By JENNIFER PASSARO

Staff Writer

A proposed separation in the United Methodist Church may unify the church in its love and acceptance of gay clergy members, some church officials believe.

Last week, church leaders from around the world unveiled a plan for a new traditional denomination. A 16-member panel signed “A Protocol of Reconciliation & Grace Through Separation,” after much deliberation with renowned mediator Kenneth Feinberg. The proposal envisions a new, traditionalist denomination split from the United Methodist Church, in large part because of the church’s inclusion of gay clergy and recognition of gay marriage. In May, the church’s General Conference will decide how to move forward.

United Methodist churches in the Pacific Northwest have openly supported LGBTQ+ people for more than 20 years, refuting church rules.

“It’s very possibly that as a gay person seeking the clergyship in our conference that you could have been shown love and acceptance for your orientation from the moment you were born,” said Patrick Scriven, director of communication for the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Methodist Church.

That hasn’t always been true for Mark Haberman, Coeur d’Alene’s Community United Methodist Church deacon and organist.

Haberman was born into a midwestern Methodist Church where his father was studying to be a pastor. His father's sister became one of the first female pastors ordained into the church.

“My first home was a seminary apartment,” Haberman said. “I can take my personal faith story to a very specific conversion moment as a preteen. That is where I entered the life of faith as a Christian person. To what I have felt called has ebbed and flowed, but my call has never diminished.”

In the mid 1960s, a young Haberman sat in the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church in Minneapolis with his grandmother. A mammoth organ rose behind the white oak altar. Haberman was spellbound.

“I can’t remember many details about the service I attended that day, but I remember the music,” Haberman said.

In that moment, over 50 years ago, Haberman felt pulled to the church. It was outside the sense of being home at church, a feeling he almost always had being a preacher’s son, and more a desire to help orchestrate, to take part in the church, to be a person of faith.

“‘Calling’ might be too strong of a word,” Haberman said. “But a ‘wow’! I could do that. I could play that music. Across time the language became calling.”

But for Haberman, his journey within the United Methodist Church was inextricably linked with his sexuality.

He married a woman in his early 20s, knowing he was gay but having no language and no culture with which to explain his way of being. They arrived in Coeur d’Alene in 1993.

“We moved halfway across the country to Coeur d’Alene to be a part of the church,” Haberman said. “I became ordained during my time at [Community United Methodist] church.”

In 2000, Haberman came out as a gay man, surrendering his ordination to the United Methodists, and leaving the Community Church where it once sat on the corner of Wallace and Seventh in downtown Coeur d’Alene.

“It would really have been impossible to stay,” Haberman said. “For many years I did the work of an ordained person, but I wasn’t ordained and I didn’t belong to a church.”

Haberman advocated for people living in poverty throughout Kootenai County. He now facilitates in-home care and community services for seniors in Spokane.

“A deacon is the bridge between the world and the church,” said Reverend Heather Seman, Community United Methodist’s pastor. “They bring the world into the church and the church into the world.”

In 2006, the church asked Haberman to come back. They desperately needed someone to run the music program. Haberman returned to his life in church, stabilizing the music program and reforming relationships with the parishioners.

Several years later Haberman and his partner decided to build a life together in Coeur d’Alene. They married in their home.

“I wasn’t going to be any place where I couldn’t be who I was, so I was going to leave the church,” Haberman said. “Heather and the congregation said ‘You do not have to leave.’”

“In the United States context of the Methodist Church, all people, including gay and lesbian people, are of sacred worth,” Scriven said, but recent rulings in the church established that “essentially being a gay clergy member is not allowed. You can’t do both of those things simultaneously.”

With Reverend Seman’s guidance, the Community United Methodist Church embraced Haberman and he stayed. The Pacific Northwest Conference’s Board of Ordained Ministry reinstated his orders. He now serves the church as a deacon again.

“I am able to go back to the church and from being embedded in the work of helping lift up the disenfranchised and poor I am able to be a bridge back to the church,” Haberman said. “I helped that congregation understand what life looks like for a person in intergenerational poverty.”

"Deacons often serve beyond the local church in community-based work," Haberman said. "I did anti-poverty work in Idaho and currently work with an agency in Washington that helps older adults stay in their homes as long as possible. We are deeply connected to people and deeply embedded in the community. While I don’t carry a bible with me, literally and figuratively, I carry my ordination with me wherever I am.”

Not only did Haberman bring an understanding of the greater community to his church, he brought an example of a life lived both in contradiction with and in full embrace of church teachings.

“Adorned Deacon Mark Haberman allowed us to understand with our hearts,” Seman said. “He’s lived so many seasons of the church and has remained faithful. His faith is lived in such an exquisite way.”

Coeur d’Alene’s story is only one in the global sprawl of the United Methodist Church. In the global church, division remains along theological lines.

The United Methodist Church is the second largest Protestant denomination behind Southern Baptists, with 12 million members worldwide.

On Jan. 1, a Traditional Plan proposed by the General Conference in March 2018 took effect, affirming punishments for gay clergy and gay marriage ceremonies performed in the United Methodist Church.

“I felt a real sadness,” Haberman said, when the proposal passed. “What is the impact on the church that has been my home for nearly all of my 64 years? What about the people that I love and care for that find themselves on the affirmative side of this issue?”

The shift had been brewing for decades. It essentially made it impossible to be both Methodist and homosexual and created the first mandated punishment for being non-compliant with a church rule. In all other instances of non-compliance, church leadership prays for a solution and forms an appropriate punishment for each situation. In this case, if a clergy member performs a gay marriage, they must take a mandatory suspension and apologize to the church. If they perform a second gay marriage, they lose their credentials.

“This is a big change,” Scriven said. “It is a prescribed punishment versus church leaders having the ability to prescribe a punishment. This is the only part of the Methodist Church where this is required. It treats this one particular area as a special situation much different than all the others.”

For the most conservative members of the church, this was not enough.

“Jesus in the Gospel of John said one of his last hopes was that the church would be unified, but down through the ages people have found ways to divide,” Pastor John Grimsted at the Eagle United Methodist Church in southern Idaho said. “For traditionalists, loyalty to the gospel, biblical integrity, and holiness of life cannot be compromised.”

While the majority of churches in the United States will likely remain in the fold of United Methodist, some belong to the Wesleyan Covenant Association, an evangelical organization that bans homosexuality on the basis of the bible. These churches may follow more traditional churches in Africa, the Philippines, and Russia as they seek to form a new denomination.

Eagle United Methodist Church belongs to the WCA.

“It’s like our parents have been arguing for a very long time and now they’re probably going to get divorced,” Seman said.

The church has only seen conflict like this during the Civil War, when northern conferences demanded that clergy set their slaves free. Sixteen years before the South seceded from the union, the Southern Methodist conference withdrew from the United Methodist Church, forming the Methodist Episcopal Church. Like today, the church was caught somewhere between state laws and its own moral beliefs.

Today the General Conference is the only body that can set official policy and speak for the entire denomination. It takes the place of a singular church head.

The Community United Methodist Church on Hanley Avenue in Coeur d’Alene belongs to the Pacific Northwest Conference of United Methodist Churches. This Annual Conference, in conjunction with the Alaska and Oregon-Idaho Conferences, embodies 450 churches and new faith communities. They form the Greater Northwest Episcopal Area under the direction of Bishop Elaine Stanovsky.

“If this protocol is adopted, the United Methodist Church will continue on in its mission and ministry,” Stanovsky said. “What will change is the full embrace of those members of the LGBTQ community who have been excluded and even persecuted by the church. Clergy and congregations that decide that they can’t be a part of a church that affirms LGBTQ+ persons would be given a graceful path to exit.”

In the Conference, Boards of Ordained Ministry responsible for approving candidates into clergy do not agree with the church’s rules surrounding LGBTQ+ people.

“The Boards of Ordained Ministry are non-compliance with that rule and we have been for years,” Scriven said. “Even though it is a rule, it’s one we haven’t chosen to follow and I don’t foresee us following it in the near future. I don’t know anyone here that would be interested in taking [ordination] from [Haberman] today. In other parts of the church it would be a big deal, but not here. It’s a challenge in the church, when you try to have a rule for everybody, but a large portion of that everybody doesn’t agree. It’s difficult to enforce.”

What would be lost in separation are the prayerful conversations between church leaders who disagree.

English theologian John Wesley led the movement within the Church of England in the 1700s that would later form the United Methodist Church. Perhaps his most famous doctrine reads, “Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion? Without all doubt, we may.”

“There are those who can only get to the perspective of seeing us as heretical,” Haberman said. “With this issue there is such a divide. I want to believe that wherever we are, we can see the other as being a person of good intention, a person who loves God and loves their family, that wants to do the right thing. If there were a way that even in the midst of the division, if we could still try to love the other. It is immensely difficult. It is difficult for me. Jesus talked about loving your enemies. This is the journey. This is the struggle.”

“I deeply believe that God wants people to learn to live together and love each other, especially with people with different understandings of the world,” Stanovsky said. “I accept that this may be a season in The United Methodist Church when some of us need to walk separately, as a practical matter, but I will look forward to the time when God will inevitably bring us back together.”

Many church leaders see the proposed split like a path separating in the woods that eventually finds its way back together.

“I’m hopeful because the people in this church want to love people,” Seman said of the Coeur d’Alene congregation. “Not because, but just. We’re a lot more touched by this issue. It’s causing conversation, but we draw the line at loving people.”

Seman defines love as the ability to recognize every person as a child of God. She sees love as the ability to build people up and share in the journey of their life, but not tell them what that journey needs to be. Her parishioners come to church so they can go back out into the world and not be afraid.

“I’m a gay man and I’m married to another man and I’m guaranteed the practice of my religion by the First Amendment,” Haberman said. “I’m going to seek that out in the United Methodist Church because that is my home. Here I stand.”