Ministry & Revelations
All told, I spent two years enmeshing my life with those youth, their families, and the congregation in Birmingham. Church and religious life gave me both purpose and meaning. It also offered me a bit of an escape. While other friends were spending time with girlfriends, and fraternity brothers were spending their weekends partying, I could sincerely claim that I had other responsibilities. And sincere I was.
I changed my major from political science to religion, and even began to consider attending seminary and pursuing Christian ministry full time. Because I had received credit for my summer at Disney, I was exempt from the January Interim my senior year. A friend and I concocted a three-week trip to explore medical schools for him and divinity schools for me that would take us as far west as Colorado, back through Kansas and Missouri, east to North Carolina and south to Georgia, and finally home to BSC for our final semester of college.
By the time of our return I had decided that I wouldn’t enroll in divinity school right away but that I would accept a full-time youth director position at a church in north Alabama. The pastor of the congregation I’d been serving in Birmingham had moved to a church in the suburbs of Huntsville. It was mostly standard practice that Methodist pastors were moved regularly from church to church in keeping with the United Methodist system of itinerancy. He encouraged me to work with him at his new church if I did indeed decide to delay going to seminary. This would give me more time to thoughtfully consider if pastoral ministry was right for me. Or said in more theological terms, to discern if ordained ministry was my calling.
I was eager for the new context and challenge. This new suburban church was much larger and growing faster than the church in Birmingham. Although I missed the close-knit relationships of my first group, it was energizing to get to be a part of such a dynamic and growing congregation. My only regret was that I had to forgo a final college road trip with my closest friends in order to start work at the beginning of the summer.
I spent three years in total with this congregation after college. And because there were so many more youth, I think the thing I was most proud of was recruiting and training a large team of adult volunteers to help support and sustain the program. But due to the large numbers of ever-growing relationships, my introverted nature was struggling to keep up with the energetic demands. Additionally, even as well-meaning church members had tried to set me up with a number of young women over these years, I was beginning to experience more and more anxiety from the implications of my lack of interest in nurturing a heterosexual relationship. It was one night toward the end of my three year stint that I sat up in the middle of my bed and said aloud to myself for the first time, “I must be gay.”
*Thanks for reading and/or listening. Join me next week for the second of my Invisible Lines: Religious Belief. Check out my previous post The Lines if you’re not sure what I mean by “Lines.” To read from the beginning please go to Why I'm Writing.
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