United Methodist clergywoman to face trial

Aug. 2, 2004

By Linda Bloom
United Methodist News Service

A United Methodist clergywoman in Philadelphia faces a church trial as the result of an investigating committee decision.

The Rev. Irene Elizabeth (Beth) Stroud, 34, associate pastor of First United Methodist Church of Germantown since 1999, talked about being a lesbian in an April 27, 2003, sermon to her congregation. She also said she and her partner “have lived in a covenant relationship for two and a half years.”

Church law forbids “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals” from being ordained or appointed as clergy to churches.

An investigating committee from the denomination’s Eastern Pennsylvania Annual (regional) Conference met July 23 to review evidence on a complaint brought against Stroud. “The committee on investigation voted that reasonable grounds exist for a church trial as provided in the United Methodist Book of Discipline,” according to a statement from the annual conference.

The committee’s vote was 5-3.

Stroud told United Methodist News Service that the committee chairman “called me personally to share the results and was very pastoral and very caring.”

A trial date will be set after Bishop Peter Weaver, who leads the denomination’s Philadelphia area, has selected a retired bishop to preside over the trial.
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According to an annual conference statement, Weaver filed the complaint and “acting in accordance with church law, oversaw a yearlong process of supervisory review with Rev. Stroud. When that process did not resolve the complaint, Bishop Weaver, continuing to follow church law, referred the matter to the committee on investigation.”

Stroud said she met with the bishop before she preached her revealing sermon “and was very open with him about what I felt called to do.

“I love the United Methodist Church,” she said, noting she had been baptized and confirmed in the denomination and had grown up in the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference. “I’m also called to tell the truth about who I am.”

Stroud added that she expects to proceed with prayer and thoughtfulness while maintaining her active ministry with children and youth at First United Methodist Church of Germantown, which is in the northwest section of Philadelphia. “I’m going to continue doing what I’ve been doing,” she said.

The Rev. Fred Day, the church’s senior pastor, has worked with Stroud for the past three years and said the 1,000-member congregation is firmly behind her.

“It is an opportunity for us to be faithful to what we believe in,” he told United Methodist News Service, noting that the church has been a reconciling congregation for more than a decade. “We could not be more supportive and more behind Beth in this.”

First United Methodist Church also has set up a legal defense fund for Stroud.

“People know Beth as a highly competent minister,” Day said, adding that, both inside and outside the church, many are “deeply appreciative for her ministry.”

Last March, the Rev. Karen Dammann, a United Methodist clergywoman from Seattle, was found by a Pacific Northwest Annual Conference trial court to be not guilty of the charge of engaging in “practices incompatible with Christian teaching” even though it found that she openly admitted to being a practicing homosexual.

In early May, during the United Methodist General Conference in Pittsburgh, the denomination’s top court ruled that it did not have the authority to review the findings of the Dammann trial court. But the Judicial Council did reaffirm that a bishop may not appoint a pastor who has been found by a trial court to be a “self-avowed practicing homosexual.”

The Judicial Council also confirmed that the practice of homosexuality is a “chargeable offense” for United Methodist clergy