A 72-year-old retired seminary professor is the latest person defrocked in the Church of the Nazarene as the denomination seeks to tighten control over beliefs on human sexuality.
Steve McCormick, emeritus professor of historical theology and holder of the William M. Greathouse Chair for Wesleyan-Holiness Theology at Nazarene Theological Seminary, lost his ordination credentials through a technicality June 4, before a trial could be held on the charges against him.
He was notified by Wayne Nelson, Kansas City district secretary of the Church of the Nazarene, that his credentials were withdrawn because McCormick had not submitted an annual report to the denomination — as required — in three years.
Steve McCormick
Earlier, on May 5, McCormick was notified by Kyle Poole, Kansas City district superintendent, that charges had been brought against him by two pastors from outside his district. These charges were “regarding some of your published and recorded words,” the email said.
It took three email exchanges with Poole before McCormick was told who his accusers were. BNG’s review of that correspondence shows the names were revealed only after McCormick repeatedly demanded to know who had accused him.
And he had a good guess at who was behind the campaign against him because of previous history. His accusers were Jared Henry, lead pastor at Mackey Church of the Nazarene in Oakland City, Ind., and Elijah Freideman, lead pastor of Foundry Church in Flowood, Miss.
It took three email exchanges with Poole before McCormick was told who his accusers were.
Henry and Freideman are vocal and well-known advocates for strict conservatism on social issues in the church.
Connection to Oord trial
Last year, McCormick testified in support of Thomas Jay Oord, who was charged with heresy for supporting LGBTQ Christians and then defrocked. Nazarene leaders declared: “Thomas Jay Oord is guilty of conduct unbecoming a minister and of teaching doctrines out of harmony with the doctrinal statement of the Church of the Nazarene.”
Thomas Jay Oord
He not only lost his ordination credentials but no longer may attend a Nazarene church.
Earlier last year, Selden “Dee” Kelley, who served as pastor of San Diego First Church of the Nazarene for 17 years, was found guilty of teaching that contradicts church doctrine by writing an essay, “A Hope for Change,” in Ord’s book Why the Church of the Nazarene Should be Fully LGBTQ+ Affirming.
Oord’s book became a lightning rod for Henry and Freideman, who wrote about it on the Juicy Ecumenism website. McCormick was another of the book’s contributors.
“The NTS administration has refused to disassociate from McCormick, despite his wholesale affirmation of LGBTQ identity and practice,” Freideman wrote. “The truth here is sobering. A premier Nazarene theologian at the denomination’s only seminary in the U.S., who trained Nazarene pastors and academics for decades, had been affirming for much, if not all, of that time. And over a year after he has made his views public, NTS has done nothing to remove his emeritus status.”
Two other Nazarene pastors surrendered their credentials without a trial last year: Jim Scharn was asked to kick out two church members who served on its praise team for allegedly being involved in a same-sex relationship he was unaware of. He refused. Rick Power, a Nazarene pastor and leader for 46 years, resigned in April from his job as superintendent of the church’s Hawaii-Pacific District. His crime was failing to discipline his daughter Rachel, a part-time district employee, who had officiated at a same-sex wedding five years earlier.
Last year, when McCormick testified in Oord’s trial, he attempted to make a defense of his friend from the biblical text and was interrupted by the secretary of the committee who “proceeded to interrogate me in the middle of the trial,” he said. “Tom objected, but the cat was out of the bag. And so I let him ask his questions of me.”
That likely also was a factor in charges being brought against him.
Code of Conduct vs. Articles of Faith
Part of the overall dispute is rooted in the technical rules of the 2.7-million-member denomination with 23,000 churches. Opposition to same-sex relations is found in the Code of Conduct (called the Manual), not in the Articles of Faith.
For McCormick, that is a distinction that matters.
“Codes of conduct are certainly not of the same level as articles of faith.”
“Codes of conduct are certainly not of the same level as articles of faith and certainly the doctrines that might emerge from those articles of faith. You’ve got issues like dancing, smoking and drinking. For example, the Church of the Nazarene has had a longtime struggle with navigating the practice of ‘dance’ in African culture, or social drinking in much of Europe. …
“The ‘codes of conduct’ have been a longstanding battle in the Church of the Nazarene, and now, they are trying a quick fix to the LGBTQ issues by making a new ruling that declares everything in the Manual has the full authority of the Church of the Nazarene. This not only did not pass at the last General Assembly, but it confuses and muddles the faith of the church by collapsing codes of conduct into the Articles of Faith and then weaponizing their doctrines to as a means of gatekeeping and exclusion.
“Over time in this battle we’ve been having for the last, I would say decade at least, the LGBTQ issue has just really mushroomed everywhere,” McCormick noted.
In addition to the various clergy credentialing debates, earlier this spring, Oklahoma City First Church of the Nazarene voted to disaffiliate from the Church of the Nazarene. The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of leaving, with 98% of the congregation voting to disaffiliate. The church cited the denomination’s stance against LGBTQ inclusion as a significant reason for their departure as was their inability to fulfill the call of Christ to serve the margins of society. They believe the Church of the Nazarene kept pulling against their mission of loving and welcoming the disenfranchised.
Purity culture vs. holiness culture
What’s happening in the Nazarene Church mirrors debates in other denominations, including The United Methodist Church and the Southern Baptist Convention. While Nazarenes descend from the same Wesleyan branch as Methodists, they sometimes hold more in common with Southern Baptists, McCormick acknowledged.
“The culture and ethos of the Church of the Nazarene in most of the local churches in North America has been more aligned with the Southern Baptists, even though they remain adamant that they are not Calvinists, especially with the doctrine of predestination. When it comes to the LGBTQ issues, the Church of the Nazarene shares in the same purity culture as the Southern Baptists. They are driven by a sense of rightness and being on the righteous side of God for purity. Instead of identifying with their Wesleyan roots that sees the essence of holiness as love, they have followed more closely with holiness as moral purity, and sexual purity.”
“The Church of the Nazarene shares in the same purity culture as the Southern Baptists.”
While Southern Baptists, for example, have emphasized purity culture, Nazarenes have added to that the concept of holiness.
McCormick recalled a Nazarene pastor whose own daughter was transgender and his district superintendent refused to address the child by her preferred pronouns for fear he would “tarnish his holiness.”
McCormick previously told a denominational official: “You’re wanting to make everything in the Manual equally weighted, and you’re now trying to say if you deviate one bit, if you’re not in full compliance with this, off with your heads, I mean off, we remove your credentials.”
Instead, the professor believes Nazarenes should “use the best of our scholarship in the service of the church to help the church articulate a faith that is faithful, but make space for everybody.”
Clamping down on education
Although most outsiders think of the Church of the Nazarene as a doctrinally strict body, the “lifeblood” of the denomination has been education, he said. “It took very seriously from its inception to educate its ministers and to take education seriously. So they started over time eight Nazarene colleges, universities in the States, and then they just kept spreading it outward. The irony now is we’ve had a long sort of anti-intellectual bent in our tradition.”
Over time, the “fundamentalist proclivity in the Church of Nazarene” has taken over, he believes. “But the irony is that our educational institutions have kept the Church of the Nazarene growing and robust and alive. They have been more faithful to the gospel than many of our local churches, and the general sentiment of the Church of the Nazarene.”
In the age of Trump and the MAGA GOP, sometimes when you enter some larger Nazarene congregations, especially on the Fourth of July, “you could just close your eyes and you would feel like you are sitting in the Republican National Convention.Of late, one of our general superintendents has become known for saying, ‘Let’s make the Church of the Nazarene great again.’”
“You could just close your eyes and you would feel like you’re in the Republican National Convention.”
Defining holiness, sanctification and purity has been elusive to the denomination for years, McCormick said.
“We’re trying to find a way to articulate faith through language in our doctrines that maintains that space so we can all grow in love. But here’s the part that a purity-driven culture that’s so certain of its rightness does not get, and it is faith for any one of us never develops the same. It never develops evenly or uniformly. It is never universally the same across the board for any tradition or any religion, any tribe. Anyone who’s sort of been studied in the long arc of church history understands that.”
‘Total compliance’
The current emphasis, he warns, is on total compliance. And that affects seminarians coming before the credentialing board.
Any deviation from total compliance by the ordination candidates is grounds for exclusion from the process, McCormick said. “Many of my former students who went through the process pledged their compliance by not marrying gay couples, but their personal conviction would be kept to themselves. The response from many district advisory boards was that they must be in ‘total compliance’ if they wanted to be ordained in the Church of the Nazarene. And it was even said to the district advisory boards that they must ‘close the loop’ in their inquiry of these ordinands because they did not want to allow heresy to infiltrate the denomination.
Yet the official Nazarene doctrine, as he sees it, straddles the fence.
“We want to be a welcoming and loving church. But if you are born gay, then you must remain celibate. I have had many friends who tried to comply with this attitude, but in the end they never felt welcomed or loved, just judged.”
In his dealings with seminarians, he often consoled them and became a theological midwife to those as they faced “total disillusion,” he said. “I would certainly tell them of the Nazarene position on the matter but always tried to help them find their own voice and convictions as they attempted to navigate through the icy waters.”
Thus, he was asked at Oord’s trial, whether he had been teaching against the Church of the Nazarene. But even that phrase, “against the Church of the Nazarene,” is not defined, he replied.
“I said, ‘First of all, my primary calling is to be faithful to the gospel. I mean, I’ve been trying to exegete the church’s faith through the lens of the gospel for the last 40 years. And that’s first and foremost. But second, by the providence of God, I’ve been placed in the Church of the Nazarene. I’ve been ordained in the Church of the Nazarene.”
The doctrine that supersedes all should be the high priestly prayer of Jesus, he believes — “The prayer of unity. We all belong. We belong to each other, we belong to one another. We may be at different places in our faith convictions, so we need to help each other as best we can.”
As for the future of the Church of the Nazarene, McCormick fears there’s blood in the water that will only make things worse moving forward. Far-right critics have taken down multiple ministers and professors now.
“You’ve given fresh meat to the bloodhounds out there, and they will not stop. They’re going to come back and they’re going to keep coming.”
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