Pastor Resigns After Confessing He is Gay and in a Relationship
The Rev. Brian Ellison, pastor of the Parkville Presbyterian Church, recently revealed to his congregation that he is gay and in a commited relationship. July 15 was Ellison's last Sunday at the church. He starts a new job Wednesday as executive director of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians.
Brian Ellison isn’t a pastor anymore.
The 39-year-old former minister of Parkville Presbyterian Church delivered sermons and spoke at funerals. He visited the sick and baptized babies. Once he dressed up in a plaid jacket and gaudy tie and pretended to be a game show host for children at vacation Bible school. He had been with the church for 13 years. It was his first church out of seminary.
So he hesitated for a moment in June before he handed over a box of letters at the Riverside post office. In the letters, Ellison told the members of his congregation that he would be leaving them in a month to take a new job.
A paragraph later, he told them that he was gay and had been in a committed relationship for nine years.
“I wanted to be finished with being ambiguous, less than transparent. I wanted to be honest and straightforward as much as possible,” Ellison says.
On Aug. 1, Ellison will start his new job as executive director of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, a nonprofit advocacy group devoted to the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered members of the denomination.
The organization is host to regional conferences to discuss issues facing gays and lesbians in the church, including ordination and gay marriage. This month, the Presbyterian Church rejected a proposal to amend its constitutional definition of marriage to include same-sex couples.
On a recent day, Ellison sips coffee at Parkville Coffeehouse while friends from the community and members of his former congregation stop by to say hello. “He’s an excellent pastor,” one says.
His last day at the church was July 15, and Ellison describes his last month there after sending the letter as “surreal.”
“This was the end of a long period of discernment,” Ellison says, indicating the letter. “By the time I got to this, I was so clearly doing the right thing, there wasn’t any question left in my mind.”
His self-discovery began when Ellison was still an undergraduate at Harvard, working on the campus newspaper “The Crimson.” Ellison realized that the time he was spending at the paper wasn’t as fulfilling as the time he spent leading freshman Bible study and teaching Scripture to fourth-graders.
After graduating, he headed to Princeton Theological Seminary to begin the process of becoming an ordained minister.
In 1997, the Presbyterian Church adopted a constitutional provision that forbade the ordination of gays and lesbians. The Covenant Network was founded that year to oppose the provision, and it was eliminated last year.
Ellison, who was still in seminary at the time, didn’t think any of this applied to him.
“It just didn’t add up, that the things I knew about myself meant I was gay,” Ellison says. “I really believed that I would either be single my whole life or I would meet the right woman and everything would change.”
He left seminary in 1999 and began the process of finding his first church. Ellison thought he wanted somewhere on the east or west coast; Parkville thought they wanted someone with experience. Despite this, the denomination headquarters found them to be a good match for each other, and the congregation eventually called Ellison to be its pastor.
“We got Brian who was at the very beginning of his preaching career, and we felt very lucky for that reason,” says Joyce Schrimsher, a 45-year member of Parkville Presbyterian, which has about 350 members.
It wasn’t until a couple years into his stretch at Parkville that Ellison finally started being honest with himself about his sexuality. In 2003, he started dating Troy Lillebo from Columbia. A year later Troy moved to Kansas City, and he is now an associate vice chancellor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He and Ellison have been living together in the Parkville area since 2005.
“At first I worried a lot about being caught … not because I felt like I was doing something wrong, but I was afraid it would come back to hurt the church,” Ellison says.
He knows that over the years, there were probably people who figured it out — probably saw Lillebo’s car parked in Ellison’s driveway or saw them at restaurants together. But he didn’t talk about it at church.
“He was very careful not to lie about it,” Lillebo says. He’s attended the Parkville services off and on since meeting Ellison, and even was in the church’s handbell choir. “I think I saw him more and more feeling like there needed to be some type of resolution to this conflict in side him, not being able to fully share who he was.”
Lillebo says Ellison just kept that part of his life to himself — if members of the congregation talked about where they were having Thanksgiving dinner, Ellison would politely excuse himself from the conversation.
Ellison: “Once I accepted that this is actually who I am, then I had to move on to making that choice of what that would mean for my continuing self.”
Lillebo attended every Sunday service since Ellison made the announcement.
“They’ve been very kind in welcoming me into their congregation,” he says. “They’ve been really wonderful.”
Ellison and Lillebo are now faced with finding a new church. Both agree that they want to find a church just like Parkville.
Joyce Schrimsher has seen three pastors come and go from Parkville since she joined.
“His preaching is just phenomenal,” she says of Ellison. She remembers the way he handled funeral services, her father-in-law’s included — how he would sit with the grieving and tell stories expressing “the very essence of the person who had died.” She also says that Ellison was very good at facilitating small-group discussions among church members, often bringing together people of opposing views.
And Parkville does have some opposing views about Ellison’s decision.
He knows that a handful of members were unhappy with his decision to be openly gay. Hours after the congregation received his letter, it was leaked to a conservative Presbyterian website, layman.org.
A few members question why Ellison didn’t tell them years earlier, says Cheryl Keimig, the head layperson at Parkville.
Ellison tried to respond to that in his letter: “It did not seem right to cause division and conflict in the church over something that was not ‘part of the deal’ when you called me … if I have failed you by being less than fully open about who I am, I truly and humbly apologize.”
But overall, Ellison says he’s overjoyed with the reaction he got from his congregation. Keimig says the congregation set up a website where members could post goodbye notes to Ellison and eventually had those notes bound in a book. An artist in the congregation, Kelly Yarbrough, did a painting representing Ellison’s favorite verse, Micah 6:8.
Meg McLaughlin, a member of the Covenant board that hired Ellison and an associate pastor at Village Presbyterian Church in Prairie Village, says Ellison quickly jumped to the top of their list of more than 30 applicants because of his knowledge of the larger Presbyterian Church and his skill in dealing with people whose views are different from his.
“He’s an advocate,” she says, but he still respects that some in the church oppose including gay individuals.
As executive director, Ellison will oversee all aspects of the Covenant Network and attend its 12 regional conferences across the country.
Yet Ellison doesn’t see himself as an activist. He recognizes that there will always be ways to make the church more inclusive and understanding. His job, he says, is to help the church strive to be better, to help it transition smoothly into the modern era.
“I think the church doesn’t have to see the inclusion of LGBT people as a radical alternative idea. I see it as the church doing what its always done, which is proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ and God’s love for everybody,” Ellison says. “So, if that makes me an activist, so be it.”
To reach Blake Ursch, call 816-234-4266 or send email to bursch@kcstar.com.
BY BLAKE URSCH
The Kansas City Star
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