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Graced by Burns

Graced by Burns

I sat in the pew feeling completed baffled. For ten years I swore I would never step foot in a church again. Now not only was I there, but I had tears rolling down my face and tissue clenched in my fist. Even though the pastor, Jim Burns, was speaking to hundreds of people, it felt like he was speaking directly to me.

This wasn’t long after I received my HIV diagnosis. My future partner Luke — who at the time was just a very supportive “friend with benefits” — invited me to join him there. He softened the request by noting this was a gay church. I couldn’t quite imagine what that looked like. But since the diagnosis had shattered my life, I figured the time had come to try new things.

The music was lively and the people friendly. Actually, the people were quite messy, as well. This wasn’t the kind of church I grew up in where we had to all look and act like absolute perfection. Rather, you really could come as you were, either totally together or completely disheveled, and the people around you had nothing but love and support to give.

church1This was the kind of environment Jim created at Metropolitan Community Church of the Rockies. Even though I had no desire to find God, I desperately needed words of hope and healing. I needed them to come from actual wisdom, and I needed them to be challenging (not just a simple pat on the back). As it turned out, this was exactly what Jim’s sermons did for me.

From that moment on, I attended MCCR every Sunday. I found that even a little atheist like me could remove the “God concept” out of the sermon’s equation and still learn a valuable lesson on how to live life better — not only for myself but for others as well.

In my time at MCCR, I was never pressured to find God or relate to their theology. In fact, my regular attendance — in spite of my lack of faith — became something worth celebrating. On several occasions, Jim asked me to speak in front of the congregation in order to share my unique perspective. This man’s grace and acceptance truly taught me the values of what it meant to be Christ-like, even if I didn’t believe in Christ.

When Luke and I decided to have a “wedding,” it made total sense that Jim would officiate the ceremony. In a way, the concepts in his sermons helped us build foundational elements for our relationship to thrive. By this time in our lives, we considered him not just our pastor, but a friend and mentor.

In any organization, it’s impossible to make everyone happy. Jim, aside from being a pastor, was still a gay man. Like any human being, he wanted to go have a beer with friends at a bar. He wanted to have the freedom to date and have relationships. For some, this behavior was unacceptable for a man of God. For others, it made him more relatable. Regardless, Jim continually offered kindness, love, and respect to everyone.

After eighteen years of being pastor for this church, Jim recently announced his resignation. The news devastated so many of us in the congregation. He created an environment safe for LGBT people to worship. This was a community I felt proud to be a part of. Jim not only gave me words of wisdom to live by, but he also gave me emotional refuge to survive by. He is the man who moved me from being atheist to respectfully agnostic. He is the man who taught me grace. And in the spirit of Jim Burns, I hope to do the same for my community as well.

Learn more about MCC of the Rockies, visit them at mccrockies.org.

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