Gay Lutheran pastor has personal and religious struggle

Jeff Ziegler was 19, working for a Lutheran youth program, when he asked his father for some advice.

"How should I handle it if any of the kids tell me they're gay?" he asked his father, a Lutheran pastor.

His father - sensing something in his son's question - spoke frankly.

"If you or one of your brothers were gay, you would be my son in a biological sense and nothing more," he replied. "My marriage would not survive it."

The harsh message surprised Ziegler, but it didn't shatter him. After all, he wasn't gay.

Right?

It has been a long journey of self-discovery for the 41-year-old Ziegler - a journey he wants the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to embark on, too.

"I spent a lot of years not looking at what I needed to be looking at," Ziegler, interim pastor of Reformation Lutheran Church in Mount Airy, said in a recent interview.

For that reason he and his family drove 800 miles to Chicago early this month, hoping to compel the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Churchwide Assembly to look at what he eventually looked at, and to accept what he has accepted: that he is gay.

Joined by his longtime partner and their two young sons, Ziegler was among the 82 gay and lesbian pastors and seminarians of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America who "outed" themselves to the assembly earlier this month and called on its voting members to lift the church's ban on clergy in same-sex relationships.

"You can be gay and be a pastor," Ziegler said at the dinner table of his split-level house in Stratford, Camden County, as his partner of nine years, Scott Thayer, cooked dinner for Mark, 10, and Quan, 8. "You just have to stay celibate."

He and Thayer are in a "committed, faithful, monogamous relationship" he said.

The assembly, which meets every two years to set policy for the 5 million-member denomination, listened for part of two days as Ziegler and his fellow clergy told of their struggles to be gay and ordained.

"Some even wept," Ziegler said. Mark and Quan, wearing acolyte cassocks, carried candles to the altar of a special worship service on Aug. 8 that attracted more than 600 sympathizers.

"Not many families there looked like us," Ziegler said.

He and Thayer are white; Mark and Quan are African American. "Daddy Jeff" and "Daddy Scott" adopted both boys as toddlers.

The decision to come out in Chicago sprung in part from years living a "don't-ask, don't-tell existence" in the parishes he served, he said, but was triggered by the recent church trial of a gay pastor in Atlanta.

In January, a discipline committee of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Southeastern Synod voted, 7-5, to remove the Rev. Bradley Schmeling as pastor of St. John's Lutheran Church because he was in an open relationship with another man.

In their decision, however, several on the discipline committee who voted against Schmeling made clear they did so only because the language of church policy left them no choice. The committee then took the remarkable step of urging Lutherans who opposed the ban on non-celibate gay clergy to work this year for its overturn.

It called on the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's 65 regional synod assemblies to declare their acceptance of clergy in committed same-sex relationships. (Twenty-two, including the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod where Ziegler works, and the New Jersey Synod, where he lives, did so.)

The committee further urged synods to petition the assembly to remove the ban, and to reinstate any clergy removed "solely because they have entered into a loving, lifelong relationship with a person of the same sex."

Inspired by the Schmeling trial and the discipline committee's call to action, Ziegler in July came out to his congregation, where he served for a year and a half, and got a "standing ovation."

He also told his bishop, the Rev. Claire Burkat, who was "supportive," he said, and contributed an essay to a pamphlet, circulated to all the voting members of the Churchwide Assembly, containing stories by gay clergy about their experiences.

His essay began with the story of his father's harsh response to his question about ministering to young gays. "The message was clear," he wrote. "Being gay and coming out equals destruction.

"It wasn't until I had been ordained five years and my father had been dead for six that I finally had the courage to acknowledge, and embrace, that I'm gay."

Many of the 13 other essays were just as powerful. But with the ban on gay clergy already under review and scheduled for reconsideration at the 2009 assembly in Minneapolis, the 2007 Assembly chose not to vote on reversal.

Instead, it offered a compromise.

By a vote of 538 to 431, it approved a document urging all Evangelical Lutheran Church in America bishops and synods to "refrain from or demonstrate restraint in disciplining" clergy and church employees "in a mutual, chaste and faithful, committed, same-gender relationship."

Church conservatives swiftly condemned the statement as a capitulation to the gay lobby.

Paull Spring, a spokesman for the Word Alone Network that is seeking to halt what it views as liberal drift in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, called the "restraint" document the "biggest disappointment" of the assembly.

Spring also dismissed the worship service where Mark and Quan carried candles as "a rally in celebration of a lifestyle that runs counter to the Biblical paradigm for marriage and the family."

He also predicted "difficult and turbulent times for our church," and urged conservatives to prepare for the 2009 assembly.

Ziegler was likewise "disappointed" by the assembly's compromise, "but not surprised," because a vote on the gay ban was never on the assembly's 2007 agenda.

"I think there's a fear that a change in policy will divide the church," he said. "But our unity is in Christ, not a church policy. Jesus is the one who said, 'Be not afraid.' "

He and the family were driving home to Stratford - Mark had to get ready for summer camp - when they got text messages reporting the assembly would not vote on lifting the ban.

The mood of "Daddy Jeff" and "Daddy Scott" was evident to Mark, who "doesn't miss a thing," Ziegler recalled.

"When we told him what happened, he said, 'Well, are we going again in two years?' "

The answer, they assured him, was "absolutely."