The Wesley Center at the University of Iowa has ended its 109-year affiliation with the United Methodist Church. The board of directors of the center, which was founded in 1913 to minister to UI students, explained the decision in a message posted on Sunday morning on its website.
For many years, it was through The United Methodist Church (the UMC) that we were able to do our best work and be our best selves. With time, however, our commitment to beloved community, particularly with queer and trans students, has resulted in direct attacks from the church body that once supported us. These attacks have resulted in loss of funding, lengthy church disciplinary processes against our chaplain, and denominational distrust among students, whose tolerance for religious hypocrisy and discrimination is blessedly low. In light of the denomination’s entrenched commitments to policies and practices of dominance and destruction, what was once a source of connection and life has become a burden and barrier to our community’s purpose.
“This decision was made to bring our organizational relationships in alignment with our purpose and values that we’ve been living in our programming,” Rev. Sean McRoberts, director of Operations and Development for the center, told Little Village.
The center describes its purpose as creating “a spiritual home on campus, nurture justice-seeking leaders, and pattern our lives in rhythms of grace, solidarity, and deep connection with each other, the Divine, and the Earth,” with “commitments to peace with justice, anti-racism, and the sacred worth of queer and trans people in the face of opposition from our government and religious denomination.”
The decision not to renew the center’s association as a covenant organization with the UMC is the result of “an evolving conversation over the last years,” McRoberts explained.
Like other denominations, the UMC is having internal conflict over acceptance of LGBTQ individuals in face of the church’s established stance that being an LGBTQ person prevents one from being fully in accordance with Christian teachings and values. While some progressive voices call for eliminating the church’s ban on allowing same-sex marriage ceremonies or its rule that a member of the clergy cannot be a “practicing homosexual,” there is strong resistance to change from conservative members.
Rev. Anna Blaedel, an openly queer ordained Methodist minister who now serves as campus minister for the center, has been the subject of three complaints about violating church rules on LGBTQ issues, since making a speech at the 2016 Iowa Annual Conference of the UMC challenging the church’s position.
Blaedel, then the executive director of the Wesley Center, began by briefly talking about being a member of the church since the age of 4, before stating that under the church’s terminology, they are a “practicing homosexual.”
“Or in my language, I am out, queer-partnered clergy,” Blaedel continued. “I know this is not news to most, if any, of you, but by simply speaking this truth to you out loud here I could be brought up on charges, face a formal complaint. I could lose my job, lose my clergy credentials, lose my place of spiritual belonging, of vocational calling, my faith community, my faith home.”
Blaedel went on to talk about “the persistent pain and wearing woundedness” of trying to remain part of a church “that continues to call me and so many I love an abomination.”
The church is “instilling in me and other LGBTQ people some horrible untruths,” they continued. Those included, “That at our core of our createdness there is something shameful, sick, sinful.”
“That, friends, is incompatible with Christian teaching. Allegiance and adherence to unjust laws is incompatible with Christian teaching.”
None of the complaints lodged against Blaedel came from the Wesley Center, and members of the center and the board of directors have fully backed Blaedel during the complaint process.
But the growing division between the center and the UMC went beyond the complaints against Blaedel or the church’s decision to take disciplinary action instead of dismissing the complaints as it often does on other matters. Speaking to the Gazette in 2019, board member Christopher Cheatum noted that the UMC’s Board of Higher Education and Campus Ministry, which provided funding to the center, had made apparently targeted cuts that affected the Wesley Center’s work.
“They’ve made an effort to steer cuts directly to the programs that serve people who are queer or trans and served by queer and trans pastors,” Cheatum said.
As part of its long process of preparing to end its affiliation with the UMC, the Wesley Center incorporated itself as a 503(c) nonprofit, and began looking at alternative ways to raise funds. (The center’s annual summer fundraising begins this week.) It also sold its building at 120 N Dubuque St, and other property it held, to the First United Methodist Church of Iowa City.
Although the center sold the building that has been its long-time home, it now leases its space there and has no plans to move. And just as the meeting space will remain the same, so will other aspects of the center.
“Our programming will continue to be led by our chaplain, Anna Blaedel,” Rev. McRoberts said.
“The Wesley Center invites all students to be, belong, breathe, and be nourished — without qualification or reservation,” the board of directors said in its statement on Sunday. “We do that best at Table, sharing our stories and finding connections, whether over coffee, homemade meals, or chocolate. We let our questions lead us, expectant to discover Divine possibility in our midst. In the face of state legislation and church doctrines that attempt to control and condemn, this invitation into authentic, brave belonging is of vital importance.”
