The Revd Dr Mark Rowland shares this blog on his journey to become Co-Chair of OneBodyOneFaith, a charity that challenges homophobia and transphobia within the Church and faith-based organisations.
I was brought up in the Methodist Church from the earliest days of my life: baptised at a few months old and have been here ever since. I owe much of my formation to the Sunday School, Shell Group, Youth Club as well as the many sermons I heard as a young pianist for a small chapel with a faithful elderly congregation. Church was a place of belonging and even flourishing for me: a contrast to school and other situations where I felt I never quite fitted in. Looking back now as an openly gay Methodist minister, what strikes me as I reflect for LGBT+ History Month was the silence about anything to do with LGBT+ identities. I didn’t hear affirmation; nor did I hear condemnation. But the effect of this silence was that I absorbed a conservative theology on this without even thinking about it – and quite possibly without anyone intending that. There was one notable exception which stays in my memory still: when the preacher at that small chapel declared the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM) ‘a contradiction in terms’.
At the time the Conference passed the 1993 resolutions, which would govern our position on human sexuality for a generation, I was nearly 12. But it wasn’t until a little over 10 years later that I discovered they existed. That I discovered that Methodists had a range of perspectives. That at least some Methodists wanted to ‘recognise, affirm and celebrate’ the participation and ministry of LGBT+ people in the life of the church. I sometimes wonder what impact it would have had on my journey if I’d known that growing up through my teens. These were the days of section 28 and so the only mention of LGBT+ identities in school was in the insults of the playground.
I felt a call to ordained ministry while I was a university student and having followed through the various processes was ordained in 2011. I came out after meeting my now husband, Sam, who is also a Methodist minister. Together we were active in campaigning for the greater participation of LGBT+ people in the life of the Methodist Church and especially for changes in our discipline on marriage. I started getting to know others active in this area across different traditions of Christianity and in 2019 became a trustee of OneBodyOneFaith (the successor body to LGCM, which that preacher had condemned all those years before). The board appointed me co-chair in 2023.
OneBodyOneFaith is a grass-roots membership organisation for LGBT+ Christians and our allies. We work across and beyond different denominations and are actively building partnerships and relationships all around the world. We have two main focal themes for our work: safety and joy. Safety, because LGBT+ rights can never be taken for granted and there is plenty of work still to be done. Progress is not inevitable and the current climate in Britain and around the world shows that there are plenty of people wanting to roll back our rights: the hostile approach our current government is taking to trans people at the moment is a critical example. Joy, because our work is not just above the negative but about the flourishing of LGBT+ people. As St Irenaeus put it, ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive’. It is not enough just to survive, we want to thrive: to live into the fullness of the potential that God created us with.
As I look back on my own journey, I realise what a distance it’s been. From the silence of my youth and the fear of even naming my sexuality to myself to living proudly and openly and the public charity work I’ve been engaged in now for several years. Somewhere along the way I heard the challenge to be the person you needed when you were younger. That has stayed with me and is the best way I can describe what motivates me to do what I do. In my ministry, in the theology I do, in the activism I participate in, I want everyone to know – young and old – that we can break the silence and live as fulfilled LGBT+ people in safety and in joy.
The Revd Dr Mark Rowland is Co-Chair of OneBodyOneFaith and serves as Free Church Chaplain at the University of Warwick and as Secretary of the Faith and Order Committee. He was awarded his PhD by the University of Leeds for a thesis entitled ‘A queer and Methodist theology of holiness: strategies for queering Wesley’s teaching’.