THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Rev. Dr. Janice Mynchenberg

“Anytime people say that mountain can’t be moved, I say, “God moved two for me.” He moved women get ordained, and then he moved gay and lesbian people who are partnered get ordained.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, May 2023

JW:  Janice, would you please introduce yourself and tell us when and where you were born?

JM:  Janice Mynchenberg. I was born August 26, 1952, in Springfield, Ohio.

JW:  Oh, Women’s History Day, August 26th. How lovely.

JM:  I know. I’ve treasured that my whole life long.

JW:  Tell us a little about your childhood, siblings, background. Anything you think that sort of influenced who you became.

JM:  I’m the oldest of five, and I was born the year my father graduated from college. He started teaching, and my mom was a working nurse. I think the fact that I had a working mother was very important because she was not the kind of person who ever wanted to be a housewife. So, my dad was supportive of that.

JW:  Unusual at the time.

JM:  Yes, very unusual at the time. He also helped her to get through college. She had only been able to get a nursing scholarship, and because it was the only scholarship she got, she became a nurse, but that isn’t what she wanted to do. So, after the kids were in school, my dad put my mom through school so that she got a master’s degree and was able to be a teacher.

JW:  Oh, wow. That’s amazing.

JM:  So, I had a good, strong, model of a woman, who fulfilled her own destiny, desire; and a man who supported that. Which was very different from the way my friends talked about their parents.

JW:  In those years, yes. What was it like being the oldest of five?

JM:  Four of us were born within five years, so we were a pretty close cluster of kids, and then the other came much later. I was ten when my youngest sister was born, so that was more like being an older sister than it was when I was with the other kids. We were more a posse, did everything together, that kind of thing. So, it was important in the sense of learning that you had to deal with consensus, that there wasn’t going to be a leader. We were all going to have our own thing. And my parents were very much committed to the notion that we were a gift from God, and what became of us was in God’s hands. They were meant to be guides, but they were not meant to tell us what had to be done.

JW:  That was unusual also.

JM:  Yes. So, we all became very different people. As adults, we joined very different religious organizations.

JW:  Really?

JM:  Yes. It was just a wonderful thing to have that kind of diversity. I remember one year, a neighbor across the street said to me, “You know, if Hitler was alive, he would want to kill you.” And I thought that was the worst thing I’d ever heard. I went home to my dad, and I said, “What is that about?” My dad started laughing. He says, “Oh, they think we’re Jewish, because the name Mynchenberg sounds like a Jewish name. I really should have gone into politics because Mynchenberg sounds Jewish, but we know it’s German. We’ve got five kids, so people think I’m Catholic.” They just went on and on and on with that kind of thing. The world is a hodgepodge and both of my parents very much had that notion that it was a wide, wide world. And that was a great, great gift to me.

JW:  That is wonderful. When did you become aware of the women’s movement?

JM:  Oh, that was much, much later. I grew up in the Lutheran church, and at the time, they did not ordain women. I had a sense in 9th grade, a very strong moment when I felt called to ministry. I was at summer camp. It was a family camp, and my pastor and his family were there. He took me to a pastor’s meeting, even though I was only in 9th grade, because I was mad at the youth group. I thought they were doing a bunch of frivolous things and I wanted to do some serious Bible study. So, he took me to the pastor’s group.

That night, one of the pastors talked about his faith struggles and how sometimes he didn’t know if he believed what he was called upon to preach. I saw the other pastors talking with him and supporting him and praying for him. And there was just this moment, when the lights went real bright and real dim, as they do out in the country. And in that moment, I said, “Oh God’s, telling me; this is the most important work you can ever do is to make people not lose their connection, help them to keep their connection to God. That’s what you are called to do.” But we didn’t ordain women. So, I just kept quiet about it. I went to a Lutheran college and kept quiet about it because they had just changed the rules to ordain women. And one of my classmates was studying to be a pastor.

JW:  A woman?

JM:  A woman. And everybody talked about how unnatural that was, and how she could get away with it because her dad was a minister and he would pull strings.

JW:  I see.

JM:  That no congregation in their right mind would ever let a woman lead them. That was my college. My Lutheran, liberal arts college with this attitude. So, I just kept quiet about it. We did an inventory of gifts when I arrived, and when I got the results back, skyrocketing above all the other things, was religion as my interest. The counselor who talked to me about it never even mentioned that.

JW:  Really?

JM:  They went down to teaching, which was the next highest, about halfway down. And said, “Well, clearly, you’re meant to be a teacher.” In a Lutheran college.

JW:  Let me ask you this. Were there other roles for women in the Lutheran church?

JM:  There was a deaconess position. You could become a deaconess. And that’s what a couple of people told me I should do, is be a deaconess. But deaconesses were more like nurses and teachers. They were not pastors. They were not studiers of scripture that taught it to everybody else, and that wasn’t what I was interested in doing. So I went to college. I got my degree, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I just played around with Mickey Mouse jobs for a while. I worked at Kmart, Uncle Bill’s, things like that. And then I decided I wanted to go to grad school. And it’s at grad school that I got into the women’s movement.

JW:  What year was that, do you think?

JM:  That was about ’75, ’76. I went out to the University of Oregon in their Comparative Literature program. At that point, I had gotten into a long-distance relationship with a woman in California through letter writing, and we had gotten together once, so I was aware of my own inclination to be with women rather than men; that women were important to me. And I had lived through Anita Bryant.

JW:  Yes, I remember that.

JM:  The greatest thing with Anita Bryant is, I was a senior in high school. We were watching the TV news, and Anita Bryant started talking about getting all the gay teachers out of the schools. And my mother; my mother who had never said word one on the topic before, said back to the television screen, “Oh, stop it. We do not need to get gay people out of education. We need to get people who hate children out of education.”

JW:  Wow, I am impressed.

JM:  Yes, that really blew my mind. And I had not self-identified yet at that point, but it was really important when the time came that I did.

JW:  Yes. Tell us a little about Anita Bryant because people listening may not know.

JM:  Well, Anita Bryant was a singer, and she had been a beauty queen, and she was a spokesperson for Florida Orange Juice. She went on a big campaign in the late 70’s about making sure that gay and lesbian people did not infiltrate the school system and take advantage of all the children and turn them gay. That’s how I remember her.

JW:  She got enormous national press. I was in Philadelphia, and it was all over.

JM:  So that was a huge, huge thing. That was really the first conversation I ever heard about gay and lesbian people, was that television my mother talked back to. We had never discussed the topic at all. Now, my dad, I think my dad had some concerns about me because he had set me down at one point and said, “Listen, Jan, if you want to get boys to date you, you’re going to have to learn not to act so smart all the time. Boys don’t like girls that are smarter than them.” And I said back to my dad, “But why would I want to date somebody who’s stupider than I am?” And he didn’t have an answer for that.

JW:  Yes, that was a good question.

JM:  I think my dad had a clue, but I did not at that point. I just had never been interested in boys.

JW:  So, we’re back to graduate school. You’re doing literature in graduate school. And?

JM:  And there was a novel at that time, I think it was Patricia Nell Warren who wrote it, in which she mentioned a gay support network in Portland, Oregon, and I was in Eugene. So, I called Portland to say, “I need to talk to somebody about this.” And the guy said, “You know what? We didn’t exist until that novel came out, and we decided we’d form this group because we figured people would start calling.”

So, that’s how I got in touch with gay and lesbian organizations who let me know there was an MCC Church in Eugene, which is a church that had special outreach to the LGBTQ. I went to that church, and that’s where I met other women who were involved in women’s issues. Got introduced to Holly Near. Rita May Brown came and talked on the campus, that kind of thing. I joined the Student Alliance on campus, and I went to MCC. There was a housing ordinance issue that came up in Eugene, so I canvassed for that. That was to add sexual orientation to the list of antidiscrimination things, and I canvassed for that. So that’s how I got into the women’s movement, was in grad school.

JW:  So, did that initiative win?

JM:  No, it didn’t. It was narrowly defeated, but subsequently it did. That first time, it was narrowly defeated, and I got really mad at a Presbyterian church, because the woman I was interested in, her father was a Presbyterian minister. So, she took me to the Presbyterian church, and the pastor stood up there and said, “You know, as Christian people, we could vote either way with good conscience.” And I thought, “You S-O-B.” That is not the right position to take as a Christian, I’m telling you, Bub. And I just got furious with the mainline church at that point.

JW:  What were the issues that were of most concern for you around then? Obviously, the LGBTQ, but others?

JM:  Well, I had become real aware that there were different attitudes toward women graduate students than male graduate students. My own father said to me at one point, “Well, if we had to choose between putting you and your brother through college, we’d send him, because he needs that education to get a job and he won’t get it on his own. But if we don’t get it for you, we know you’ll get it.” And I thought, “Well, that’s not fair. I care about it more than he does.”

JW:  Wow, that’s great. So, it’s like you didn’t need the education, not because you’re a girl, but because you are who you are.

JM:  Right. And I would make sure I got it. So, it was real important to me to argue for the equality of women in matters like this, rather than the preference for men as the caretakers, and so forth. At that point, I had said to myself, “If I’m not married by the time I’m 30, I’ll get to live my life the way I want.” So, I was kind of waiting to turn 30. I really was not interested in getting married and having kids and all that. I just was not. So, when I turned 30, it was, “Oh, happy day, now I can go to seminary.”

JW:  Oh, wow. Isn’t that interesting?

JM:  Yes. And that’s what I did when I turned 30, I went to seminary.

JW:  I see. That was the marker for you, 30.

JM:  30. I was free to be my own person.

JW:  Were there other women at the seminary?

JM:  Yes, there were. By that time, we were what was called the second wave to the Lutheran church, and my class in seminary was one-third women. Which was the largest percentage of women they had ever had to deal with.

JW:  Wow. That was in the middle 80’s, right?

JM:  That was the early 80’s. And the seminary professors just had a terrible time, because we women met in a separate chapel one day a week instead of going to chapel with everybody else. And we made a bond that if one woman spoke up in class, another woman would speak up behind her. We wouldn’t let the professors just brush somebody off. We really had a strong women’s group in that seminary. I’m so grateful for the women I went to seminary with. It was very empowering to have that kind of support. I timed it just right.

I still sort of had doubts about it, because women had never been fully present in the church as leaders. But I went to a women’s seminarian conference where someone read the poem by Elizabeth Theorenza. I don’t know if you know her, but she’s a very strong feminist theologian, and she wrote a poem that starts A wandering Aramean was my mother and did a whole history of women in the Bible as being the central players of the story rather than men. I just felt so blessed and affirmed by that. And there was no more doubt in my mind, that this is what I had to do. Even though at the time, the rule said, you could not be gay or lesbian. Not a practice that you could be celibate if you were gay or lesbian, but you could not be partnered. That was the guideline. But I said, “God clearly wants me to do this in spite of that guideline, so I’m doing it.”

JW:  I can see you saying that to yourself, and then you did it.

JM:  Yes. And in my senior year, two critical things for me. One, was my advisor asking me why I wanted to be ordained, and I said, “Well, you know, the church is not a healthy place for women, but there aren’t any healthy places for women, so I might as well serve in the church.” And he said, “How can you look at me after four years of seminary and say, God sends us to healthy places? Healthy places don’t need us. If you know the church is sick, God’s telling you, go heal.” That was important to me.

JW:  And what was the reaction?

JM:  Well, I was like, “Yes, I’ll go heal then.”

JW:  Oh, my goodness. Wow.

JM:  He was so supportive.

JW:  That’s incredible for that time.

JM:  And he was a new advisor to me that year. My former advisor had not been nearly that supportive, so that was a critical time for me to get that message. The other thing that happened was I was seeing a counselor at the time, because I was discerning whether I was really doing the right thing. And the counselor said to me, “No congregation in their right mind is ever going to call a lesbian person to be their pastor.” And when she said that to me, I said, “Well, the thing is, God told me to do it, so God will find a way. That’s all there is to it.” When we graduated, I was the first woman who had a call.

JW:  That’s what I was going to ask you next.

JM:  Yes, I was the first woman who had a call. So, all right, God’s looking out for me.

JW:  Where did you go?

JM:  I went to Wisconsin, out in the Dodgeville area, which is where Land’s End is centered. I was in a real weird situation where I was a part time associate pastor to the big church in Dodgeville, and then I was a part time pastor of two small congregations out in the country, which is where I lived. So, it was a crazy call, but I gave it to myself because when the bishop was talking about the openings and he said that, I said, “Wow, that’s interesting. Bingo, you’re going there.”

JW:  You were a busy woman then. My goodness. Do you know what happened to the other women in your class? Did many of them get a call?

JM:  Yes, most of them did get a call within the first year. Because by then, we were mid 80’s, and 1970 is when they changed the rules. So, people were a little more used to the notion of a woman being among the candidates. Most of them got positions as associate pastors or in country churches. Nobody got, like, one of those great calls that everybody dreams of getting. But everybody got a call except for one person who was postponed for mental health issues.

JW:  Oh, well, that’s a different story.

JM:  Yes.

JW:  And do you know if other women in your class were lesbians?

JM:  Well, here’s the thing. While I was in seminary, two churches out in California decided to ordain lesbian and gay people, even though it was against the rules, because these were partnered lesbian and gay people. They got sanctioned and there was a huge controversy. I signed the petition supporting what they had done, a bunch of my classmates signed the petition for it. So, it was a big issue when I was in seminary, and I thought “Okay, so God meant me to be here at this time so that I could be supportive of this.” And it turned out, I’m not sure about everybody, but in time, I found out about three other women. I attended the wedding of one and knew about the wedding of another. And the other remained single.

JW:  I see. But the people who were married, they got positions?

JM:  Yes, but they did that before they were married. They were still single when they went out into the field.

JW:  I see. Now, has the rule changed since then?

JM:  Oh, yes, ma’am, the rule did change, but not for a long, long time. And that was a terrible issue for me because I was partnered when I went to seminary.

JW:  But a lot of people didn’t know, I’m guessing.

JM:  Right. Though, some suspected. But my parents knew, and my parents found the apartment in German Village in Columbus, Ohio, for my partner and I, so we didn’t live on campus. We lived off campus, and I commuted into seminary. A couple of people suspected things, but nobody ever actually said anything except my first advisor when we were getting our internship assignments, which meant you went to another city to serve under a pastor, asked me if Diantha was going to go with me, and I said to him, “No, why would she?” Because I put Diantha through college. She was at Ohio State at that time, so she was getting her undergrad at Ohio State.

JW:  And did she go with you?

JM:  No, she did not go with me on internship. I mean, it was silly because she’d have to interrupt a year of school to do it, and I’d be too busy to be her partner anyway. So, we just did the year apart and then I came back and lived in the apartment with her senior year.

JW:  Oh, I see. So, you did come back. So that year I’m going to assume that the congregations, plural, were accepting of you?

JM:  As a woman, yes, but I was not identified as lesbian. I was the 7th intern that they had had, and the one before me was female. I was their second female, so they were fine.

JW:  I see. You weren’t so strange.

JM:  No, but I remember my supervisor, the pastor, in one of our discussions was like, “I noticed that you don’t like to use the male pronoun for God.” And I said, “No, I don’t.” And he said, “Well, that could be a problem in ministry.” And I said, “Well, has anybody complained about it?” He said, “Well, no, I don’t think most people realize you’re doing it, but I do.” And I said, “Well, if people aren’t complaining, I must be doing it okay.” And he said, “Well, yes, I guess so.”

JW:  I have to say I had a button around that time that said, God is coming, and she’s pissed.

JM:  Yes, God language was another huge topic in seminary. I remember talking to one of my professors who was saying, “But Janice, women pastors, and talking about God as a woman, that puts sex in the pulpit.” And I said, “Well, maybe for you, sir, but do you not think that when everything was all male, sex was in the pulpit for women?” He said, “Oh, I never thought about that.”

JW:  It’s so interesting. It’s just so, in a way, hard now for me to get my head around what it was like then. I mean, obviously we still have aways to go, but how women were just so discounted. Well, so then you say you came back to Ohio?

JM:  I was in Toledo for internship and then came back to Columbus. Diantha stayed in the apartment while I was up in Toledo.

JW:  I’m sorry, I thought you were in Wisconsin. Did I lose a track?

JM:  I was in Wisconsin when I got my first call. This is during seminary when I did internship where you’re a student pastor.

JW:  Oh, I see. Okay.

JM:  That was my student pastor year. When I graduated, I went to Wisconsin.

JW:  Okay, now I got it.

JM:  Diantha stayed behind in Ohio to finish up her undergrad, so she was a year yet in Ohio before she came out to Wisconsin.

JW:  But she then did come to Wisconsin with you?

JM:  She did.

JW:  Okay, and how long were you in Wisconsin?

JM:  I was in Wisconsin, oh my gosh, ’88 is when I graduated. The other thing about 1988, it was the year of the new Lutheran Church. The Evangelical Lutheran Church, which was a merger of three Lutheran bodies. So, it was a whole new church, and they were finding new ways of doing things. And that was very exciting to be the first group to graduate into that new church, because that meant we were important in forming what it would become. And one of the great things was when they were voting on who should be bishop, there was a woman candidate for bishop. She didn’t win, but there was a woman candidate.

JW:  Which was significant, obviously.

JM:  Yes, because it’s like, “We’re on our way, baby. We’re on our way.” And I was the second woman to serve in my position in Wisconsin. The three congregations had had a woman pastor before me.

JW:  How did they react when your partner joined you?

JM:  Well, it was kind of an odd thing. She came and she went to graduate school while I was pastoring. So, they thought, “Okay. So, she came out for her education and they know each other.” They were pretty good about it until a group of people got upset with me and then they decided something was really wrong about it and they went to the bishop. And so there that was, that was toward the end of my time there.

JW:  Were they upset because they got that you were partners? Is that it?

JM:  No, they were upset because they were losing control of the church, because I had been there long enough and I had stood up to them on some issues. They were beginning to fear that I was going to stay there a long time, and they were going to lose their control because they were the big money givers. One of the things I did, was I stopped posting how much everybody gave each year, and they hated me for doing that. It was stuff like that.

So, they went to the bishop about me, and we had a bit of a church fight about what was going on, because the congregation was aware they had gone to the bishop about me, and the congregation did not like it. They started talking about how Diantha and I were a lesbian couple and the congregation didn’t want to hear word one about it. It was a kind of situation where that kind of tension kept you from being able to do normal ministry. So, my bishop moved me to another congregation.

JW:  And how did that go?

JM:  Well, it was the other side of Madison, Wisconsin. I had been out on the west side and now I was on the east side, and Diantha got a job in Racine working for the prison system as a teacher. She was in Racine and I was in Rio, which was the name of it. So, we were not living together at the time. And the congregation was a weird feeling place, because they wanted to police every little thing I did. They told me I had to leave my garage door up so they’d know whether I was home or not. Odd things like that. And I said, “Well, I’m not doing that. I’m closing my garage door like a normal person.” But I suspect they came into my house from time to time.

JW:  Oh, my gosh.

JM:  Yeah, I think they did. There was one time when a car started up my driveway and I opened my front door and it backed right back out again, little things like that. And then, things would be moved, and I’d think, “I didn’t move that.” I think they were coming in and spying on me. Anyway, long and short of it, my support committee told me that I just didn’t fit their family model and I needed to find another church or things were going to get ugly. But I shouldn’t have a problem, because I was a good pastor, so the bishop should be able to give me something really fast.

This happened after the leading financial person in the congregation called me to talk to me and he said, “I don’t like the way you’re running things. If you’ll come and meet with me once a week, I’ll tell you what your priorities ought to be and you can stay here.” And I said, “Well, the problem with that is, you weren’t called to be the pastor, and I was, so I’m not going to do it.” And that’s when the trouble started.

JW:  Yes, I can see that. You were not controllable.

JM:  I never was controllable. What happened is, my cat disappeared, and that was just like the final straw for me. I went to the Senate office and I said, “I need to leave ministry because I’m just falling apart in this place.” And the assistant to the bishop said, “You are not leaving ministry because you’re too good a pastor. So, you are going to go into counseling. You are going to go into emergency care mode, where you do nothing but what you absolutely must do, and you take dog-on-good-care of yourself. And we’re going to come in there and we’re going to negotiate a severance package and get you out, and then we’re going to figure out what’s wrong with those people.”

So that’s what they did. And it turned out that this congregation had driven out six of the last seven pastors. Doing things like, one Sunday, the pastor came up to the pulpit and there was a note saying, “Nobody likes you; you should resign.” Things like that. And another pastor they fired while they were away on vacation. They uncovered all of this stuff. This congregation had always been vicious to its pastors, but they didn’t know that, because this congregation came from a different Lutheran church than the Senate officers were from, so they didn’t know the background of this church. So, they said, “We’re going to put an intentional interim pastor in there to straighten them out. And we’ll get you a new call.” And I said, “Well, I can’t interview because all I can think about is how horrible this whole experience was here.” I knew within three months it wasn’t going to work.

JW:  And so how long were you there?

JM:  I was there about a year and a half. I was afraid to tell them at three months that it was a failure. So, they said, “Okay, then we’ll make you an interim pastor.” So, what that meant was, I didn’t have to interview for a pastor’s job and fill out call papers and all that kind of stuff. The bishop assigned me to congregations that were between pastors and needed somebody to help them sort through their problems. I had to take a special training to do that, which I did during the sabbatical that they had gotten me with the severance money.

I took the training, and then I became a pastor of a church that was in a worship war. I did such a good job with that, and I liked so much that I was solving problems, and had clear goals. And I said, “I want to keep doing this.” So that’s what I did most of my professional life, was I served as an interim pastor, which meant I moved around a lot, but it also meant congregations didn’t worry too much about my private life. Because I was stepping in and stepping out, so nobody looked too close. That worked well for me, because the guidelines still said I should not have a partner.

JW:  I see. Did your partner move with you a lot?

JM:  Yes, she did. She took a variety of different jobs. Sometimes she couldn’t move right away, but she always did eventually. And it worked really well until the issue came up about ordaining partnered gay and lesbian pastors in the Lutheran Church; the big battles about that. I was serving as an interim pastor at the time, and I preached a sermon about the reasons why we needed to consider this. And having preached that sermon, somebody in the congregation called the bishop and said, “She came out as a lesbian on Sunday morning.” So, the bishop called me in and said, “I want to see that sermon.” I gave him the sermon, and he said, “There’s nothing in here. You didn’t say it. You’re just talking about why you think it’s good for us to talk about it”. I said, “Yes, I know.” He said, “Well, did you deviate from your sermon?” I said, “I don’t.” “Well,” he says, “Let me explain to you how to talk to people about these issues.”

I said, “Excuse me, but didn’t my former bishop tell you that I am a lesbian?” And he said “No, he did not,” because I had told my former bishop. And I said, “Well, I am.” He said, “Oh, okay.” And I said, “I think for all concerned, when I finish this interim, I should simply take a time-out while the church resolves this, because if they’re going to be fighting this issue everywhere I go, I don’t want to be the cause of the argument.”

So, I went on leave from call. That bishop was against ordaining partnered people, but he helped me to get a position in the United Church of Christ. We had a full ecumenical partnership with them, and they were pro-gay. So, he called their bishop and said, “I have a pastor. Will you take her? We need to protect her Call, because she’s a dog-on-good pastor.”

JW:  I don’t get the difference. Like, it’s okay for you to be gay or lesbian, but just not have a partner?

JM:  Just not have sex with anybody.

JW:  Oh, so if you’re single, you’re not having sex, is that it?

JM:  That’s what they believed.  It’s not true, but it’s what they believed.  So, I went sideways into a different denomination and served as an interim pastor there for three years. And the rules changed in that time in the Lutheran Church. I was at one of the conventions where it was being debated. I was with the protest group that went, and we stood in front of the whole assembly while they voted. I looked directly at the two bishops I had dealt with, one of whom was pro, but could do nothing for me, and the other who was anti, and got me into the UCC. I had looked at both of them in the eyes when they voted.

The rules changed while I was in the UCC, so I went back to a new bishop and said, “I’m ready to come back to the Lutheran Church because now everything’s fine.” And he said, “Well, terrific, because you’re a good pastor. We want to have you back.” And I said, “Good. And you know, I have a partner.” And he said, “No, nobody told me that. Okay, well, now I can’t find a place for you.” I said, “Okay.” So, I found a position where I was a chaplain to a senior community. And I did that for about two years, until the bishop could find me a place in the church again. And then I started back doing interim work again.

JW:  Wow, what a saga. My goodness.

JM:  I know. And every year I would wonder if I was still going to be an ELCA pastor at the end of the year, because at any time I could have been dismissed for misconduct. Throughout my whole career, I could have been dismissed for misconduct until they changed the rules.

JW:  Misconduct, just because you were who you were.

JM:  Because I was partnered. If I’d been single it wouldn’t have been a problem. But I was partnered. That’s misconduct. So, I was practicing civil disobedience throughout most of my career until the rules got changed.

JW:  What year was that?

JM:  I don’t remember exactly. It was in the early 2000s. 2004, something like that. And then the rules changed and I was finally legal, so that was good.

JW:  This is kind of personal. You don’t have to answer, but did you ever get married?

JM:  Yes, I did. Diantha and I got married in an MCC Church, which is the church that has the outreach to gay and lesbian folks. We got married in that church a long, long time ago. I’m not sure exactly when we did it, but we date ourselves from January 1984. We’ve been together since January 1984 and we got married sometime in the mid 90’s when I was serving.

I had finished with the UCC and was with the senior community. We got married in an MCC church. Not a legal marriage, because we were living in Tennessee. We had a church marriage. We didn’t get legally married until, what was it, 2016, ’17, something like that. I don’t remember because it didn’t matter to me, but it mattered to my parents. They wanted to see me married. So, what happened was, when my mother was dying, she gave me her wedding ring, and she said, “I want you to use this when you finally marry Diantha. And I’ve told your father he’s to go to the wedding.” So, we did get married. I was in D.C. at the time, serving at the Georgetown Lutheran in D.C. and that’s where we got married, Georgetown Lutheran.

JW:    That’s lovely.

JM:  Legally married.

JW:  Yes, legally. I’m sure you felt like you were married all those years anyway.

JM:  January will be 40 years we consider ourselves to have been married. That was the first place we lived where it was legal for us to do it. So, I had my mother’s ring. We bought a ring for Diantha and we got married in Georgetown Lutheran Church.

JW:  How long were you in D.C.

JM:  I was in D.C. I think five years. I lived in Arlington and served at Georgetown.

JW:  I’m going to guess that you continued to be an activist all through your years, and even now. Tell us some stuff you’re doing now.

JM:  Well, one of the things in the past that I did that I do want to mention is Mel White came to Madison, Wisconsin when I was serving in a congregation there, because the Madison legislature was debating same sex marriage, and he wanted to find some clergy that would speak up about it. So, we were invited to a gathering of pastors, and I was the only Lutheran who went to this gathering. We decided to appoint a committee and I was on the committee to write the Madison Declaration, which called the church to account for its discrimination against gay and lesbian people, and all the harm it had done, and to support the marriage.

Out of that, we published it as a full-page ad in the Newspaper, and then the evangelicals published a full-page rebuttal, and then the far right published an even deeper rebuttal of it. So, we invited all of the clergy who had signed this, because I got lots of Lutherans to sign it. We invited all the clergy that signed it to come to a Bible study together. And we spent twelve weeks together, half of it taught by the liberal churches, half taught by the evangelicals on the issue. And at the end of it, nobody changed their position. But the liberals said, “My gosh, you guys do have a pastoral heart. We always thought you were just bible thumpers, but you really do care about people.” And they said, “Well, we always thought you were just political nerds, but we see you care about the Bible and God. So, let’s start another Bible study together on families.”

I’m really proud of that moment. That we got all those clergy together like that. I left Wisconsin, so I didn’t get into the second Bible study. I don’t know how it fared, but I was really proud of that. That was my strongest pastoral moment. And then, the church that I went to serve was in Memphis, Tennessee. After I had been there two years as the interim, I said I was going to teach a class on sexual ethics. My president came to me and said, “Three of our important members are really, really mad about this because they say you’re just going to push a gay and lesbian agenda on the congregation.”

And I said, “Excuse me, that’s all they think sexual ethics is about?” They said, “Well, but we know you promoted it up north, so we figured down here you were going to promote it.” I said, “Who told you this?” “I’m not telling you.” I said, “Yes you are. Tell me exactly who it is because I want to talk to those three people.” He eventually gave me the names. I took the book to each of them and I showed them all the different issues that we were going to discuss, and they said, “Oh, okay.” It just so happened, we had a lesbian couple that was attending church about that time, so that’s what made them afraid. But they came to the discussion and everybody saw how normal they were, so everybody calmed down.

JW:  Well, that’s amazing.

JM:  Well, I had been there long enough that they trusted me. That was the thing. If I had come in doing that first thing, probably not. And that was the first church where I was known as lesbian.

JW:  I see. Where was that again?

JM:  Memphis, Tennessee. Well, actually, it was in Cordova, which is a suburb of Memphis. Tennessee. Bible belt, baby.

JW:    Yes, that’s amazing. So, you’re now in Florida?

JM:  I’m now in Florida. When I left D.C., my last interim position was D.C., I came here to Florida and I told the Senate office that I thought I had one more, good interim ministry left in me before retirement. And they tried to find me one, and they couldn’t. But they told me about this little congregation in Oviedo that couldn’t afford more than a half time person that had been waiting two years, and had not even had a single candidate interview. Their interim pastor wanted to move on, so they wondered if I would finish up the interim.

And I said, “Well, they don’t need an interim. If they’ve had two years of interim, they need a pastor.” And they said, “Well, would you be the pastor?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know if I even can be a normal pastor anymore because I’m so used to the freedom you have as an interim.” Because you are representing the bishop when you go as the interim pastor. So, if you tell a congregation this has to be done before you can call a pastor, they have to deal with it. You have a lot of power as an interim that you don’t have as a regularly called pastor.

One congregation, for example, had trouble with the IRS, and I said, “You’re going to pay the IRS off before you call the next pastor.” They said, “We can’t afford to.” And I said, “Well, yes, you better, or you’re not going to be able to call a pastor, the bishop has told me.” A lot of belly aching, but they finally did it. You could do things like that, but you can’t as a regular pastor. So, I don’t know if I can be a regular pastor. And they said, “Well, how about if we make you a limited term pastor? You serve for a year and see if it works?”

JW:  Interesting.

JM:  I said, “Well, I’ll think about it.” The thing is, this little congregation in Oviedo was the second church in Florida to become reconciled in Christ, which means gay supporting. They did that after the Pulse shooting. And they said, “So we know they’ll accept you. They’ll accept Diantha” which they did in D.C. too, Georgetown did it in D.C.

I went and I interviewed, sort of as a favor to the bishop. But the call committee and I had such a good time talking, that at the end of it I said, “Well, I’ll consider really coming.” And they said, “Good, because this Friday we have you set up to meet with our council, and then the following Sunday, we want you to preach the Congregation so that we can call you and get you here fast.” So, it was a whirlwind courtship. July will be five years that I’ve been there.

JW:  Okay, that’s great. So, you’re not retiring?

JM:  Oh, no, I’m having too good a time, because these are terrifically, supportive people. And what I’m doing now, is our Senate has a lay education program, and I’ve been asked by them to teach a segment on gay lesbian issues in the church.

JW:  Oh, my goodness.

JM:  That’s what I’m working now, is designing that curriculum. That’s what I’m doing at the moment.

JW:  Well, you need to maybe copyright that curriculum and get it around to other people.

JM:  Well, we’ll see how it turns out. Because what they do with this lay ministry program, is you record five lectures and you give assignments, and work with students that way. So, we’ll see how that works out.

JW:  I see. So, it’s not in person, so you might be able to adapt it to all different situations. That’s interesting.

JM:  That’s what I’m doing at the moment.

JW:  And it sounds like this is the right place for you right now.

JM:  Oh, my goodness. Yes. My first pastor’s conference here at the senate, when you talk about being a troublemaker; every year they have a gathering for all the clergy. And they had a speaker, and they kept talking about all these different groups. “We got to support Black people, we got to support Hispanics, we got to support poor people, we got to stand up for women,” all this kind of stuff. Never breathed a word about LGBTQIA +. Not a word about it. And then, this guest speaker that they had, toward the end of the second day, did a Bible study on the story of the Ethiopian in the Book of Acts. And he’s a eunuch, that the Christian missionary baptizes and accepts fully as a member of the Christian church. So, the speaker says, “How do you think that made the Ethiopian feel?” And everybody’s going, “Oh, he was so grateful. He was so happy.” And I stood up and I said, “I think he thought, it’s about damn time. What took you so long to realize that I’m as much a child of God as you are?”

JW:  I think you’re probably right on that one.

JM:  I’m known in the Senate for being that pastor.

JW:  People know who you are. That’s wonderful.

JM:  I’ve been a feisty gal, and Diantha is a pretty feisty gal too.

JW:  And she’s found a place there in Florida, too, I assume?

JM:   She’s retired. We came to Florida and she said, “I’m not working anymore.”

JW:  Well, this has been wonderful. As we close, do you have any kind of closing comments? Any sort of thoughts you want to add?

JM:  Well, the thing is, my sense of call, that I was chosen by God to do this ministry, has been really important to me. And from the beginning I said to myself, “The change is going to be slow and it probably won’t come in my lifetime. But I’m part of what’s going to change this church.” And I was just flabbergasted when the rules changed in my lifetime. So anytime people say that mountain can’t be moved, I say, “Well, God moved two for me.” He moved women get ordained, and then he moved gay and lesbian people who are partnered get ordained. Those were two huge mountains that moved in my lifetime. So don’t tell me we can’t move that mountain.