Preacher Comes Out in the Pulpit

It doesn't make any sense to me that people calling themselves Christians would focus so much energy on one dimension of human behavior: sexual orientation. There are real crimes out there, murders, rapes, robberies, kidnappings, there are greedy people whose selfishness brings suffering to others, there are liars and cheaters and falsifiers and deceivers -- I mean, really, there is some seriously bad stuff in the world for good people to oppose.

And then you have two people who love each other, but they're not the right two people, and all of a sudden that is the worst problem in the world, that's what the preachers spend their time preaching about. I'm not a dumb person, honest, but I cannot understand why anyone would think that homosexuality is a problem at all, never mind why it is the most important problem in America today. And even though the whole supposition is bizarre, that homosexuality is a threat to anything at all, the derivation of that supposition from the scriptural teachings of Jesus is even more bizarre. How you can take a message of love and forgiveness, tolerance of our neighbors' offenses against us, and twist it into judgment against the kind of love that some people feel?

Those who are trapped in the darkness of the church have it bad, those gay, lesbian, and transgender members of the church whose innate nature makes them the targets of the hatred of the church authorities.

One such person, trapped in a leadership position in such a church, cleared his conscience and hopefully brought a lesson in love to his congregation:

(Nov. 15) -- Despite feeling called by God to spread the gospel, he lived a lie for decades, fearing that the truth would not set him free, as John the Apostle promised, but ruin his life and his devotion to preaching.

Bishop Jim Swilley founded a Greater Atlanta house of worship in 1985 that has grown into a mega-church. He married twice and fathered four children. He traveled the country giving sermons about Christ and Christian love, but kept secret his own feelings on human desires.

But on a recent Wednesday night, he stepped out of the closet while sitting in the pulpit of his 1,200-member, nondenominational Evangelical church and announced he was gay -- something he said he neither chose nor spoke about for most of his 52 years. Some walked out. Many others stayed. Torn by Bullying Suicides, Pastor Says He's Gay

Their preacher tells him he's gay, and a bunch of them walk out. I have always thought people have some kind of internal consistency check, they monitor that their beliefs and feelings and actions are consistent with one another. So you go into church every Sunday and pray for the strength to forgive others, and then your own minister tells you his deepest, most personal secret, he asks for your understanding and love, and you stand up and insult him by walking out.

Swilley said he wanted to change hateful bullying and intolerance of homosexuals. He wanted people to know that, at least for him, it was not a choice or a calling.

"There are two things in my life that are an absolute," he told his flock. "I did not ask for either one of them; both of them were imposed upon me, I had no control over either of them. One was the call of God on my life ... and the other thing ... was my sexual orientation."

It was the recent series of suicides by gay teens that pushed him to stop living a lie, Swilley told NPR. He was especially compelled by the story of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate and a friend allegedly live-streamed video of a sexual encounter between a man and Clementi.

"I would hear people nearly imply that he deserved it -- you know, people would say he shouldn't have been in an act of perversion," Swilley told the public radio network. "And when I started hearing that, especially from people who professed to be Christ-like, I don't know. Something changed."

In the videotaped address to his followers, Swilley said he had recently told his parents and his children, and they stood behind him. He said his wife of 21 years, Debye, had known before they were married, but loved him anyway. The couple separated more than a year ago, but she remains an associate pastor at their cathedral in Conyers, Church in the Now, about 25 miles east of Atlanta.

And it was Debye who told him he should come clean and follow the church's motto of "real people experiencing a real God in the real world," Swilley told WSBTV in Atlanta.

His wife knew he was gay before she married him. It would be interesting to hear her story, it sounds like they stayed together nearly twenty years.

He said he's received some sharply negative reactions. "I know all the hateful stuff that's being written about me online, whatever," he said. "To think about saving a teenager, yeah, I'll risk my reputation for that.

"As a father," Swilley said through tears, "thinking about your 16-, 17-year-old killing themselves, I thought somebody needed to say something."

The pastor also said he wanted to clear up some rumors. He had not left his wife for another man, he told his congregation, which included a smiling and applauding Debye. His situation was not similar to Eddie Long, another mega-church pastor in Atlanta.

Long, an anti-gay preacher, has been sued by four young men who claim he coerced them into sex with lavish trips, gifts and jobs. Long denies the accusations.

"My position is not about gaying up the church," Swilley told CNN. "It's about people being who they are."

We have seen anti-gay gay preachers and politicians fall out of the closet, something happens and their lovers identify them publicly, or an undercover cop busts them, a reporter follows up on a hunch, those people are simply hypocrites, their lives are a cliche. They always either deny the reality of their sexual orientation or, like Ted Haggard, they claim to "struggle" with it until they pronounce themselves "cured," or somehow identify themselves as realigned with the forces of traditional repressive religion.

This is an entirely different story. This man, out of compassion for those young people who have given up their lives as a result of the harshness of social pressure on them, has risked everything to try to make things right. It will take a lot more than this, but you can be sure a lot of people down there in Georgia went home and talked about this and questioned whether some assumptions they made were unkind, harmful, incorrect.

[ Update: good interview with the minister and his wife HERE ]