It's not often that an installed pastor gets married - a pastor usually arrives at their parish already wed (if they are married, of course). It's even less often that a queer pastor has a queer wedding while they are already serving a congregation!
Burlington Lutheran fully embraced and celebrated the wedding of Pastor Charis Weathers. It was a day filled with love, wonder, dancing unicorns, tears and laughter, and was featured in the following front page article in the Skagit Valley Herald (a photo album of the article can be found at this link):
A Love Story: Church celebrates pastor's marriage, complete with dancing unicorns
Colette Weeks / Skagit Publishing director of content Jul 15, 2023
A church pastor dancing in the street with a herd of unicorns might make you question your own eyes.
But this joyful dance of unicorns to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” was a gift from Pastor Charis Weathers to her newly wedded spouse Deborah Frost. It represented many things — for the couple and more than 100 people celebrating their marriage ceremony on July 9 at Burlington Lutheran Church. While love and acceptance were among the meanings behind the performance, the result was joy and laughter from those who watched.
Choices
Same-sex marriages have been legal in Washington since 2012, but marriages of pastors to members of the same sex are still unusual outside of large urban centers.
Bishop Shelley Bryan Wee of the Northwest Washington Synod attended Sunday’s wedding and said it was an honor to be there. She attended with pastors of other denominations, the church congregation and many of the couple’s friends.
The Synod announced in 2009 that it was a Reconciling in Christ Synod. That meant it would choose to acknowledge and embrace all people with open arms, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation. The move caused division, and some churches left the Synod, the bishop said. Despite the painful transition 14 years ago, she said that overall, the move was positive, “especially in these times that are so divided. ... We can say, actually, we are all the body of Christ. We are all God’s children.”
Bethany Hull-Somers, former pastor of Burlington Lutheran, raised the prospect several years ago of the church following the Synod’s lead and becoming a Reconciling in Christ church. Church members gathered and considered “the hard questions” before determining how to move forward, she said.
It was a difficult discussion, but after hearing from people who described what it meant to be welcomed as a child of God, “there was no other choice” but to become a church that openly supports LBGTQ+ people, Hull-Somers said. Burlington Lutheran decided to follow the RIC path. Some congregation members who disagreed left the church.
A journey of faith
Weathers was on her own journey, which would eventually lead her to Burlington Lutheran.
The first time she heard a woman give a sermon, she was listening to her own voice. It was somewhere near the turn of the century and a turning point in her life.
At the time, she was working with the campus ministry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Weathers had been surprised and a little disconcerted when her church pastor asked her to deliver a sermon while he was away. She agreed, but with a qualifier. “I said, ‘OK, I will give the sermon knowing that it’s your responsibility for asking me. In other words, if God has an issue with this, it’s going to be your fault,’” she said.
As she stood to preach that day, doing something she had never seen another woman do, she focused on the task at hand. “I knew my message. I was confident in what I was saying,” Weathers said.
Her path to faith had begun in high school. She then worked with the student campus ministry in college, which ultimately led to the job working for the ministry. About that time, she had a life-altering experience with God and realized her education was incomplete.
“I realized that what I had learned and what I had been teaching about God was smaller than God was. And I craved theological education like I was gonna go nuts if I didn’t get it,” she said.
Weathers ended up in a Protestant seminary at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. She wrestled with the topic of women’s role in the ministry as she learned more about theology and biblical interpretation. She never assumed she would one day become a pastor. "I thought I was going to go get a Ph.D. and teach church history,” she said. After seminary, she found opportunities beyond teaching history and secured a job as an assistant pastor at a First Baptist church in Bellingham. She was allowed to preach there as an assistant. “When I was in the pulpit there, in the midst of giving a sermon, it felt like this is what I’m supposed to do,” she said.
She later took the role of interim lead pastor in a Baptist church in Vancouver and soon became a candidate for the permanent position. When the “call committee” did not select her, she was crushed. Weathers said she later learned that some committee members were uncomfortable with women as church leaders.
“I’d had a whole year of seminary to study that topic and came to the conclusion that I believed biblically that there were examples ... for women to be in whatever position in the church,” she said. But she realized that the call committee members had not had that opportunity to study.
“They had unexamined theology around that, which resulted in me being pushed out — and it hurt. It hurt so bad, and in that process of me exiting in that pain was my own self-reflective question of what unexamined theology do I have that is pushing out people? And I knew exactly what it was: It was how God feels about LGBTQ people,” she said. “ … I was a closeted, queer person.” Weathers felt helpless and ashamed.
“My own personal shame, of the fact that I could be attracted to women and be a leader in the church — be even in the church at all. And assuming that God was not happy with that, and there’s nothing I could do about it, is a terrible place to be,” she said. “So I lived with an extraordinary amount of shame, and I was closeted because I didn’t want to deal with anyone else’s shame. I had enough of my own,” she said.
Weathers moved to Seattle to work at REI (Recreational Equipment, Inc.). She worked Sundays to avoid church, but she also spent an entire year studying. Her topic of research was “God and the gays,” she said. She read and talked to professors and friends and considered her own thoughts and feelings. After a year of study, she determined that “gays are included in the love of God.”
While she figured that out, she also had found an inclusive ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America). She approached the Northwest Washington Synod to find out if was possible for a woman to become a Lutheran pastor. It was. And her first assignment was to start a church in Bellingham — from scratch. She called the church Echoes, went looking for people who felt excluded from church and offered acceptance. Echoes was small, but it’s still going today, Weathers said.
Fast Forward
Weathers met Frost several years ago, and it was a life-changing experience. It was her first official relationship with a woman. “We started dating officially in October 2017, and National Coming Out Day is in October. So I’m like, let’s do it,” Weathers said.
In 2022, she became pastor of Burlington Lutheran Church. When her meetings with the call committee began, she made it known that she and Frost were heading toward marriage.
Weathers said that when Burlington Lutheran Church decided to become a Reconciling in Christ church, it was signing onto a process that is meant to help a church go beyond just stating words of acceptance. The change became official in 2018. Then in February 2022, it named Weathers as its first full-time LGBTQ+ pastor.
Call Committee member Nancy Hill Hoffman said Weathers was not chosen because of her LGBTQ+ status, but because she was the perfect candidate.
“I have just over and over again found this congregation to be surprising — and good. And I can’t believe I get to be here,” Weathers said.
Lasting friendships
Terry Kyllo, a long-time Lutheran pastor known for his efforts around Skagit County to bring people together, led Sunday’s ceremony. He has known Weathers as a colleague for about 10 years and is a member of Burlington Lutheran Church. “I really wanted to support their wedding, their marriage together ... just because it’s really important to me that we recognize the Creator guides us to committed relationships,” Kyllo said. “There have been many ways that human beings have been uniting in families over the centuries.”
Kyllo introduced Weathers to Kay Knott, an elder with the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe and participant in the couple’s wedding. “He told me that they did a (tribal) land acknowledgment here, and I never heard of that before,” Knott said. That effort to connect with the tribe made an impression on Knott and her family. Both the friendship and the connection to the church have grown ever since, she said.
Knott and fellow elder Lora Pennington participated in a Celtic hand-fastening tradition in which the marrying couple’s hands are wrapped together with a cord to symbolize becoming one. Knott’s brother, Jay Bowen, helped design the wedding rings.
Knott credits Weathers for her efforts in building relationships with the Native American community. The result is that members of the tribe are now working on projects with the church, she said.
Sharing the journey
Weathers consulted with the church’s leadership before deciding to talk about her personal life for a news story. She didn’t take it lightly.
Even though Burlington Lutheran Church has been rebuilding and getting stronger in the years since the fracture occurred over the RIC status, she knows many people still disagree. It saddens her, but she no longer feels shame. “I want to be me in this world,” Weathers said. “I want to live as how God made me to be — and God made me to be this way, both as a queer person and as a pastor. And the two coexist quite well together. And I never thought they would,” she said.
She wanted to share how this congregation has found unity and joy through acceptance despite differences. The church’s hope was that more people might learn there is a welcoming place for them, she said. Church leaders also considered the downside of drawing the attention of people who might react negatively. “We considered it, we talked about it, and the council was like, we don’t want to back down from that,” Weathers said.
Burlington Lutheran’s leaders and congregation are living their stated intentions, she said. But it’s certainly not a single-issue church. “This is a beautiful part of the church, but it is not the whole of it,” she said.
The church purposely recognized that the land the church sits on is part of the Upper Skagit Tribe’s history. The church also has a Spanish-speaking congregation meeting there.
Weathers would like the church to do more: Make more connections with local nonprofits, find ways to use the church building as a community resource and build a reputation as a church that cares.
“I think that’s a bigger part of who the church should be,” she said.
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