My wife and I were attending a Methodist church in Ohio. Well, sort of. We had just started attending when covid hit. So we went for 2 weeks, and then churches were shut down. So we attended after that online.
In general the church talked a good talk. They told me about how various LGBT people were on the board and participating in worship. The Pastor was pretty supportive.
After a year or so online, restrictions were relaxed, and churches began to meet in person again. The first few weeks were fine, but then, the Pastor announced that he was leaving. The church then did what churches tend to do, which was install an interim pastor, and start getting ready to have a new pastor.
Meanwhile, the associate pastor, who had been leading a satellite campus at a local YMCA, began preaching often at the church. My wife and I quickly noticed that her sermons always seemed to include the idea of "family values", even if it didn't seem to fit into the sermon. To us, that rang alarm bells, because when churches talk about family values, they really mean "anti LGBTQIA+".
Over the next few months, that proved pretty accurate, and we soon realized that the direction the church intended to take, freed up because the previous pastor had left, was decidedly anti-LGBTQIA+. We waste no time leaving the church.
The truth of this was shown about a year later, when the United Methodist Church split on LGBTQIA+ lines. The church we had attended formally left the UMC, departing with the other "I hate LGBTQIA+ churches.
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