If You Believe in Gay People III: Interview with Genderqueer Pastor Ann Reilly
Brad and Dan's interview with Reilly, Associate Pastor at Presbyterian New England Church in Saratoga Springs NY. Reilly shares how she grew up evangelical, realized she was gay right about the time she received the call to ministry, and her role as a possibility model to young people.
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AXIS MUNDY Okay, so we're here now talking with Anne Riley.
Riley is a local clergy person.
She is an associate pastor at Presbyterian New England Congregational Church, which is a mouthful, but I think I got it right.
And that church is here in Saratoga Springs, New York, just about a mile and a half or two miles from Skidmore.
And Riley has an amazing sort of faith journey and life path, and it involves being an ex-evangelical, it involves now being part of a ministry team at a UCC church that's combined with a Presbyterian church, and so we're really excited for our conversation.
Thanks for joining us.
Oh, thanks for having me.
So first things first, just tell us about yourself and tell us about, you grew up evangelical, but you're not now.
And I kind of think your life and your faith and your identity are very different than maybe they were when you were an evangelical.
So how does that work?
Right.
So I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church.
It's part of the Dutch Calvinist tradition.
Grew up in Holland, Michigan.
I have never ever been to public school.
I have been Christian educated from kindergarten through college.
I went to Kelvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
And it's hard to describe the culture I grew up in.
It wasn't a question of whether or not if somebody went to church.
I could safely assume that everybody did.
It was just a matter of where.
Through my Christian education, I got two things as a takeaway.
One, just a world-class education.
And two, a deep unshakable truth that God loved me.
Which not everybody gets.
So I remember finding out my friend then was a Lutheran and really wondering if he was saved.
It was a very insular theological community.
I didn't have a whole lot of possibility models for how to be something other than the traditional good Christian woman.
Implicitly or explicitly, my life goals were to get married, have kids, raise them in the church.
I spent a lot of time either in Bible class, which I had on my schedule every year for 16 years, or, you know, going to church twice on Sundays, and youth group on Wednesdays.
The community I lived in, it was pretty common among the teenagers to keep a Bible in our car so if we got pulled over we could throw it on the dashboard and say we were on our way to Bible study.
Or to keep the Christian radio station on preset so you could change it over to the Christian radio station.
Because these were the things that could help you get a lesser ticket.
That was pretty normal in Holland.
Like your story, I mean, it's funny to think about all these like, you know, we should start a hashtag like evangelical life hacks or something.
But, you know, one of the things that your story reminds me of is so many folks who have found their way out of evangelicalism are not the ones who didn't take their faith serious.
They're the ones who took it ultra serious.
Oh, yeah.
And then ended up sort of in one way or another thinking and living themselves sort of into a different place.
And so how did that like happen?
Right, so I knew that I was gay pretty early on but I didn't really know what that meant.
And the way that manifested in me was I just thought that I was being a girl wrong.
I had lots of friends who could do their hair and makeup and who knew how to flirt and had boyfriends and wanted to be cheerleaders and I self-identified as a tomboy.
Most of my friends were boys and There is a sense in which if you had an intimate friendship with someone of the opposite sex, they must be your significant other.
And those traditional gender roles really messed with me.
And I just internalized this, well, you're bad at being a girl, and you're gonna be really lucky if some boy sometime finds you interesting and attractive.
And I have this very clear memory of in college saying to one of my floor mates, I really think that God has in God's plan for me to be a wife and a mother and believing every word that came out of my mouth.
And so at some point when I realized like what it was wasn't that I was bad at being a girl or bad at flirting that I just I was gay like that's not I still knew that Jesus loved me so I never I was never one of those kids that pray to be straight.
It's a huge gift.
I don't know how that happened, but somewhere I did have this unshakable feeling that nothing could separate me from the love of God.
However, also around the same time, I realized I might also be called to the ministry.
And so my prayer was, Dear Jesus, please don't make me gay and a pastor.
Because I knew that was going to be hard.
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