A Gay Pastor Leaves His Santa Ana Flock, Exposing the United Methodist Church's LGBT Rift
Hymn No. 558 in the 960-page United Methodist Hymnal is "We Are the Church," and the chorus to this call for Christian unity echoes through the high-arched ceiling at Santa Ana United Methodist Church (UMC). It's Pentecost, the day that commemorates when the Holy Spirit came to the Apostles, and the multicultural congregation—Latinos, Filipinos, Cambodians, Tongans, whites and blacks—sing from their worn, wooden benches: "I am the church/You are the church/We are the church together!"
The Reverend Cedrick Bridgeforth, a bespectacled African-American who wears a neatly pressed, white, short-sleeved shirt, joins in before yielding the pulpit to other pastors during the joint service. It's his last month of ministry. He looks back at the altar, on which rests stoles marking different phases of his career. They will serve as props for his farewell address.
The inspiration for it came earlier that morning, when Bridgeforth saw a puzzle-piece-decorated stole in his closet, the one he wore while speaking at the LGBT-inclusive Reconciling United Methodists Texas Conference in Houston in March. "It took a lot to get to Houston last week," Bridgeforth tells the faithful in his Alabama drawl. "There's a whole journey that led to that. That's not where the story begins; that's actually where it ends."
Bridgeforth continues with the story of his stoles. He drapes a kente-patterned stole over his shoulders and recalls the Afrocentric Crossroads UMC in Compton, where the reverend started as a youth minister. He cloaks himself with a surfboard-decorated one gifted by UMC Bishop Minerva Carcaño upon his appointment to Santa Ana in 2015. But Bridgeforth sets aside a shorter white stole with colorful praying handprints sewn in, a gift given when he sought to become a candidate for bishop in the Western Jurisdiction of the UMC, which stretches from Hawaii to Colorado and all the way up to Montana.
Read more: http://www.ocweekly.com/news/a-gay-pastor-leaves-his-santa-ana-flock-exposing-the-united-methodist-churchs-lgbt-rift-8217641
