By Jeff Brumley
The folks at College Park Baptist Church in Greensboro, N.C., remain baffled as to why anti-gay protesters demonstrated outside their sanctuary on Aug. 23, hurling insults at members and clergy.
The American Baptist Churches-USA congregation has been long known as a welcoming and affirming church, Senior Pastor Michael Usey said. But he and others have not pinpointed why the three demonstrators showed up on that particular day.
Could it have been, he said, its acceptance and performance of same-sex weddings? Or the church’s vocal opposition a few years back to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage?
Usey said he even considered College Park’s new, mobile-friendly website that may have made the LGBTQ-embracing church easier to find on the web.
“Or I wonder if they were coming back through from Charlotte,” he said of protesters who demonstrated at the North Carolina city’s gay pride parade the week before.
Either way, he said, it wasn’t all that impressive: Two males, including a boy, holding insulting, anti-gay signs and one man video recording the protest. No one at the church is even sure who the protesters were.
“It was kind of a lazy activism,” Usey said.
But it was also one that he and others at the church have taken seriously and with some sadness.
‘Scary and unexpected’
“My experience is that they were shaken,” Lin Story-Bunce, associate minister of youth, said of College Park’s LGBTQ members.
“This has become a safe haven for them, a place where they could be themselves and a place where they could worship freely,” she said.
The protesters, and particularly their confrontational style, left them feeling violated and vulnerable in what had been their sanctuary, she said.
“It was as scary as it was unexpected.”
Compounding the fear they experienced that morning were the memories many of them had of growing up in traditional church settings, she said.
Usey said those include undergoing exorcisms, being kicked out of churches and families and suffering beatings.
The protesters, Story-Bunce said, reopened those wounds for many.
“It made them feel aware of the things they had tried to put behind them,” she said.
‘They called me a sodomite’
The demonstration spurred some churches members to action — sometimes with wit and humor.
In an article on the church website, Usey wrote of encountering a church member offering food and bottled water to the protesters. She asked one of them if the other man was his “partner.”
“That went over well,” he wrote.
Others volunteered to escort church members who felt too intimidated to enter or leave church.
The scene church members faced was provided in a letter to the editor penned by church public defender and church member Sean Olson.
Olson described the visuals in the letter published Aug. 29 in the Greensboro News & Record: “Two men and a young boy holding signs urging to ‘Repent’ and informing that ‘Homosexuals are bastards in need of a savior.’”
The verbal attacks were just as abrasive.
“When I went in,” Olson wrote, “they called me a sodomite. They called a 19-year-old college student, a young woman, a whore.”
Preparing for repentance
Usey had his own encounter with the demonstrators.
After learning of their presence between services, he approached them and extended his hand to one of the protesters.
“The protester recoiled and refused to shake it, saying he thought I probably [committed a sexual act] with it,” Usey wrote in his reflection for the church.
The lead demonstrator screamed at the minister, standing just a foot from his face.
“His bombast and nearness was disconcerting because it was so relentless,” he wrote. The man was saying Usey needed to repent of various sins, to which he agreed.
“That’s what we’re getting ready to do in worship — repent,” Usey wrote. At that point he invited them to join him inside.
“Cue a new wave of outrage,” he said.
In the subsequent worship team meeting before the second service, Usey said it was clear that everyone was shaken up by the scene, which also included police and a counter protester who had arrived.
Usey returned outside to invite in a dozen college freshmen who had come to church but felt intimidated by the protest. All but two of them turned away.
“This was among the saddest consequences of their presence,” he wrote.
Usey told BNG that his invitation to the protesters was also sincere.
“I think it was serious,” he said. “There were 200 of us and three of them — I don’t fear for anyone misbehaving and this group not being able to handle it.”
Besides, he thinks they would have been surprised by the congregation’s strong, Christocentric worship. Conservative Christians who attend College Park are often disarmed by it.
“Being accepting is not our thing,” he said. “Following Jesus is our thing.”
‘Showed our true colors’
But the sad truth is that being protested is now, or could be again, College Park’s thing. So it will likely adopt some sort of “protest protocol” to be prepared for the next group of protesters who show up on their door, Usey said.
He said it will likely follow existing safe-children and safe-church protocols. It will dictate who calls 911, who is tasked with talking with police and informing staff and how and when to notify the congregation. There will be a protest manager, volunteers who escort members and visitors to and from the building and even to video record the demonstrators.
There were other blessings that came from the incident, Usey said.
They include an outpouring of support from the Greensboro interfaith community and seeing members of the church rise to the task of providing security.
Usey said it’s also been interesting to hear from other LGBTQ-friendly congregations who wish it had been they who were protested.
“It has sort of galvanized our work, but I am sad it took away a sense of safety from our LGBTQ members,” Usey said.
Why was College Park singled out? Usey said he doesn’t know for sure.
“But I am grateful for the chance to show our true colors,” he said. “I am proud of how the church reacted and that there was no violence and no hatred directed toward the protesters.”