Transgender person commissioned as deacon

United Methodist News Service ^ | 6/5/2017 | Heather Hahn

[bkopto]

The Northern Illinois Conference on the evening of June 4 commissioned an openly transgender individual as a provisional deacon.

The United Methodist Church has ordained transgender clergy before. However, the Rev. M Barclay is the first openly “non-binary trans person” to become a United Methodist deacon, according to Reconciling Ministries Network. Non-binary means Barclay identifies as neither male nor female but as gender neutral.

Barclay — who uses singular they pronouns — serves as director of communications at Reconciling Ministries Network. The unofficial United Methodist group, based in Chicago, advocates for full inclusion of LGBTQ people in all aspects of church life.

“For so long, I’ve longed to be a pastoral presence in the world — and certainly you can do that without a collar — but we have ordination for a reason, and part of that is that I can publicly identify as a pastor now,” Barclay said.

“I know it’s not particularly common in The United Methodist Church, but I intend to wear a collar every single day because for a person like me to navigate society in a collar provides some profound and urgently needed pastoral opportunities, particularly for queer and trans people.”

[Cedar]

“Their women exchanged the normal practices of sexual intercourse for something which is abnormal and unnatural.

Similarly the men, turning from natural intercourse with women, were swept into lustful passions for one another. Men with men performed these shameful horrors, receiving, of course, in their own personalities the consequences of sexual perversity.”

(New Testament, Romans 1:26, 27)

[CptnObvious]

It is not a slippery slope. It is a staircase with each step deliberately taken.

Each step more slippery than the one before. And each one taken that much harder to step back.

[Lee N. Field]

Can't tell from the pic what this individual started as.

Sooooo.....