c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) What is most remarkable about the Rev. Irene Elizabeth Stroud is her Christian response to the church that has discarded her.

“I love the Methodist church,” she told me Tuesday (Nov. 1), only a day after the United Methodist Church’s Judicial Council defrocked her because she is involved in a lesbian relationship. “Some have urged me to change denominations, to become a minister in a church that accepts gays and lesbians, but I was born into this faith. God makes a way.”

Since 1999, Stroud has been an associate minister at First United Methodist Church of Germantown in Philadelphia. She has been especially involved with the church’s young people, a predictable career trajectory for the little girl who grew up talking to God and Jesus about whatever was on her mind. She wrestled the demons of doubt that torment young adults, but Jesus won her heart, she said, because he kept on knocking.

“Each time, Jesus showed up, a living presence on the wrong side of the door where he had no reason to be,” she preached on April 27, 2003.

In that same sermon, she told her congregation she was gay and in a loving relationship with Chris Paige, her partner of nearly three years.

“Because of my relationship with her, I am a better, more faithful Christian,” Stroud told them. “I am deeply grateful to her for the daily practice in loving and being loved, and forgiving and being forgiven, that constantly deepen who I am as a person of faith.”

Stroud said she came out to her congregation because she could not fully embrace her faith if she kept such an important part of her life cloaked in darkness. She warned them that her public announcement might lead the larger church to condemn her, but she cautioned the congregation against looking for “an enemy to fight.”

By staying calm and breaking bread together, she said, “we’ll notice the risen Christ breaking into the midst of the fear and concern and anger, bringing hope and joy … right where we are.”

Stroud was right to warn her congregation. The local bishop filed a complaint against her last year. The church’s lower court stripped her of her credentials as minister. Her home church immediately rehired her as a lay minister, but she can no longer perform baptisms or celebrate Communion.

That anyone could declare this woman a threat to any church is enough to break a Christian’s heart. Stroud’s voice was low and flat, like someone too stunned by grief to know its name.

“I don’t think this will fully hit me until I’m a few months down the road,” she said. “I am tired, I am worn out. A form of ministry I love may never be available to me again. No matter what else I do now, no matter how many I try to help, I’m always going to be the lesbian minister who was defrocked.”

My own prayer for this 35-year-old minister is that she gives herself the time to grieve and then returns to a public who desperately needs to know her. She continues to love those who scorn her, and it is that embrace of Christ’s teachings that illuminates her every step in the walk of faith. Her potential to lead has never been greater.

She was a guest pastor this year to a Missouri church where an angry man in the congregation demanded to know how she could defend homosexuality in light of the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

“I told him I would tell him what I thought about those passages if he was truly interested in hearing it,” she said.

He said he would listen.

“Sodom and Gomorrah was a story of strangers and guests being threatened with gang rape, which the Bible condemned and I would also condemn,” she said. “The way I read the Bible, it condemns many sexual behaviors that I would also condemn, like cult prostitution and sexual abuse of children.”

She continued.

“I don’t think the Bible said anything about the kind of relationship I have with my partner: a mutually respectful, loving, committed relationship between two adults of the same gender.”

She held her breath and waited.

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s very helpful. I never heard that before. I really appreciate it.”

Rev. Stroud, your work has just begun.

(Connie Schultz is a columnist for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.)

KRE/JL END SCHULTZ