Every three years, I have to go to sexual misconduct/boundaries training.
It is required for all clergy in my conference of the United Methodist Church. We hold a lot of power in our role over the lives of parishioners and breaking that sacred trust by misusing that power to exploit someone else is absolutely unacceptable.
We are in fact held to a higher standard because of the weight of the responsibility we hold in the lives of the people we serve.
Facing the reality of our history of this kind of abuse is important.
Acknowledging the acts of our colleagues who continue to perpetuate this kind of abuse has not been easy. In fact, it feels like it is often swept under the rug, rather than actually confronted and named so that congregations and people might find healing.
Is sitting through the training comfortable? No. In fact, as a woman, sometimes hearing the comments of my colleagues is incredibly uncomfortable and I wonder why I’m there and why they aren’t paying more attention.
Often it doesn’t feel like to goes far enough to really be able to create change… because honestly, it keeps happening. And the training itself can be incredibly heteronormative – typically using examples of a male pastor and a female congregation member…. well, what do you do it it is a same gender situation?
Sometimes, as a woman, I wish the training addressed how sexism and misconduct and boundary violations can go the other way and how we might protect ourselves from them. Anecdotally, women in ministry experience that far more often than our male colleagues do and so there might be different things we need out of such a training. Or, maybe we should acknowledge that a training addressing the particular experiences of women might also benefit the men in the room. Oh… let’s also not forget transgender colleagues…
It isn’t perfect… but this kind of training is important.
It is essential.
And calling out the misbehavior of clergy does not make me anti-clergy.
Critiquing the training doesn’t mean I’m anti-training.
Learning and acknowledging the sexist history of my tradition does not make me anti-church.
All are about a love of the work and the institution and the desire to in fact make it better.
I have thought about how this same view about sexism and abuse and clergy could be substituted with and applied to our national conversation on racism and excessive force and police. Acknowledging the patterns and the history and misbehavior of particular officers doesn’t make me anti-police… Lifting up the need for training doesn’t mean I think everything these officers are doing is wrong… Maybe like the critiques I would make of our boundary training, there are things that these law enforcement officers are experiencing that could be better addressed if the training were modified… Just like in my own experience and tradition, I look at this with a critical eye because I care for the people who have been called to the work and because I care for the communities they serve. I just want it all to be better.
Our conference made a commitment this summer at our annual conference to work towards becoming an anti-racist conference.
We should probably make a commitment to actually be an anti-sexist and anti-homophobic conference right along with it. Because we aren’t there yet, either.
I see it as acknowledging the places we have failed and where we have room to do oh so much better.
It’s what church is all about, after all, right?
Being able to see your sin, repent of it, and step into transformation.
We can’t always see it ourselves.
Sometimes we need to be challenged and made uncomfortable to see these truths.
Like when Nathan confronted David.
But the idea is littered all over the words of the prophets as they call out the faults of the nations and the leaders and the people… and challenge them to repent and to do better.
Some of these realities were ones that were going on for generations!
The conversation we are having all across our country on racism exists because we haven’t truly learned our history yet.
We have erased it and swept it aside and ignored it… much like we have given male pastors a slap on the wrist for sexual misconduct and then appointed them to a church with a bigger salary.
I was astonished this summer when I learned parts of our national history in our exploration of the National Parks during worship.
There are countless examples of the beliefs and experiences of people who were indigenous to this land or enslaved by our ancestors that we have either forgotten or never been taught.
And perhaps the one that really shocked me the most was to learn more about the Dred Scott case in exploring the Gateway Arch and the Old St. Louis Courthouse. The majority opinion of the Supreme Court wrote that our Constitution demonstrated a “perpetual and impassible barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery.”
We’ve been working on some of this reckoning in the United Methodist Church as well, especially on our history with Native Americans.
We are lamenting and confessing and repenting around the role we played in the Sand Creek Massacre… even as we are celebrating the work of people like John Stewart among the Wynodotte people (https://um-insight.net/in-the-church/umc-global-nature/plan-now-wyandotte-land-return-global-ministries-founding-20/)
Wounds that are not exposed to the air and to the light can fester and become infected.
Light brings healing.
I’m deeply troubled by the actions of our national administration to ban diversity and anti-racism and anti-sexism training not only in the federal government, but now also among any contractors. (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/M-20-34.pdf and https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-combating-race-sex-stereotyping/)
We should feel discomfort at our history.
Because that discomfort is what urges us onward to do better.
We should also see and acknowledge and celebrate the diversity that is all around us.
When Dr. King spoke of how he didn’t want his children to be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, he didn’t mean that he thought our awareness of the beautiful tapestry of our varied pigmentation or culture or differences should be erased.
He was actually critiquing that the threads woven in the Constitution, continued in the Dred Scott decision were not rectified fully by the Emancipation Proclamation. One hundred years later, they were still being felt. The “Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”
He dreamt of a day we could sit together in our differences and all be free.
Our history is complicated…
Our people are, too…
But it is our story. Our history.
And it’s legacy has stretched through and laid the foundations for where we stand today. It is woven into the fabric of who we are and how we got to this place.
Acknowledging that allows us to weave a different thread for future generations.