Chris Glaser’s 30-year struggle to answer that question — for himself and for the church

By RICH SHUMATE
Atlanta Magazine/November 1995
(Note: This story won the first place award for feature writing at the 1996 SPJ Green Eyeshade Awards, saluting excellence in journalism in the southeastern United States.)

It was Sunday morning, and from the earliest days of his childhood, Sunday morning was a time set aside for Chris Glaser to stop, separate himself from the day-to-day and trivial concerns of life and give himself over to the message and grace of Jesus Christ. To spend Sundays this way was as much a part of his natural order as eating or breathing, and almost as necessary. And though this morning he was in the middle of a celebratory secular parade and not sitting on the sacred surface of a church pew, he was still about to see the message of Christ become physically manifest.

Or rather, wildly different interpretations of the message of Christ.

As Glaser and the other Gay Pride marches cross Third Street at Peachtree, parishioners at The Lutheran Church of the Redeemer stand behind a folding table set up on the sidewalk on the right side of the street. They hand cups of water to the overheated marchers who have already been out in the midday sun for 45 minutes but are, as of yet, only halfway to Piedmont Park, their destination. In the next block, volunteers from St. Mark United Methodist Church, including the senior minister and his family, carry small cups of water on trays and walk into the fringes of the marching line of gay activists. “Everyone is Welcome at St. Mark” reads the banner draped above the door of the church’s sanctuary.

Directly across from St. Mark, at the church on the left side of the street, there are no welcoming parishioners, not a drop of water. A uniformed guard sits watch, perched inside a white truck with the words “First Baptist Security” stenciled on the side. This year, two other guards and a handful of church elders watch impassively as one of the marchers takes blue chalk, writes “Bigot” on the sidewalk and adds an arrow pointing straight at the towering steeple of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta.

Friends of Glaser who had warned him about the dichotomy of the welcomes he would and wouldn’t receive know that he applies to himself, quite comfortably, both the adjectives “gay” and “Christian.” Indeed, both labels have become so integral to how he reacts to his world and enjoys and lives his life that they have taken on a significance stronger than adjectives, a power more vibrant than a mere label.

So as Glaser stood giving witness as a gay man while watching the Methodists and Lutherans give witness as Christians, what came into his mind is a familiar passage of Scripture: For truly I tell you, whosoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will be no means lose the reward.

“We may not have known we bore any resemblance to Christ,” Glaser would later write, reflecting on the experience. “But these Christians saw Christ in us. Their reward was that we saw Christ in them.”

_______________
In the Old Testament, an ancient psalmist facing uncertain exile cries, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” For people with a Christian spiritual imprint who come to accept their sexual identity as gay, the psalmist’s cry is all too familiar.

To live openly as a gay man or a lesbian is to contradict 2,000 years of church tradition. To live openly as a Christian — a word that gays and lesbians who have felt more preyed upon than prayed upon use as a synonym for oppressor — is to be politically incorrect in a community that values political conformity.

Why cling to an institution that at best doesn’t fully include you and at worst persecutes you? Why push the church to change its time-honored conventions and moral standards to accommodate your reality? Why not find a way to fulfill your spiritual needs that doesn’t conflict with you sexual identity? Why not find a way to fulfill your sexual needs that doesn’t conflict with your spiritual identity?

To be both gay and Christian is, in the eye of ideologies at either end of the debate, to be fully neither. To be both requires gay and lesbian Christians to redefine, or even reinvent, their spirituality. The journey can be painful and scary and last a lifetime. It can also be joyous, a time of spiritual growth and discovery. If you ask a dozen gay and lesbian Christians why they persist on the journey — what sustains them — their replies almost always focus on the joy.

Their belief in Christ and his message may have been challenged, even shaken, but, they say, it still gives them a peace that passes all understanding. They are also comforted by the rituals and fellowship so woven into the fabric of Sunday mornings in the South. They want to live out Christ’s social call by contributing to institutions that feed the homeless and minister to the sick. They need the camaraderie that comes with raising voices in unison with other believers in praise of their almighty God.

“We are all confronted with not knowing,” says Eugene Schoenfeld, a professor emeritus of sociology at Georgia State University, who is currently studying how faith impacts Atlanta’s gay and lesbian Christians. “The church has always provided reassurance of the meaningfulness of that existence and the continuation of that existence. That isn’t any different for gays and lesbians.”

_______________
As he was growing up a devout Baptist in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Chris Glaser, now 45 and a Yale-educated writer and theologian, couldn’t always see Christ in himself or believe others would see Christ in him. In his early teens, he felt a growing attraction to men — and with it a growing terror. Homosexuality contradicted everything he had been told about who God was and what he would accept.

“At first, I believed it was a sin or a sickness. And I would pray to God to change. I would repent, confess my sins. Sometimes I would pray several times a day. I prayed to God that I would grow out of it. But I didn’t.”

It was during this time that the volunteer youth minister in Glaser’s church was forced to resign. Glaser and his family had been friends with the man, had invited him into their home. But when the church’s leadership found out the youth minister was gay, he was asked to leave. It didn’t matter that the man vowed he was celibate and fully agreed with the church’s teaching that homosexuality was a sin.

The rumors that were swirling through the church coincided with a scheduled field trip to Disneyland. Despite her friendship with the minister, Glaser’s mother pulled him aside and admonished him that while at Disneyland, he was not to go into the restroom with the older man.

As Glaser had begun to feel his true sexual identity emerge, he had also begun to experience a call from God to the ministry. So as he watched the life of his friend, the only gay minister he knew, being destroyed, Glaser grew more and more frightened.

“I felt like the fearful reaction that the people in the church were demonstrating toward this man was the same reaction they would have toward me, if they knew who I really was.”

_______________
If the church of Glaser’s youth helped accentuate his terror, his overriding belief in God’s wisdom and mercy delivered him from it.

“As a child, I had been taught that I could talk to God about anything and everything. And so even those things I couldn’t talk about with my parents or a minister or a psychiatrist, I could speak about with God. And it really was the beginning of my prayer life because I spent a lot of time talking to God about my feelings and about my doubts and my loves.”

As he read the Bible, Glaser began to identify with its outcasts, those characters who were treated badly and persecuted not because they were sinful or evil but because they were different or sought God differently. Jesus himself fit into that category. And the discovery that he could see himself in the Bible’s mirror convinced Glaser that no matter what he was, he was known by God.

It was that sense of acceptance that was his security blanket even during those times when he was having trouble accepting himself.

When Glaser got to college, he left the Baptist Church and became a Presbyterian. Its traditions, he felt, were less dogmatic, more receptive to the value of personal introspection and possibility of debate and dissent.

College was also when he first fell in love with a man. He was Glaser’s best friend, completely heterosexual, and no romantic or physical relationship developed from it. Glaser never even told him how he felt. But the experience was transforming and profound, especially on a spiritual plane.

“I suddenly realized that my sexual orientation was an ability to love. And since I believe all ability to love ultimately comes from God, I came to believe this was a gift from God. I recognized that my feelings for him were really sacred.”

After finishing college, Glaser entered the Yale University Divinity School in 1973. Though at the time the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) didn’t explicitly ban the ordination of gays and lesbians, Glaser knew that under church rules a congregation would have to hire him before he could be ordained. Unless he covered up his sexual identity, chances were slim that any congregation would want him. But this obstacle didn’t diminish the call he felt from God. Because he had suffered and struggled with his own identity, he was convinced he could empathize with the suffering of others and minister to them, especially other gay men and lesbians.

So Glaser decided to go to New Haven anyway, telling himself that it was purely for theological study, not necessarily in pursuit of a pulpit. But he didn’t disclose his sexual identity to members of a committee set up by his home presbytery in California to monitor his work at Yale.

_______________
Homosexuality has traditionally be such a taboo subject that gay and lesbian Christians, even those who grew up in conservative churches in the Bible Belt, don’t remember many fire-and-brimstone sermons on the subject. That’s not to say that they didn’t know the church disapproved mightily. Rather, the notion that homosexuality was an abomination was so unchallenged that preachers says little need for reinforcement.

But in June 1969, four years before Glaser started at Yale, an event occurred that began to subtly alter the position of gay people in society. Patrons at the Stonewall In, a gay bay in New York City, rioted after a police raid. The uprising was the seminal event of the modern gay rights movement, and it is commemorated every June in parades in Atlanta and around the country.

The dialogue touched off by Stonewall about the place of gays and lesbians in American life began to seep into churches and seminaries. The Rev. Elder Troy Perry, who a year before the riots had started an outreach ministry to gays called the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, came to the Yale University Divinity School to give a lecture that Glaser helped arrange.

As part of his work at the seminary, Glaser had been involved in a ministry directed toward the gay and lesbian community. What he was doing had begun to draw attention, and bringing in Troy Perry would no doubt draw even more.

When he returned to California after his first year at Yale, the committee charged with overseeing his education called Glaser in for a visit. They asked a series of questions about his ministry. Then one of them finally asked the question. Glaser told them the truth. He had decided he wouldn’t pursue ordination at the expense of honesty.

Even though the possibility of Glaser becoming a minister was now remote, and the committee members’ reaction to his admission was mostly negative, they nonetheless decided to let Glaser complete his studies at Yale. He was thus one of a handful of openly gay people who became eligible for ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in the mid-1970s, touching off a fierce debate about what the church should do with them. In 1978, the General Assembly, the Presbyterians’ governing body, voted to formally bar gays and lesbians from ordination as either ministers or elders. But far from settling the issue, the vote hasn’t even slowed down the arguing.

Today, the debate goes beyond ordination, addressing the broader issue of how far the church should go in including gays and lesbians equally in every aspect of church life. And no item in this discussion about equality generates more raw emotion than the argument over whether the church should recognize committed relationships between two people of the same gender.

_______________
On a sunny Sunday afternoon last October, family and friends filled the pews in the Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church, a small, gray stone structure in southeast Atlanta, where Chris Glaser and Mark King, 34, were to formalize their longtime commitment to each other. Glaser had met King, an AIDS educator and activist who grew up in Louisiana, while both were living in Los Angeles.

In the Presbyterian tradition, marriage is an occasion not only to join two lives but also to worship God. Glaser and King wanted a church setting to lend full reverence and ceremony to their worship.

Facing them as they came up the aisle were two Presbyterian ministers: the Rev. Howard Warren, from Indianapolis, who is gay, having stated his sexual identity after decades in the pulpit, and the Rev. Peter Denlea, then the church’s pastor, who is heterosexual. As Denlea stood there waiting to preside at the covenant ceremony he had helped design, he was well aware that he had climbed way out on a limb.

Since his arrival at Ormewood Park in 1989, Denlea’s watchwords had been full fellowship. This was to be a community of believers where all could come together and participate equally and fully in all the parish had to offer. That included black people, homeless people and gay people. It was a message that made some longtime members angry enough to launch a campaign to get rid of him. An imposing former Navy commander and father of five who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn, Denlea, 61, had survived 50 air combat missions in Vietnam. His message to his critics was succinct: Don’t you dare get between me and the people to whom I need to preach the Gospel.

But when Glaser called and asked Denlea if he could use the sanctuary to formally join his life with King’s, Denlea flinched. He swallowed hard. The church’s elders had previously agreed to let him bless same-sex unions performed outside the church. But to do it right there in the sanctuary? The space where one whispers out of respect for its sacredness?

“Damn it, it was either full fellowship or it wasn’t,” says Denlea. The elders agreed, unanimously.

Glaser and King later put an announcement about their ceremony in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a notice which included both the location of the service and the fact that Denlea presided.

The elders at Midway Presbyterian Church in DeKalb County read the item and decided that this just went too far. They formally petitioned the Presbyterian Church’s regional governing body, the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta, asking that Denlea be disciplined and Ormewood Park’s elders be counseled “regarding their mission as spiritual leaders.”

_______________
When the elders at Midway looked at the totality of the Bible’s teachings, they were — and are — convinced that King and Glaser, with Denlea’s help, were acting contrary to Scripture.

“We have to have something to turn to and find out what we believe. We have to have a home base,” says the Rev. Ronald Hieber, the pastor of Midway Presbyterian, which, though inside the Perimeter and just east of Decatur, sits in an isolated enclave with an almost rural feel.

At Midway, home base is the Bible. Sitting around a table in an office just off the parish hall, Hieber and a group of elders say they are not hateful people, not spiteful or intolerant. They are not archconservatives, ascribing inerrancy to the Bible’s every word. But they firmly believe that the ceremony Denlea performed went against the Bible’s total teaching.

“And we don’t see ourselves jousting at windmills,” says Ralph Murchison, one of the elders who drafted the overture to the presbytery (which, after an emotional debate, was defeated). “We don’t see ourselves as alone.”

And they are not. In a world of astonishing change, in an era when sexual roles and the definition of family have blurred nearly beyond recognition, the church has stood for many as a bastion of comfort and continuity. And though in the last 30 years churches have been faced with issues such as civil rights, women’s rights, abortion, homelessness, drug abuse, contraception, violence, the morality of the nuclear arms race and the explosions of divorce and illegitimacy, fully including gays and lesbians is a Rubicon that seems especially wide and tumultuous.

This is a frontier many in the pews would just as soon not explore. But the Chris Glasers of the world prod them on — not because they want to be revolutionaries but because they want to be Christians.

For Glaser, with each year that goes by, the realization grows that he may never be ordained. He has written four books about the gay Christian experience, including The Word Is Out: The Bible Reclaimed for Lesbians and Gay Men, and he travels the country lecturing and preaching. His ministry without ordination brings him more notice than he would receive laboring as a minister in a local parish, typing the church bulletin and baptizing babies. But he still wants the authority and respect that comes with being ordained. He wants to be part of a church where the level of one’s participation is shaped only by talent and desire and God’s call.

And in the face of everything he’s gone through in the last 30 years, Glaser has gotten philosophical about the struggle. He simply paraphrases theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “Anything worth committing your life to requires more than a lifetime to achieve.”