Church Bylaws

2017

At this point, if you haven’t read the story about the e-mail from the Transgender person, it would be best to get that background, as it will lend clarity to this vignette. You can find it here: E-mail from a Transgender Person

I'm the brunette, transgender wife. 

I was the Chair of the Church Board of Trustees. We attended an extremely conservative church, which sometimes caused some issues for my wife and I, regarding church teachings. But, honestly, though there were some things that got to us, we had been able to shrug it off. It’s amazing what you can shrug off in the name of normalcy. 

As the chair of the Trustees, I was vested with a lot of authority and was the number 2 person in authority in the church, behind the Senior Pastor. Mind you, despite the previous event with the e-mails, the church had taken no official position regarding transgender people.

Things were going well. We lived our lives, but the people at church had no idea of the truth about me, which frankly frequently caused me to feel that I was being dishonest. Overall, things were going decently. But since life is life, all good things must come to an end. Like many churches, how things are done in that church was guided by bylaws. The Senior Pastor had been wanting to make some changes, in language and punctuation. So, a committee was formed to consider the changes.

One day, the Senior Pastor sent out an e-mail to all of the church leadership, detailing the decision of the bylaws committee adding a few paragraphs to the church bylaws. The text of the paragraphs was:

We believe that the term “marriage” has only one meaning and that is marriage sanctioned by God which joins one man and one woman in a single, exclusive union as delineated in Scripture. We believe that God intends sexual intimacy to occur between a man and a woman who are married to each other. We believe God has commanded that no intimate sexual activity engage in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. 

We believe that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and an offensive to God.

We believe that to preserve the function and integrity of the church as the local Body of Christ, and to provide a biblical role model to the church attendees and the community, it is imperative that all persons employed by the church in any capacity, or who serve as volunteers, should abide by and agree to this Statement of Marriage and Sexuality and conduct themselves accordingly.

As you might imagine, this presented me with multiple quandaries. First, because I am a transgender person, this would mean that I not only could not ethically continue in my current position, nor any other position, but that I also couldn’t serve in any capacity whatsoever, not even as a volunteer.

Additionally, the statement makes it clear that the church’s new position would be that I was considered to be sinful, and an offense to God, simply because of who I am as a person.

Also, I was driven more than a little nuts by the typos in what is supposed to be a legal document. But that’s another story.

Lastly, I don’t find in scripture the things the statement says are in scripture.

I was greatly distressed upon reading this statement, and what made it even worse was the overwhelming support from the entirety of church leadership for the inclusion of the statement. Only one other person voiced any dissent.

I engaged in a very logical, tense, but not heated discussion with the Senior Pastor, which included numerous e-mails, telephone calls, and face-to-face conversations with him. I actually was eventually able to persuade him that including the statement was morally reprehensible, and he then persuaded the remainder of the bylaws committee. The statement was NOT included in the new bylaws!

But that didn’t change the fact that I had seen the heart of the members of the church leadership team. I had been given a very rude awakening, and I no longer felt comfortable there. I now knew what was going to happen when, eventually, they found out the truth about me.

My wife and I talked at length about all this, and we spoke repeatedly with our therapist. The final decision was honestly life-altering. I have now resigned as Chair of the Board of Trustees, and from the board itself. We have withdrawn as backup Sunday School teachers and resigned from the fellowship committee, which plans church meals, etc. We also resigned from the church's community outreach program that we had been in charge of. Over the last few months, we have attended several other churches, and that will continue, as we search for a church that will not condemn me.

This story is wrapped up in this writing, Breakfast at Bob Evans