Conference to appeal decision on Stroud

Judicial Council being
asked to rule on case
involving lesbian pastor

United Methodist News Service
The Eastern Pennsylvania Conference is appealing the April 29 decision to reinstate the credentials of an admittedly homosexual pastor.
Bishop Marcus Matthews of Valley Forge, Pa., announced May 3 that he was authorizing legal counsel “to proceed immediately with filing an appeal with the Judicial Council of The United Methodist Church.”
The appeal must be filed with the denomination’s “supreme court” by May 29. The court’s next scheduled meeting is Oct. 26-29 in Houston.
The Northeastern Jurisdiction Committee on Appeals set aside a December verdict against the Rev. Irene Elizabeth “Beth” Stroud. The appeals committee said evidence showed Stroud violated church law but determined that the trial court had made legal errors.
The Eastern Pennsylvania Conference trial court found Stroud guilty of violating the denomination’s rule against “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” being appointed as pastors.
Stroud was associate pastor of First UMC of Germantown in Philadelphia. She remained on staff of the church as a layperson.
Stroud said she had met with Matthews May 3. She said the bishop returned her ordination credentials and offered to reappoint her to her former position, but she declined the appointment until her case was concluded.
“I thought the right thing for me to do was to turn it down,” Stroud said, explaining that she didn’t want to be a “political football” for various parts of the denomination. “That could just trivialize what ordination is and means.”
Stroud said she would be placed on voluntary leave of absence as a clergy member but would continue her work as a lay minister at the Germantown congregation.
  “While losing my credentials in the trial was painful for me and for my family and for the whole congregation, it has also been for me a time of healing and reconciliation,” she said.
Stroud characterized the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference as a “close little family” that she’s been involved with for years, and she has appreciated the opportunity to be open and honest with people about her committed relationship with another woman, Chris Paige.
Although she has received some “very negative messages from people that I don’t know,” Stroud said that all who do know her “have been very loving and very respectful…and have wanted to know about my journey and learn from it.”
The entire experience, she said, “can teach and model a way of talking about this issue that is more honest, more open, more Christian and more respectful.”
Stroud said she’s realized that while some very strong liberal and conservative voices are heard on homosexuality within the denomination, “there are an awful lot of people in the middle who have never had a serious conversation about this issue at their church.”
Her case, she hopes, will “put a human face on something that otherwise might be abstract.”