The Preacher’s Husband

The night I met my husband, David, a Presbyterian pastor, I went back to my apartment in a South Philly brownstone, sat on the front steps, and decided that the minute we got engaged I would announce it on Facebook by changing my profile picture to Whitney Houston in The Preacher’s Wife. I saw the future clearly and, apparently, that future was on Facebook. You’ve got to be always thinking of how you’ll turn life events into #content, and it’s a known fact that engagements, the first baby, some new jobs, winning Big Brother, and photos with celebrities are the gold standards of social media reaction-getters. Squandering such gifts is a scandal and a sin. And I wasn’t trying to sin, because, honey, I was about to marry a preacher. I was about to be Mrs. God or whatever. Mary Man-delene? Possible. I was a little unclear on some of the details, like (a) how to contact David, (b) what male wives of preachers were called, (c) what a Presbyterian was per se, and (d) if enough of my friends were familiar with the complete Whitney Houston film collection for my reference to land. It was a stressful time; prayers were requested.

On the night we met, David had been on a panel about LGBTQ people of faith, alongside representatives from other branches of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam. I’d been asked to moderate for reasons that I am still unclear on. I suppose it was for my personality and the fact that I had a standing appointment on my Google calendar that read “Go to church, you asshole,” which I consistently ignored. In any case, David delighted me so thoroughly that midway through the panel I stopped talking to all the other panelists and peppered David with personal questions. Please invite me to disrupt all of your events for a small honorarium.

Afterward, I mumbled awkward conversational things in David’s general direction and tried to fend off someone else who wanted to badger him with long-winded anecdotes disguised as questions. What is a good way to flirt with a pastor? I wondered, and my brain answered “TELL HIM HOW CHRISTIAN YOU ARE.” It’s like when you’re on a dating profile and you write that your favorite book is Less by Andrew Sean Greer and then you see someone else who lists Less by Andrew Sean Greer as their favorite book and you send them an all-caps message that’s like “WHO COULD IMAGINE TWO PEOPLE IN THIS WIDE WONDERFUL WORLD WOULD BOTH LIKE THIS BOOK WHICH IS UNIVERSALLY BELOVED AND WON THE PULITZER PRIZE? We must be soul mates, you and I! Shall I schedule a spring wedding?” Except instead of a comic novel about a late-middle-aged gay man’s existential crisis, the thing I was trying to bond with David over was the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I was determined to highlight our mutual interest in the niche subject of Protestantism.

It turns out, when you are a pastor, everyone wants to talk to you about God. I did not realize this. I imagine that launching into a long, personal quixotic monologue about spirituality is something that people can’t help, and it’s something, I’ve found, that pastors don’t mind. That’s ministry, after all, and it’s not only their life’s work, it’s their calling. It is not, however, a great way to flirt.

“Jesus, what a pal, right?!” I shouted at David. He nodded. Perhaps through natural development or perhaps through years of studied admiration, David has the friendly, patient countenance of his hero, Mr. Rogers. It always sounds cliché to say a person has kind eyes, but sometimes clichés are true and that’s a real paradox for a person who is trying to write interesting things. His eyes look like they give to charity? Anyway, you get the picture or you don’t, but don’t blame me. Blame eyes.

Kind eyes are always a surprise to see in the flesh, because not everyone has them. I certainly don’t. I have side eyes. In addition to his eyes (two of them! So kind!), David has a round face and, at that point, had shaggy brown hair that curled up on the ends, giving him the joyful, boyish look of a camp counselor or a campus tour guide or an Eagle Scout—all of which he has been. (Or, in the case of the Eagle Scouts, still is.)

Our post-panel conversation going swimmingly, I decided to wrap things up by asking him out. “I’d like to visit your church sometime,” I said without a hint of intrigue. I put the single in single entendre. David nodded and smiled and handed me his business card with his work email address on it. How am I supposed to text nudes to this? I wondered. Modern love, what a scam.

What I didn’t realize is that by saying I wanted to visit David’s church, I had inadvertently put myself in the category of congregant and not fiancé. If a person has a need for ministry, he does not get the minist-D. (I’m sorry; I’m trying to delete this.)

We didn’t talk for two months because, despite what I said, I wasn’t trying to go to church. I was just a liar who was trying to go Dutch on an Italian dinner and eventually name him as the beneficiary of my life insurance plan.

At that point, I had been in Philadelphia for about a decade and I’d spent much of it searching for a church home, with varying levels of commitment. I knew that spirituality was something that I wanted in my life (Jesus! What a pal!), but as I came more into myself as a gay person, I became resolute in my desire to never sit in a pew and be told I was going to hell again. It’s the little things. I’d found myself in a number of open and affirming congregations, but most of them were largely white and their style of worship was so dramatically different from what I grew up with it was hard to take seriously as capital-C Church. Some of these people were wearing shorts. Jesus didn’t die on the cross for you to be exposing your knees like it’s Casual Friday, Mark.

I love Church. It’s theater, it’s high camp, it’s cabaret. What’s not to love? You get to dress up like you’re going to the Grammys. Literally every word that everyone says in Church is a very compelling story that frequently involves both scandal and magic. There is so much gossip. It’s Pay-What-You-Wish. There is a choir. And musical numbers. And choreography. And when things really get going, people yell, shout, jump up and down, and stop the show. HONEY. Church is very gay.

Honestly, I see very little difference between Church and a Beyoncé concert. Maybe that’s the core of my theology: if it makes you feel something ineffable, if it’s bigger than you and yet deeply personal, if it sometimes involves a fog machine, it’s Church. Jesus is in there somewhere, swaying to the music, saving you a dance. What a pal.*

The church I grew up in was a small building around the corner from the racetrack where the Preakness is held. One narrow room with maybe fifteen pews and wood paneling on the walls. It always smelled of perfume and old books. The floor was cold in the wintertime and in the summer there were fans. You know the fans I mean—card stock on a big Popsicle stick with an illustration of Dr. King on the front and an ad for a funeral home on the back. You had to leave through the front door and walk around the back to get to the restroom. And every Sunday, Sister Jackson sat in the front row and stopped the show. When Sister Jackson got to thanking and praising the Lord, well, that was a wrap on service. Our church was one of those that went from eleven-ish to “until,” so Sister Jackson taking two minutes, twenty minutes, a decade to get her everlasting life was par for the course. It was almost as if she was the minister of praise, though the church was never much for putting women in positions of authority, so that would’ve been a no-go. But at any moment, Sister Jackson could get worked up, shouting, standing, waving her hands, and the show would not go on.

I was deeply intimidated by that but I loved it. Because in church I was a spectator. Praise seemed to involve both an unabashed spirit that I never possessed and an earthy blackness that was a mystery to me. Even though we were a simple, one-room church in an impoverished Baltimore neighborhood, it was one of the most extravagant, confounding, and dramatic experiences I’d ever had.

Church in Philly didn’t compare. The churches that felt like home weren’t here for the gays, either overtly or covertly. The churches where everyone wore a rainbow pin on their lapel seemed oddly calm about the Resurrection. I wanted an experience where people were shouting but not shouting at me. After some years of itinerant worship, I just called it a (Lord’s) day and spent the Sabbath blasting show tunes and going to brunch. Another kind of church.

There was one church that always came up when I googled “Who will love me church lol gospel prayer hands emoji?” It was a Presbyterian-affiliated faith community that met at 4 P.M. on Sundays (after brunch!) in a huge old sanctuary with flying buttresses and sun-drenched stained glass but peeling walls and no pews. They were open and affirming; they sang hymns and also Stevie Wonder songs. The congregation was diverse across all manner of demographics. During the week, the space was used to serve daily gourmet meals, prepared by Chef Steve, a former corporate chef at Comcast, to people experiencing homelessness and food insecurity. A theater company that produced forgotten works took up residence in the Sunday school room. In short, it was a little bit like heaven. It seemed perfect for me; so, of course, I never went.

It should come as no surprise that the card that David handed me after the spirituality panel bore the name of that same church from my Google searches: Broad Street Ministry.

There was one church I could go to in Philly to fulfill my spiritual needs, but if I went to the church I couldn’t date the surprisingly appealing pastor. It was a real Catch 3:16.

So, I did nothing.

I would make a terrible disciple, I think.

When David and I tell this story, it’s here that we switch off, like a reliable double act with choreography as easy as breathing. He gives some background on why he was on the panel in the first place (he was stalking me), and then we fast-forward a few months to when I was performing a one-man show called Always the Bridesmaid about how I was very single and I had questions about God and wanted someone to date me and also explain theological ideas to me. Look, you have to ask for what you want. Some people pray; some people write hour-long theatrical monologues. We all do church in our own ways, okay?!

One of David’s congregants, Colton, suggested to David that they go together. Colton had been conspiring to get us together since he saw me hosting The Moth the month before the panel. He’d nudged David in the audience and said, “You should marry the host.” David had demurred, claiming I was too famous for him, which is my favorite quality in a person. Anyway, undeterred by my fame, they continued to stalk me until they ended up sitting in a small cabaret space watching me struggle to remember lines I had written myself based on events that had happened to me and thoughts that had actually passed through my head.

We started dating soon after, but I wasn’t allowed to go to his church, because it’s kind of weird for a pastor to be trotting his trade through the sanctuary willy-nilly. He wanted to wait until we were sure we were serious. He was also looking for guidance for how to do it. Not divine guidance (although he may have inquired to the department upstairs), just a how-to for being a gay, single pastor and introducing your congregation and co-workers to your new boyfriend who hasn’t been to church since the Bush administration.

Initially, I was fine with this, but it eventually started to wear on me. I’d worked so hard to emerge from every closet in my life, and being kept a secret like a plot twist on Game of Thrones felt like a regression. It became a sticking point in our nascent relationship. All things church did. He was staying in a manse beside another church and would invite me over to hang out or watch TV and it never stopped feeling like I was sneaking around, sipping the communion wine, and breaking some sort of covenant. Eventually, I’d had enough. I decided that I was going to tell him we needed to take a break. But before I could do that, he told me he’d decided the time was right for me to be introduced at church. “I’d love it if you came to Ash Wednesday service with me,” he said.

“That sounds awesome,” I replied. “What’s Ash Wednesday?”

I was vaguely familiar with the concept of Ash Wednesday and I’ve worked in an office before, so I knew that sometimes some people came to work with a smudge on their foreheads, but I thought they were all Catholic. In retrospect, I thought that all forms of Christianity boiled down to Catholic and Whatever I Am. I knew that there were variations on worship styles from church to church, but I hadn’t ever parsed the differences between denominations. My parents met in an African Methodist Episcopal church but had joined a Baptist church by the time I was born. Though I’d been to services at both, I couldn’t tell you how—in theology or practice—they differed. Frankly, I thought the biggest predictor of difference in a church service was the race of the people in the pews. There was white church and there was black church.

After the invitation to the Ash Wednesday service, the thought occurred to me for the first time, Does David work at a white church? The congregation was very diverse, but the way they worshipped was so foreign to me. They ended after a brisk forty-five minutes! Every time! No one caught the spirit and laid on the floor. Not even on Easter! Eventually, my brain short-circuited and I just started labeling everything white. So, when I write “white” here, know I mean Presbyterian. Unless I actually mean white. In that case, I mean white.

In any case, Whitney Houston never encountered this particular issue in The Preacher’s Wife; she was at a black church. I was on my own.

We realized rather quickly that we were serious about each other. The Ash Wednesday service debut had gone over just fine; when offered ash I simply replied, “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.” The music was nice; the congregants were friendly. And, for David, that was one of the last hurdles. Somewhere along the line we started talking about marriage and so I started googling things like “What do Presbyterians believe?” “What is my church lady hat size?” and “Does this mean I have to stop cursing?” David wasn’t the lead pastor of Broad Street, but I knew that eventually his path would lead him to his own church and I wanted to be ready.

I started searching in earnest on Amazon for books about being a pastor’s spouse. Every single thing that I found was exclusively directed toward women and seemed to assume that I would be playing the piano for the choir, teaching Sunday school, and definitely not working. I understood this kind of life but I was shocked to find myself stepping into it.

I began to wonder if I was supposed to be giving up parts of myself to fit into a mold of a pastor’s spouse. Should I learn to play piano? David assured me that he didn’t expect it and that the church he envisioned for himself didn’t require me to teach Sunday school if I didn’t want to. “I want you to feel free to be exactly who you are,” he said.

As his time at Broad Street came to an end, David began putting out his CV on a site that’s basically LinkedIn for Presbyterian pastors. Pastors looking for “calls”—invitations to lead a congregation or a specific ministry—would post profiles, and churches looking for pastors would fill out profiles of their own. Imaginings of life in exotic locales like Ohio and A Dakota started popping up in our evening conversations. Once, he read me a profile of a church that had a laundry list of duties for their new junior pastor: “lead the youth group, perform couples ministry, preach twelve Sundays a year. Also, in keeping with the traditions of the church, the pastor will occasionally wear colonial garb.”

“Excuse me?”

“Apparently, George Washington visited this church once, so they celebrate by dressing up in clothes from colonial times,” David said. This was white church. David clicked to another profile and then turned to me with a new thought. “If I got that, what do you think you would wear?” he asked.

Visions of Crispus Attucks in a church hat danced in my head. Hard pass.

I replied, “Oh, honey. I’ll be the pastor’s wife-husband. I’m going to wear whatever I want.”