Yahoo Movies Methodist church apologizes for controversial Durham church
Pioneers in Durham doesn’t look too different from the other restaurants and bars on the periphery of downtown. It’s one of several converted auto shops on Geer Street, like Cocoa Cinnamon to the west and Hutchins Garage to the east. If you didn’t know better, you’d assume it was just another coffee shop; there isn’t a lot to indicate that it’s a church.
There are some smaller indications that something is different. If you walk by, you may notice how often it appears completely empty. You may also notice that there are no Pride flags anywhere — something that you may find on the doors of other businesses in the area.
Pioneers Church was controversial before it even opened late last year, thanks to its affiliation with the non-LGBTQ affirming Association of Related Churches. At the time, head pastor Sherei Lopez Jackson said her personal beliefs, as well as the rules of the United Methodist Church, kept her from marrying LGBTQ couples.
“I, personally, hold an interpretation of scripture that Christian marriage is a sacred covenant between one man and one woman and believe that sexual intimacy has the potential to be at its healthiest in that context,” she wrote in a set of Instagram slides.
On Tuesday, the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church sent a letter to neighbors in the Geer Street area, formally apologizing for planting a non-affirming church in the middle of a city that held North Carolina’s very first pride event and a rich history of protest.
“We aren’t perfect, but in the spirit of the United Methodist Church, we are striving to become more perfect in love and ultimately more like Jesus,” the letter said.
It’s important to note that the United Methodist Church (UMC) still has an anti-LGBTQ rule on its books, preventing churches within the denomination from marrying same-sex couples and LGBTQ clergy from serving in the church. In 2019, UMC set up a path for churches who wanted to keep the rule to disaffiliate from the church. In November, the NC Conference, which represents everything east of Alamance County, approved disaffiliation requests from 249 of its churches. Forty-one churches have disaffiliated from its western counterpart.
When the church’s governing body meets again in 2024, it’s likely that this rhetoric will be removed. The North Carolina Conference of The United Methodist Church has not commented publicly on the letter.
Sure, the letter sent to Geer Street neighbors seems like a fairly easy thing for UMC to do. Although the council has apologized for Pioneers Church in the past, members of the community asked leaders to apologize in writing, explicitly listing the harms they brought to the Durham community. Natalie Spring, one of the community members who organized a forum with UMC and Pioneers Church, says she read it multiple times to grasp that the apology was more than just corporate speak: it felt genuine.
“I think it was a true sign of humility from the United Methodist Church, that they named the harm in planting Pioneers in a neighborhood,” Spring told me. “They interrogated their own processes of what led to it, apologized for it and then committed to making it right.”
Pioneers, on the other hand, was unaware of the letter until I called them this week. Lopez Jackson responded to requests for comment with a written statement, saying that UMC will continue to be “our neighbors and siblings in Christ.”
“In listening to neighbors, we heard our community share pain in areas like gentrification in a growing city like ours, isolation coming out of the pandemic, and polarization in the political hour we are in,” Lopez Jackson said. She stopped short of exploring the pain LGBTQ people may feel having a business like this in one of Durham’s most popular food and restaurant areas.
For now, there isn’t much anyone can do. Since Pioneers’ split from UMC was related to the church’s changing stances on LGBTQ issues, they were allowed to keep their space as long as their landlord is willing to rent them the space. The building will continue to sit near empty every day.
Read the full letter from the Bishop of the North Carolina Council of United Methodist Churches below. For now, this is a step, a meaningful acknowledgment that a church like Pioneers doesn’t fit in this welcoming community and city. It’s a small victory, but an important one nonetheless.
