Our Proud Role in LGBTQ+ Liberation

Seventh Sunday of Easter ● June 1, 2025

Rev. Jeff Wells © 2025

Readings: Isaiah 61:1-4 & Acts 10:9-16, 27-28, 33-36 (adapted from The Inclusive Bible)

The texts of the readings are in the worship bulletin linked here.

Watch the worship video recording on the Church of the Village YouTube channel here.

Over the 10 years I have been at the Church of the Village, we have talked and written a lot about the history of LGBTQ+ advocacy and inclusion in the Washington Square and Metropolitan-Duane United Methodist Churches – two of our predecessor congregations – but we have not focused as much attention on the significant role of the Church of the Village itself in advocating for full LGBTQ+ inclusion, ordination, and same-sex marriage in the New York Annual Conference and the UMC denomination as a whole. So, I want to focus today on that aspect of who we are and help us remember our part in this long, eventful, and proud struggle.

From the time I was in college in the late 1970s, I have been active in the struggle for LGBTQ+ liberation. When I graduated from seminary in 2005, I was immediately commissioned a provisional elder and appointed to Community United Methodist Church in Massapequa, Long Island, where I served for ten years. Early on, I became involved with Methodists in New Directions – also known as MIND – the LGBT advocacy group in the New York Annual Conference. With MIND’s support and guidance, I began a ten-year journey of patient preaching, teaching, individual conversations, group forums, church-wide meetings, and more. After much labor, I helped the Massapequa congregation take the vote to become fully welcoming to LGBTQ+ persons and to sign the Covenant of Conscience – a program created and promoted by MIND. In signing the Covenant, the congregation committed itself to performing same-sex weddings, supporting their pastor if they got in trouble for doing such weddings, supporting the ordination of LGBT persons, and being open to accepting an LGBTQ+ pastor. That vote occurred in May 2015 – one month before I took over as the lead pastor of the Church of the Village.

COTV has been a part of the Reconciling Ministries Network in the UMC for the whole of its 20-year existence. However, when I arrived in July 2015, the church was not yet allowing same-sex unions or wedding ceremonies in the church building. But very soon after I arrived, Micah Gary and John Fryer approached me about presiding at their wedding in the sanctuary. So, I initiated conversations with our Vision & Ministry Council and other leaders. I also had many individual conversations with members who I thought might be uncomfortable with taking that step. And by September, we felt confident about adopting the Covenant of Conscience and Micah and John had a fabulous wedding in this sanctuary in December 2015.

I had joined the MIND Steering Committee in 2014, the year before I came to the Church of the Village. I served for 6 years. Pastor Vicki Flippin, then COTV’s associate pastor, was already on the MIND Steering Committee when I arrived. Althea Spencer-Miller, a COTV Minister in Residence, had also joined the steering committee. So, for at least two years, four of the sixteen members of the MIND Steering Committee were affiliated with the Church of the Village. In addition, many COTV members were participating in MIND organizing meetings and supporting MIND legislation and activities at Annual Conferences. 

Our own Jorge Lockward got involved in the LGBT inclusion movement in the UMC in 2000, the same year the Reconciling Ministries Network was formed. In 2006, he was one of the founders of Methodists in New Directions and has remained a strong and active supporter ever since. In my research for this message, I discovered that Alfida Figueroa served on the MIND Steering Committee back around 2010, when she was a member of another UM church. 

I can say confidently that in all the years MIND and other organizations have been presenting pro-LGBTQ inclusion petitions and carrying out other actions, the COTV delegates to New York Annual Conference sessions each June have been speaking for, voting for, and supporting them. Moreover, Jorge and Katie Reimer served on the General Conference delegation in 2019. And they served again last year when the General Conference voted to remove all of the terrible anti-LGBTQ language, rules, and policies from the UMC Book of Discipline. So, they represented COTV’s voice, our witness, and our love at the General church level.

The work of Methodists in New Directions, that the Church of the Village has staunchly supported, has been very effective and impactful in the New York Conference and beyond. I need to honor Dorothee Benz, who was the founding chair of MIND and served in that and other leadership capacities for 15 years. She helped us develop one of MIND’S fundamental principles that “a collective refusal to obey unjust rules was not only possible but necessary.” Let me share just a few examples of that. 

In 2011, MIND promoted a campaign called “We do! Methodists Living Marriage Equality,” in which UMC clergy committed to providing wedding ceremonies to all members, regardless of sexual orientation. Dozens of clergy in the New York Conference risked their ordination and signed the pledge.  

In 2014, in MIND’s “We Did” campaign, numerous NY Conference clergy wrote and published stories about having done same-sex weddings. 

In the meantime, MIND and others brought legislation to the floor of every Annual Conference session with the goal of undermining the homophobic and Transphobic rule of the UMC. In each successive year, the majorities voting in favor kept growing, so that they passed overwhelmingly. And more and more individuals and churches signed the Covenant of Conscience. All of this put tremendous pressure on NY Conference Bishops to try to appease or accommodate MIND. But MIND did not let up. And neither did we in COTV.  

MIND also created a “Welcoming Churches” program to guide and assist groups that wanted to move their congregations toward signing the Covenant of Conscience and then helping them to live into those commitments. I am very proud to have helped create and lead that program.

MIND also worked openly and behind the scenes to promote the commissioning and ordination of LGBTQ+ candidates – undermining the explicit prohibition the denomination had passed in 1984. With a huge amount of organizing and individual conversations, MIND succeeded in getting the Board of Ordained Ministry in the NY Conference to vote and publicly declare that it would not consider a candidate’s sexual orientation in determining their fitness for ordination. In a very short time, the first openly queer candidates were approved for commissioning by the Board. The Conference Clergy Session endorsed the Board’s recommendations, and the Bishop agreed to commission them. This was a huge victory and we were a part of it.

MIND’s 2019 updated preamble to the Covenant of Conscience states: 

“Passing resolutions is not enough. In our fourth decade of our opposition to church doctrine and policy, we are beginning to find ways to bring the words of inclusion off the page and into the lives of God’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender children.”

The Church of the Village’s direct role in MIND and its broad support and lived example of radical inclusion have contributed greatly to the success of all of these efforts. 

Why does all of this matter? Why does it matter if the UMC is inclusive? It matters because people’s lives are at stake. So, we cannot stop. We have to keep going, keep working, keep fighting for justice and liberation. It is not nearly enough to have the offensive language and rules stripped from the Book of Discipline. There are still many congregations in the New York Conference and the UMC as a whole that still avoid having the conversation about publicly declaring themselves and becoming welcoming churches. There are still far too many places in the UMC where LGBTQ+ folks do not feel cherished or even welcomed.

The journey toward love and liberation for LGBTQ+ siblings has been a difficult and often frustrating struggle. Yet, at the NY Annual Conference level, we kept moving forward, kept declaring we were going to live into the reality of full inclusion, regardless of the rules or the consequences. And members and leaders of the Church of the Village were a big part of those efforts and successes. 

Our congregation also took a direct stand within the NY Conference against the historical injustice that had been perpetrated against Rev. Ed Egan and Rev. Paul Abels, who were forced to retire early from pastoral ministry because they were Gay. COTV, with the support of  MIND, the Queer Clergy Caucus, and the Board of Church and Society, initiated and submitted a petition to the June 2017 Annual Conference session to address this injustice. That legislation passed overwhelmingly. Toward the end of that month, COTV held a well-attended event to remember and celebrate Egan’s and Abels’ courageous ministry. 

Moreover, COTV has had an ongoing public ministry and witness that has included building relationships with the LGBT Center, the Callen-Lorde Health Center, and PFLAG. We also have an important relationship with the LGBT Religious Archives Network, which features both Ed Egan and Paul Abels on its website. 

The Church of the Village is recognized for its loving advocacy on the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project website. And, of course, we devote a whole month to Pride in worship each June. We join in the Queer Liberation March each year on Pride Sunday, as well as open our doors to provide hospitality to Pride marchers.

In 2017, we also co-sponsored and hosted the Oscar Wilde Temple art exhibit for four months. The celebrations of the 45th and 50th anniversaries of PFLAG were hosted by COTV. And when a young Trans man, Sam Nordquist, was brutally murdered in upstate New York, PFLAG and the New Pride Agenda asked COTV to host the vigil in February this year.

Being part of the long struggle for LGBTQ+ liberation, radical inclusion, and love has been one of the most meaningful aspects of my 20 years in ministry – and one I am very proud of. I thank God for the Church of the Village and – other congregations like it – which have served as beacons of light and hope. COTV and churches like St. Paul & St. Andrew UMC, Asbury-Crestwood UMC, Park Slope UMC, and others have served as models for other congregations wanting to move toward full inclusion. It is not just a few leaders who have made that happen – every member of COTV plays a role by actively participating in and building up this beautiful, diverse, and radically inclusive congregation to serve as an extravagantly welcoming space for our own members and a light and hope for others.

Beloved, as the passage from Isaiah says, “the Spirit of God is upon us” – and it has been for the entire existence of the Church of the Village. We do this work imperfectly, but we do our best to listen to the beckoning and inspiration of God. Like Peter, our congregation long ago discerned the Spirit of God telling us, “Do not call anything profane that God has declared clean” – “do not to call any person or group of persons unclean or impure.” For 20 years, we have heard and taken to heart the message from God through Jesus to cherish and value everyone for just who they are. We continue to live out the reality of radical inclusivity by welcoming everyone – Trans, non-binary, gender expansive, gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, queer – and even straight and cis-gender folks. The Church of the Village is how it demonstrates to the world one example of how to live together in love. While I won’t be with you to create it, I am excited to see what’s next for COTV in the long arc toward love and liberation.