Dorothee Elisabeth Benz

Dorothee Benz (known to all as “Benz”), a longtime queer organizer in the New York area in both Christian and secular spaces, writes,

I was raised in the United Methodist Church and left for college with the intention of becoming an ordained minister. But during my freshman year at Harvard, I came out as a lesbian at pretty much the exact moment that the UMC’s General Conference voted to ban gays and lesbians from ministry. I was shocked and outraged, but had no idea how to resist such injustice.

Over many decades of political organizing, a PhD in political science, and most importantly, 15 years of work as Methodists in New Directions’ (MIND) founding chair and then national representative, I came to understand that the collective refusal to obey unjust rules was not only possible but necessary. Indeed, I have come to understand it as the most powerful expression of the liberationist theology tradition.

Within the UMC, the collective use of our moral agency to defy the denomination’s codified discrimination eventually created spaces in the church in which openly queer people could seek and achieve ordination without prosecution. In 2024, the General Conference caught up and finally ended the formal bans on both LGBTQ+ ordination and marriage.

But for me, it was too late. Working with MIND to fight UMC discrimination constantly illuminated the tension between the Gospel imperatives of love and liberation and the worldly pull of institutional self-preservation. It was my experience that church leaders pretended this tension did not exist and consistently chose church order and stability over the destabilizing prioritization of the needs of the oppressed and marginalized.

It was this refusal to engage honestly with the meaning of the Gospel and with those whom the UMC systemically excluded that led me, finally, in 2019, to resign my membership in the UMC. Thus, when I decided to go to seminary and pursue the call I had originally received in high school, I knew that I could not pursue ordination within the UMC – for while the rules may have changed, the leadership has not.

I also knew, from my involvement in the Church Within A Church Movement in the late aughts, that CWACM embodied the same radical, liberationist values that guided my work in MIND. Like MIND, CWACM dared to exercise moral agency in defiance of unjust rules, particularly through its pathbreaking extraordinary ordinations. Its commitment to intersectional analysis and anti-racist work is also decisive for me, for the work of undoing the legacies of white supremacy and colonialism is the work of Gospel. And CWACM's self-understanding as a movement rather than a church reflects an assessment of the dangers of institutionalism that is central to my theo-ethical involvement in the world. It was thus a no-brainer for me to seek ordination through CWACM.

Where this next chapter of my life, as an ordained clergyperson, leads me, I do not know exactly. But I know that an unwavering commitment to the example of Jesus’s ministry has never been more critical and I intend to use the privilege of a Christian collar to pursue justice for the marginalized, oppressed, and vulnerable with every fiber of my being.