I can’t promise this will be home forever, but it’s home for right now.
I say it every time I move into a new apartment, a new job, a new city, a new part of the country. But it only applies to one faith tradition.
I spent most of my 20s wrestling with belonging in my home denomination, the United Methodist Church. It isn’t easy being the only young adult, or one of few. Whether at a famously Baptist university or the famously Baptist state of Alabama or the famously evangelical Wheaton, Illinois, I have not been short on opportunities to find a home elsewhere. I’ve tried charismatic and nondenominational and Episcopal and United Church of Christ and emerging-style contemplative neo-liturgical. Mega and micro, worship rock bands with professional stage lighting and giant gold-piped organs, rented warehouses and historic cathedrals, globally famous and nearly unheard of to any even in their own town. In some, I only needed one visit to know it wasn’t for me. In others, I stayed for years because I was loved and seen, making theological compromises for the feeling of family and belonging I couldn’t get as the odd single childless young adult while trying UMC after UMC of middle-aged married parents and retirees.
Every so often, someone obligated to be at a church for one reason or another, simply going through the motions to be seen there, would ask why I came to church if I didn’t have to. After all, I didn’t have a kid (for the free childcare) or a husband (who needed to be there for political or business networking). And I certainly wouldn’t have any luck finding a single man my age if I was there to date!
I didn’t know how to answer their question with “Jesus” without it sounding like a Sunday school answer from a child.
But it’s more than just Jesus, who I found at the other churches and in the sanctuary of trees in city parks and serving spaghetti from the kitchen of the homeless shelter. It’s the specific way of understanding Jesus, and everything else about Christianity, that keeps me coming back to the UMC, over and over. In my decade of wandering through evangelicalism, I began to encounter a world I’d only vaguely heard of growing up and had little defense against. I knew things experts and authority figures were saying sounded wrong, but I couldn’t always articulate why. And the power dynamics were never in my favor, personally or professionally, in these encounters. It wasn’t in my Methodist vocabulary to think in terms of sola scriptura and predestination, or spiritual warfare and manifesting healing, or asking Jesus into one’s heart and doubting one’s salvation. I admired how the wide varieties of evangelicals I encountered had faith expressions that actually seemed to matter in their lives and how they viewed God as real, rather than a formality for the sake of social drama, but this God wasn’t the one I knew.
Didn’t everyone know that God is patient, kind, gentle, good, loving, and just? My pangender social-gospel Servant-King of diversity, equity, and inclusion didn’t seem to square with the conservatives who believed in a literal hell and an angry God who punishes those who violate his very rigid will. They read the Bible as a “clear” instruction manual instead of a complex, multi-genre, ancient, imperfectly translated love letter. I was repulsed by what I witnessed: power-worshiping and arrogance as well as this greedy, selfish, sadistic, exclusionary, hyper-masculine false God I was encouraged to obey—or else. But I found myself in a losing battle, surrounded by a conservative Christian culture where my brand of liberal Methodism had dwindling influence, if any, and White nationalist patriarchy was on the rise. If there was no home for me in the aging country club of the UMC, there certainly wasn’t any in this world of purity culture and gender roles.
Instead, I fell in love with the passionate faith of my heritage through the journals of John Wesley and the stories of Methodist women who refused to be silenced, whether by him or anyone who came after. I took note of John’s explorations of various faith expressions of his time and followed in his footsteps by letting my own faith evolve as I read Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessey, Brene Brown, Barbara Brown Taylor, and dozens of other books and blogs. I learned to seek God in therapy, “secular” music, and more inclusive theologies of the marginalized, whether I was part of those marginalized groups or not. I found myself impatient with the post-evangelicals and their fear of hell, hoping they could join in the Christian-universalist social gospel where all belonged and everything was made new in the light of God’s truth and love. But I was especially impatient with newcomers to the Jesus feminism (as Sarah Bessey phrases it) that I had been championing since my girl-power ’90s childhood. I couldn’t imagine a nonfeminist faith, and I wanted to shout to everyone my dreams of what the church of my heritage could be, if only we had the critical mass of impassioned Gen Xers and millennials to bring it back to its original fire. (Older Methodists told me often that this all sounded great, but if I wanted this kind of church to exist, I’d have to start it myself.)
In my heart, I was queer affirming as well and subtly tried to move the needle in any room I could fight my way into, though it took the entire decade to get to a safe place to come out as queer myself. This was, of course, inconvenient timing. The shock of the 2016 presidential election followed by the heartbreak of the 2019 UMC General Conference solidified that my queer Christian identity would not be one of ease, inside my home denomination or out of it.
Complicated.
That’s my word for 2023. Perhaps the first time I’ve set a “word of the year” and actually remembered it past February. Complicated, as in “letting myself be.” And being a queer Methodist is certainly complicated. Do we stay? Is there anything here worth breathing new life into? Do we go? Where else would feel like home?
My answer came at the end of 2019 when I found a new variety of UMC I hadn’t encountered in my wandering yet: the warmth of California. Even now in my mid-30s, I’m well below the average age. But I’m not alone, in age demographic or beliefs or my dream for what the UMC can be. These church people, the Cal-Pac conference, and most of the West Coast are feeling more and more like home every time they state they are not only affirming but willing to fight for the queer community to have a place to belong there. Every time it’s taken for granted that of course women can lead; we’re not in the Dark Ages. Every time we listen and change and grow toward racial reconciliation, decolonization, and welcoming the immigrant and refugee. Every time we wrestle our egos into empathy and humility. Grace upon grace, constantly failing to get it right and yet trying again tomorrow.
There is no perfect church. There is no finished church. There is no easy fix for all that has been broken: the harm done, the doors slammed, the hate propagandized, the abuses covered up, the contracts violated, the legal and financial and spiritual divorces, the hearts aching and families ripped apart, the names called, lies spoken, the history we’d rather forget and the present we’re at war over and the future that looks a lot like grief.
But when I sing the hymns of my childhood, say the same communion liturgy I’ve had memorized all my life, see another baptism the way I was baptized at two months old and confirmations the way I was confirmed at 12, and welcome in new members across generations, I remember why this is home. The Advent wreath and Ash Wednesday cross. The cookouts and the choirs and the little tithes coming together to make a big tangible difference in the lives of real people we minister to. The hugs and handshakes that turn into dinners and hangouts where diverse ages, backgrounds, and orientations are met with honor and appreciation instead of hostile tension. The hearts that are fully engaged with putting their faith into action, whether that’s knitting prayer blankets or delivering supplies to the homeless or distributing free lunches or showing up to defend queer people at city council meetings or trans kids at school boards. The theology that never stops speaking grace, peace, and justice. The hope that doesn’t sugarcoat or promise what it can’t fulfill. The word love, love, love repeated in our sermons, curricula, songs, attitudes, and actions until all is made whole.
I can’t promise the UMC is going to be home forever, for you or for me. But in present tense, we can work on making it a safe, healthy, better home for all. And right now, today, I have what I need for that to be enough.
Jenna DeWitt
Jenna DeWitt (she/her) is an editor, resource curator, and sapphic aromantic asexual Methodist. She lives in sunny Southern California. Jenna earned a bachelor of arts in news-editorial journalism from Baylor University and has over a decade of experience working on Christian magazines. You can find more of her work for queer inclusion and education, including resource lists, essays, poetry, and podcast episodes, at InvisibleCakeSociety.com.
Yet Alive 