My church, Trinity United Methodist Church in Springfield, is very important to me and my family. I am especially active in the youth fellowship, leading a youth service several times throughout the year and helping with the youth groups.<\/p>\n
My proudest moment at Trinity was when we voted to become a Reconciling Congregation. The Methodist Discipline has language that is excludes gays and lesbians. Methodist ministers who perform marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples can face discipline, up to and including being defrocked. The Reconciling Ministries Network has been working to remove that language from the Discipline and to help Methodist churches become more open and inclusive, to truly live up to our promise of \u201copen minds, open hearts, open doors.\u201d A few years ago, I helped lead a workgroup to gauge our congregation\u2019s feelings on the topic, offer educational resources to people with questions, and discuss what becoming a Reconciling Congregation would mean to our church. After about a year of prayer and discernment, our congregation voted unanimously to become a Reconciling Congregation.<\/p>\n
This year, the New England conference passed a resolution to \u201cnot conform or comply with provisions of the discipline that discriminated against individuals who are LGBTQ.\u201d At this time, there are over 800 Reconciling Congregations or communities throughout the U.S. (and one in the Philippines). On Sunday, my church proudly displays a rainbow banner next to our welcome banner to let people know that we truly do have \u201copen minds, open hearts, open doors.\u201d<\/p>\n
-Nicole B.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My church, Trinity United Methodist Church in Springfield, is very important to me and my family. I am especially active in the youth fellowship, leading a youth service several times throughout the year and helping with the youth groups. My proudest moment at Trinity was when we voted to become a Reconciling Congregation. The Methodist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":5280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[529,527,528,531],"class_list":["post-5245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsletter","tag-giving-back","tag-giving-season","tag-pay-it-forward","tag-volunteerism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/hnetalk.com\/member\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/Nicole-Baker-family-pic-for-Reconciling-story-e1482331243145.jpg?fit=700%2C467&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6ZZGa-1mB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hnetalk.com\/member\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hnetalk.com\/member\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hnetalk.com\/member\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hnetalk.com\/member\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hnetalk.com\/member\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hnetalk.com\/member\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5246,"href":"https:\/\/hnetalk.com\/member\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245\/revisions\/5246"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hnetalk.com\/member\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hnetalk.com\/member\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hnetalk.com\/member\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hnetalk.com\/member\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}