Yeah. Kevin and Steven went to Mahan and asked him if he would be willing
to officiate at a blessing of their commitment to each other. That took
place in September of '92. Excuse me, '91. Mahan had been involved with
the Raleigh Religious Network for some time and in that context, had
discussed the issue of holy unions because our friend Jim Lewis had
performed holy unions at his parish in West Virginia back in the late
seventies and had had considerable fallout from that decision. But that
was a decision that he took personally that his church wasn't involved
in making. In the course of those discussions, particularly on Long
Retreat that RRNGLE had down at Shalom Place at Topsail Island, the
house that Mahan has used as a retreat center for fifteen years, we
Page 9 talked about holy unions and ramifications and
authority within denominations and what kind of repercussions one might
expect, and Mahan had expressed his willingness to perform such a
service if he were asked, but this was the first time somebody actually
had asked. What he did was, he spent about a month, well, a little more
than a month—he had three sessions with Kevin and Steven to talk to them
about what their intentions were and why they wanted to do this, and
were they prepared for possible consequences and that sort of thing. And
what you might call marriage counseling, sort of built in—I guess we
need another word for it—committed relationship counseling. Marriage
tends to sort of send up a red flag for folks. And then he spent some
time on his own being clear about what he believed was the appropriate
response and why. And actually he put this in writing, he put out six or
seven steps that he had gone through in his own understanding of
homosexuality and of sexuality in general, and God's intention for human
life and so forth. The steps that he had gone through to come to a point
where he believed it was appropriate to respond positively to Kevin and
Steven. He put this in a letter to the Board of Deacons. Which, I had
been elected to the Board the year after I came out to the Board, which
is another commentary on Pullen. He presented it to the Board, it was
the last item on the agenda in the November meeting. He presented it to
us in letter form, he asked—he passed it out, asked us to read it, asked
us not to respond immediately, and asked that we spend at least a month
in discussion and prayer, and reflection before we made any decision at
all. This is what folks on the Board referred to as "The Jolt." But the
response after we read it was that he and Jim Powell who's chair of the
Board, asked each of us in turn to tell them what information, or what
resources we would need to be
Page 10 able to make a
decision on this issue, rather than "What's your position", but what
kind of help do you need? So we did that.
We also called a meeting for two weeks after that that was on this issue
only. And that was one of the most remarkable meetings I've ever lived
through. Every one of the deacons had spent a lot of time, a lot of soul
searching, trying to figure out how to respond, and from what point of
view. And everybody came at it from a different angle. But since I was
the only gay person on the board, or the openly gay person, I was kind
of the focus of what people had to say. We agreed at the meeting that
Mahan should follow his conscience in terms of his own participation. We
agreed that the decision on whether this should be part of the church
ministry, and the symbol of that being whether you can use the church
building for it, should be made by the congregation. In a subsequent
meeting, in the regular December meeting two more weeks from then, we
took votes on the issue divided up into four pieces so that it would be
clear where we agreed and where we didn't. We were unanimous about
Mahan's—the appropriateness of him following his conscience. We were
unanimous about the congregation's decision. There was a split vote,
14-5, about recommedning that the service be part of the church's
ministry and about recommending that the building be used for such
services.
A couple of days after that meeting, forgive me, back up—a couple of days
after the mid-November meeting, five of us had been appointed as a
committee to try to plan a process. So we sat down and went through all
the options, appreciating the fact that we had gotten the issue
presented to us in a safe environment with some respect and
confidentiality built in. We wanted to be able to present it to the
congregation in a similar
Page 11 way, but there was no
way to get everybody together at once, and it would be hard to do it in
little pieces without its beginning to be spread by rumor rather than
facts, so the best we could come up with—especially with Christmas right
ahead—was to send out a letter to the congregation similar to the one
we'd received, but with some additional stuff from the deacons. Then
plan a whole series of small group meetings, of opportunities for people
to get together and talk. We ended up scheduling like fifteen meetings.
Some of them were morning, some of them were at church, some of them
were in people's homes. We had some at outlying communities where you
have a lot of members. Some were night for folks who work and some were
in the daytime for people who don't drive at night and that sort of
thing. We tried to create enough opportunities so that no matter what
your schedule is you could attend at least one. And people were invited
to attend as many as they wanted to. We had two deacons at each of those
meetings, and we tried to have somebody from Open Forum—actually it was
suggested that we have someone who had been a participant in Open Forum
at each one just for information purposes because we'd gone through a
lot of study together, dealt with a lot of different issues. And that
was a group that was about half gay and half straight, so it wasn't just
a matter of having a gay person at each meeting but having someone with
that background. So those meetings went on. The trouble is that somebody
took the letter directly to the newspaper, the day it went out. It was
in the newspaper on Friday before some folks had even gotten their
letters. And before the first meeting which we'd planned for Sunday. So
immediately it took on this sort of life of its own in the public. And
it was all this debate
Page 12 and letters to the editor,
and all the Baptist stuff got whipped up before we even got a chance to
consider, much less make a decision.
That was really a crazy time. For four months straight we were in the
newspaper all the time. The church got hundreds of calls and letters.
Some of them were very reasonable but very concerned. Some of them were
just nasty. Some of them were extremely supportive. We have collections
of them at church. There's one whole notebook of positive letters and
one of negative letters. They kept a log in the office, I feel for the
secretaries, because they had to field a lot of stuff during that time.
The difficulty was that we had an internal process that was fairly
reasonable and allowed a lot of opportunity for exchange. But this
external stuff going on kind of superimposed itself. Kids were being
teased on the schoolbus, people were having to defend the whole issue at
their workplace even before we made a decision. Whether or not they
agreed with it. We had about a third of the congregation who did not
agree with it, with the holy union piece.
Now, it was almost unanimous that we agreed that gay and lesbian persons
would be accepted in full membership. That was never in question. But
the offering services to bless couples was the piece on which about a
third of the congregation did not agree.
So the process was to go from the small group meetings to a town meeting,
which is something we do every once in a while when there's something
going on at Pullen. The town meeting is just kind of an open mike, it's
a get together where everybody can hear everybody, and just listen to
each other and sort of think out loud. There's no voting that goes on,
just a chance to speak and listen in the larger group. And so we had one
that was
Page 13 just really amazing. There were two
people who spoke first in opposition and everybody else who spoke was in
support. There was a lot of courage shown, and a lot of just amazing
stuff that happened. The really good precious stuff that happened in
this process—anybody who was there would tell you just how amazing some
of it was, and how we got to know each other at a level we never had
before. You don't get opportunities to know each other that deeply with
that kind of honesty at church very often. Which is a sad commentary but
it's true. Sometimes churches were just supposed to keep up appearances.
And this was being very honest and remarkably caring of where other
people were coming from. But after the town meeting there was the
congregational meeting, which had been, from the beginning, advertised
as the first opportunity to vote in the issue. And it had been made
explicit that the congregation could decide at that time whether they
were ready to vote. So the process could have continued beyond that. It
was real intense. Some of us were at five and six meetings a week
through that. And there were lots of extra deacons' meetings and extra
ad hoc committees doing various things. So a lot of people were just
kind of worn out, didn't want to extend it because it had just taken
over our lives, pretty much. A lot of other things kind of got set aside
simply because of the intensity of what was happening, not only inside
but what was happening to us from the outside.
And so the people who came to that congregational meeting, most of them
expected the vote to be taken then and there. And that would explain why
we had the largest turnout we've ever had. Probably ten times our normal
turnout for a congregational business meeting. But there was a decision
made at the recommendation
Page 14 of the deacons, that
mail ballots be used because that would allow everybody who was a member
of the church participate. And it would allow the confidentiality of
voting. So once the meeting made that decision to use the mail ballots,
the only thing they had left to do was to finalize the motions. And the
deacons had gone through considerable effort to come up with a graduated
set of motions as a starting place. Of course, any of them could have
been thrown out. But to begin with areas of general agreement and move
toward the more difficult, more controversial areas. So that in fact, we
did get substantial agreement on the welcome and acceptance of full
participation of gay and lesbian members. Which is all one would have
voted on at the end of a Reconciling Congregation's Program kind of
process. The holy union issue is much more difficult. But the process
then became sending out mail ballots, double blind. It was kind of a
complicated process to send them out so that they came back and you
could guarantee signatures that only members voted, and people only
voted once. And then take out the inside envelope and tally those
without knowing whose they are. I was part of that process too. And that
was February 28th that we tallied the votes. And then March 1st, the
Sunday, the results were announced after the worship service. And a lot
of the external furor intensified with the vote. There'd been plenty of
it that we were even considering the issue, that made enough people
made. But once the vote was taken we were kicked out locally, and then
state, and then nationally.