My husband had to quit his Methodist ministry for being gay. The new rules on LGBTQ clergy are long overdue.

We had just gotten settled into the second-floor apartment of a house in the Rockhill neighborhood of Kansas City, Mo., when my husband burst through the door with disturbing news. A psychological test given to the entering class at St. Paul’s School of Theology, a Methodist seminary, indicated he was gay. If that were true, he might not be able to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a Methodist minister. Tears filled his eyes as he explained the test results to me. “But you’re not gay!” I insisted. “We know that!”

The incident, in the fall of 1969, was unsettling, but we soon moved past it. We loved each other very much.

Three years later, after he graduated from seminary and was ordained, the Rev. Michael L. Collins took his first church assignment as pastor of a congregation in a white, working-class neighborhood of Portland, Ore., our hometown. We lived across the street in a three-story, four-bedroom parsonage, which came with the job. I had never lived in such a large and beautiful place.

As Mike preached the social justice message of the Gospel, I became the dutiful minister’s wife, inviting church lay leaders over to the parsonage for Sunday pot-roast dinner. I began teaching Sunday school.

Late one summer afternoon in 1974, Mike summoned me from the parsonage to his office in the church. He paced the floor in front of me. When he spoke, there was a sense of urgency in his voice. “I’ve just tested positive for an STD, and you will have to be tested,” he told me. Pause. “I got it from a man.”

When Mike came out, he faced an impossible choice: Because the United Methodist Church forbade LGBTQ Methodists from being ordained and serving as parish ministers, he could either keep his ministry and continue to live a lie, or he could acknowledge his sexual orientation to church officials and lose his ministry. Night after night, we stayed up late to talk about the options. We also probed our relationship. We loved each other; I wanted that to be enough. But, of course, it wasn’t. I eventually moved out. He told church officials and was forced to give up his parish ministry. Soon, he moved to New York City and launched the first national resistance movement aimed at changing discriminatory Methodist doctrine.

For nearly a decade, he traversed the country to mobilize clergy and lay leaders in support of full inclusion for LGBTQ ministers within the United Methodist Church. Along with other activists, he founded Affirmation, a group of LGBTQ people within the Methodist denomination who fought for inclusion. He also reached out to conservative opponents to change hearts and minds. But at conference after conference, proposals to liberalize church doctrine went down to defeat.

Despite our separation and eventual divorce, Mike and I remained soulmates. In the fall of 1983, I moved from Oregon to Philadelphia to take a reporting job at The Inquirer. I was excited to be joining the staff at one of the country’s leading metropolitan dailies, but just as excited to be moving within easy commuting distance of Mike in New York.

Our rekindled connection was short-lived. Michael Leroy Collins died of complications due to AIDS on Oct. 15, 1984, a week and a day after his 37th birthday. He was among the first wave of gay men in New York to succumb to a virus that would go on to kill more than 40 million people worldwide.

After Mike died, I carried on his work in my own church, Philadelphia’s First United Methodist Church of Germantown, which had a long history of supporting liberal causes including the civil rights movement in the South. In 1990, our church took on a new cause: the fight for gay equality within the Methodist denomination. After many months of discussion and debate, parishioners voted overwhelmingly to become a Reconciling Congregation, part of a small but growing network of Methodist churches advocating for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the life and leadership of the church.

In doing so, our church defied Methodist doctrine — until now.

On May 1, after more than half a century of barring openly gay clergy from the pulpit, the United Methodist Church threw out its discriminatory policies and voted to allow LGBTQ Methodists to be ordained and serve as parish ministers. Under new rules, Methodist ministers will also be allowed to preside over same-gender marriage ceremonies.

» READ MORE: United Methodists repeal longstanding ban on LGBTQ clergy

The historic changes rolled back a 1972 Methodist policy that the practice of homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.” Also eliminated was another rule, adopted in 1984, that explicitly prohibited “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from serving as Methodist clergy.

The reforms ushered in a new era in the Methodist church in the United States, which will now practice within its own ministerial ranks the ideals of unconditional love and acceptance that the church has preached ever since its founding more than 200 years ago.

I rejoice that one of the nation’s largest Protestant denominations has finally embraced equality for LGBTQ clergy. But equality was made possible only after more than 7,600 religiously conservative congregations — roughly one in four Methodist parishes in America — broke from the United Methodist fold and were no longer able to block proposals to liberalize church doctrine. It is the largest doctrinal schism since 1844, when Southern congregations left the Methodist Episcopal Church over the issue of slavery.

While current and future generations of LGBTQ clergy will benefit from the recently approved reforms, those who went before them will not.

The larger loss, however, is the pain endured by hundreds of gay clergy over the past five decades who were either kicked out of the pulpit or who were not let into church leadership because Methodist doctrine deemed their sexual orientation to be “incompatible with Christian teaching.” While current and future generations of LGBTQ clergy will benefit from the recently approved reforms, those who went before them will not.

I only wish Michael Collins were alive today to see his dream for an inclusive Methodist church finally come true. I think of him every Sunday as I take Communion and hear the words Jesus spoke: “My body, broken for you.”

Huntly Collins has spent more than four decades in journalism, including nine years as a reporter at the Oregonian, a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, 18 years at The Inquirer, and 12 years as a journalism professor at La Salle University.