The only thing Mary Lowrance ever wanted to do was be a minister in the United Methodist Church.
In 1994, after graduating from Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University, Lowrance said she answered God’s calling and was ordained a UMC elder.
Lowrance married a man who was also a Methodist minister, and she served various congregations in the Fort Worth area over the next decade.
“My awareness that I was a lesbian, I buried that as deep as I could, because I knew what the church’s position was on that,” Lowrance said. “For a while, I thought I’d live in the closet until the day I died.”
But after Lowrance and her husband were divorced in 2002, she said she gradually began to come to terms with her sexual orientation.
As a result, she was overcome by a deep sense of guilt, as well as the fear of a church trial, and especially the impact it would have on her now-10-year-old son.
Ultimately, Lowrance opted to surrender her ministerial orders.
“If I hadn’t given them my orders, they would have come after them,” Lowrance said. “I felt like the church I fell in love with didn’t love me anymore.”
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“There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28. Sad to say, this ancient truth is nowhere to be seen in the modern American arena. What an interesting article on the discrimination of fat people. Like sexual harassment, the true victims rarely report it while the abused suffer in silence. This is a problem. Huge Problem. In my book, Wingtips with Spurs, I devote a chapter to discrimination and how it is often over-looked or swept into a dark corner. And yes, it still exists in modern America. While we pour more stupid laws into the books to prevent such painful actions, we fail to fix the real problem, that is, the root. That problem is the pride and vainglory that has infected our society from Hollywood to Wall Street. In addition, we have been conditioned by lawyers to believe that legal and moral are the same thing. So sad. Whenever a human is treated differently than the masses, we should take a cold, hard look at the situation. A hard look indeed. Maybe even the mirror.
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