When Sarah Hassmer was growing up in rural Virginia, she knew two things for certain: she wanted to become an ordained minister, and she was gay.
With a father, uncle, and great-uncle who were all United Methodist pastors, she felt a natural pull toward ministry, even dressing up in her father’s robes, wearing a fake mustache, and carrying around a Bible one Halloween.
“I was a huge daddy’s girl,” says Hassmer, who is now a policy fellow at the National Women’s Law Center in D.C. “I saw being part of ministry as sort of a family business.”
But Hassmer was deterred from her path by the 2004 church trial of lesbian United Methodist minister Karen Dammann. The church pressed charges against Dammann in Seattle for declaring her relationship with another woman, and she endured national public scrutiny. Dammann won the controversial trial—but that wasn’t the end of the story.
The Methodist church continues to be roiled by questions of LGBTQ inclusion, as openly gay members are often blocked from ordination and global church rules continue to ban same sex marriages. Even here in D.C., where many churches are inclusive of gay congregants and clergy members, people like Hassmer feel forced to wait in the wings while the larger battle over the issue plays out in the Methodist church.
According to the denomination’s Book of Discipline, Methodist pastors cannot conduct same-sex weddings, and gay people cannot be ordained as clergy. In February, church representatives from across the world voted in favor of a plan to uphold those rules despite pressure from some increasingly liberal factions of the denomination to change them. The “traditionalist plan,” as it’s called, also cracks down on churches that break the rules, requiring that they “certify adherence” or leave the church. The plan will go into full effect in January of 2020.
A number of progressive churches in the area already have gay and lesbian pastors ordained by more lenient factions of the church leadership, and happily perform same sex weddings. But though they can can control what happens in their own congregations, church leaders have less say about whether the Baltimore-Washington Conference, the area’s regional Methodist leadership, approves the ordination of gay people seeking to become pastors.
Ahead of this month’s meeting of the conference, a group of local church leaders is working on legislation to counter the traditionalist plan. They’re also campaigning for the leader of the conference, Bishop LaTrelle Easterling, to eschew the plan and act in accordance with her conscience instead of current church rules.
“We can no longer abide by the restrictions… placed on inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people in the full life of the church,” more than 200 clergy wrote in a letter to Easterling. “To do so would be a violation of our baptismal vow to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.”
“There’s just so much anger and emotion and commitment to what is happening,” says Rev. Angela Flanagan, lead pastor of Silver Spring United Methodist Church. Flanagan is working to get multiple LGBTQ-friendly petitions presented to the Baltimore-Washington Conference.
To Flanagan, the most damning aspects of the traditionalist plan are its high minimum penalties against clergy. If a minister officiates one same-sex wedding, they would be faced with suspension without pay for one year. After the second offense, they would lose their credentials entirely. The law also technically bans civil unions and domestic partnerships.
Easterling, the leader of the conference, has been a complicated figure for Washington-area Methodists, outwardly expressing progressive views on the issue of LGBTQ inclusion, but continuing to uphold church rules banning the ordination of gay people.
Just last summer, Easterling halted the ordination of two D.C.-area ordination candidates because they are “self-avowed practicing homosexuals.” But in a statement after her decision, Easterling said she believes that “the United Methodist Book of Discipline is wrong when it states that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching,” and that people in same sex relationships are “living out who God has created them to be.”
Joey Heath-Mason, a chaplain at American University (which holds the license for WAMU, DCist’s parent company), was one of the ordination candidates Easterling denied in her decision last year.
“I feel like the traditionalist plan is meant to push people like me out of the clergy,” he says. “There’s so many of us who exist inside the church that run counter to that narrative.”
Easterling also denied the ordination of T.C. Morrow, a gay woman and member of Foundry Methodist Church in Dupont Circle (a progressive church that’s been attended by the Clintons) . Morrow has been trying to become ordained as a deacon for more than ten years.
“I remain firm in my commitment to make myself available for ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church,” Morrow told DCist in March after the church voted in favor of the traditionalist plan. “It will now be up to others to decide what they want to do, given that I continue to present myself as a candidate.”
Hassmer shares Morrow’s determination to stay true to the church she grew up in. She also attends Foundry in Dupont Circle.
“The United Methodist Church feels a lot like home to me,” says Hassmer. “It’s hard for me to leave.”
Still, since 2004, Hassmer has found it difficult to picture how she could possibly ever live out her dream of becoming ordained. Although she has considered applying for seminary school in a couple of years, she still approaches the topic with reticence.
“The concept of having to go on trial for being who I am was too overwhelming,” she says. “So I put that path aside. For now, I’m waiting in the wings to see what happens.”
