Can the Church Be an Obstacle to Faithful Parenting?

Photo at Left: Pastor Heidi Mann (third from left), family, and baptismal sponsors, after presiding with her father (left) at the Baptism of her second son. The older son referenced in this blog post is 6 years old in this picture. (Photo courtesy of Heidi Mann.)

That I value openness and acceptance toward the LGBT community was not the main reason I transitioned last fall from serving as a Lutheran pastor to doing freelance copyediting (including for this web-zine), but it entered in.

When I became a pastor 14 years ago, I had no husband or kids to be impacted by my profession. In 2002, married with one child, I started serving a new congregation. When I soon found myself entangled in tension with a Bible study participant because in class I merely suggested some reasons the view of homosexuality as sin might not match the will of God, and when, in the following months, I skirted the issue, I wasn’t concerned about how well the pastor side of me and the parent side of me meshed (or didn’t). At age 4, my son was still unaware that any sort of love could cause any sort of objection.

But as years went by and I continued to serve this same small-town – and, truly, mostly wonderful – congregation, our son, now the older of two, grew toward middle-school age; he is now almost 12 (What?! “Where is the little boy I carried? When did he grow to be so tall?”). Little by little, his black-and-white world has blurred into gray, stirring questions and emotions in him. More and more, his father and I are unwilling to let challenging matters of human relationship slip by without grabbing on and harnessing them as “teaching moments.”  

Like the time, last fall, when he spouted at the dinner table (I don’t even recall about what), “That’s so GAY!” To which I replied, calmly but firmly, “I don’t ever want to hear that expression again, and I’ll tell you why.” My husband and I went on to have a long, open conversation with him about homosexuality (clearly too long for his taste, and perhaps too open as well, but so be it – Greg and I have never treated any topic as taboo).

Actually, I was proud of our “tween” for engaging with us, posing questions, voicing discomfort, and starting to move, I believe – even in just 20 minutes – to a place of deeper understanding. (It helps that we have gay friends and relatives who are married/partnered, to whom we could refer, putting real faces on what could otherwise seem abstract.) I know he’ll keep growing in open-mindedness because that’s the environment in which he lives.

But, I had long been concerned – and now my concern was becoming practical – what if an environment of open-mindedness was not what surrounded him at church? – and at the church his mother pastored, no less? Worse, what if I, in order to keep lines of communication open with all parishioners, tiptoed around the matter of homosexuality with certain people? And what if my son heard me doing so... and wondered, or even asked aloud, there, why I was less tolerant of conservative views at home than at church?

So, as pastor of a congregation not bold enough to even discuss the issue – no one, but no one, signed up when I followed the urging of our denominational leaders and offered a study on proposed policy changes regarding homosexuality – let alone bold enough to welcome an openly gay person or couple, I feared my actions at church might, someday soon, prove confusing to our kids in light of what we as parents try to teach at home.

I’ve always valued authenticity in myself and others. More than words can say, I wish I had found in myself the boldness to declare my support of the LGBT community openly from the position of my pastoral role, and to urge parishioners to reconsider biblical interpretations they were previously taught. But rightly or wrongly, I felt other matters carried broader import for the congregation at that place and time. (I am heartened that at least a few people in the congregation were and are open and accepting, if quietly.)

In the end, though the desire to present myself genuinely across the board and before my children was not the primary reason I went “on leave” from parish ministry, I admit relief that I can now talk openly with them about two men or two women who love each other unto marriage, without having to worry whether my words at church measure up. Of course, I’m also aware of the sad irony that my service to the church threatened to become an obstacle to the type of parenting I believe I am called, as a Christian disciple, to do.

I didn’t have it in me to do much advocacy as a pastor, but I am eager to do it as a parent. I couldn’t sway a whole congregation, but, God help me, I will do everything I possibly can to sway the hearts of the two young boys for whom God has given my husband and me direct responsibility.