Ordination Disorientation
Rev. Jonathan Fuller and Rev. Lauren Wright were both ordained at the 2022 Virginia Annual Conference. Lauren is an Elder serving as a pastor in Chesapeake. Jonathan is a Deacon serving in student leadership development at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. The views expressed in this post are their own and not the views of any organization with which they are affiliated.
As we’ve navigated the United Methodist ordination process, we have long imagined the feeling of joy that would come when being ordained. We envisioned a great celebration having finally accomplished the goal that we’d been working on for so many years.
This wholly joy-filled season of celebration has not been our lived reality. Since hearing of our recommendations for ordination in February, we’ve felt a variety of bittersweet emotions. Alongside the joy we anticipated, there is profound gratitude for the people who have journeyed alongside us and cheered us on. There is guilt, because while we’ve reached this place of having our calls to ministry affirmed, our system continues to harm others and exclude them from this very process. There is deep sadness for those that should be ordained with us, but for a variety of reasons were not. There is frustration for the ways in which the system is broken and helplessness for our perceived inability to fix it.
This tension we’re experiencing is not only a question of ordination vows, but also one of baptismal vows. As we continue to wrestle with these vows, some questions linger at the forefront of our minds: what if the system we’re vowing to uphold perpetuates the very injustice or oppression that we’ve vowed to resist? What does it mean to vow to uphold a system designed to exclude? What does allyship and solidarity with the LGBTQIA+ community look like when we are now full members of an institution that rejects full inclusion?
This season, full of joy and grief, celebration and sadness, frustration and privilege, has been disorienting. Our privileged identities that made this new stage in our ministry possible mean our disorientation does not carry the same personal weight as those excluded from this process because of who they love. We name that our system, denomination, and conference are flawed while also naming that there are many working for lasting change. While we might see glimmers of hope of a church that fully welcomes and embraces our LGBTQIA+ kin, we have offered ourselves in ministry to a church that simply is not there yet. This church that we love and by which we have been loved has been both a vessel of God’s grace and an instrument of harm.
Our experiences at Annual Conference, including our own ordination service, testify that all of these things are true – there is joy, there is pain, there is guilt, there is celebration, there is deep need for change. And yet, through our ordination, we’ve also experienced a deep sense of freedom, freedom we vow not to squander. We will join the many others in the Virginia Conference who have courageously exercised their freedom to make space for all called by God to experience what we are privileged to receive: the freedom to be all of who we are.
May it be so.