledged active homosexuals since 1980, leaves the matter up to its regional units. Homosexual orientation is itself no barrier to ordination, and information about behavior patterns is “neither asked nor given,” said Evan Golder, a UCC spokesman.

William R. Johnson, formerly of North Hollywood, was ordained in the United Church of Christ in San Carlos in 1972 and is generally recognized as the first professed non-celibate homosexual to be ordained in a mainline denomination.

Meanwhile, the 173,000-member Unitarian Universalist Assn., which does not identify itself as a Christian church, ordained its first self-proclaimed active homosexual minister in 1979 and now has about 50 among 950 clergy, said the church’s director of gay-lesbian concerns.

Roman Catholic teaching holds that while all homosexual acts are sinful, homosexual orientation is not. But a widely quoted Vatican decree issued in 1986 warned that homosexual inclination tends “toward an intrinsic moral evil” that must be considered “an objective disorder.”

It is estimated in various religious studies that between 10% and 50% of Roman Catholic clergy are homosexual, and half of those homosexual priests are believed to be sexually active. Between 1981 and 1985, about 5% of all candidates accepted into men’s Catholic communities identified themselves to the church as homosexual. John Dart reported from San Francisco and Russell Chandler from Los Angeles.