‘Love against hate’

Church takes Open and Affirming stance, ordains first gay minister

By Vicky Wedig

Editor

The Delavan United Church of Christ will ordain its first openly gay minister May 31.

Erik Koepnick, whose family has attended the UCC for about eight years, will be ordained the day before his 30th birthday.

His ordination comes less than a month after the congregation took a vote to attain the official UCC designation “Open and Affirming,” meaning it accepts gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in its membership and ministry.

The church is the first in Walworth County to adopt the designation and is among about 1,100 United Churches of Christ nationwide to join the movement.

UCC minister the Rev. Laura McLeod said the congregation is aware that not everyone will agree with the move but has heard no criticism yet. She calls it “taking a stand of love against hate.”

The secret

Koepnick grew up in Delavan and became aware that he was homosexual when he was in seventh grade. He shared his secret with no one – including his parents Patti and Tim Koepnick – except his best high school friend, who held the information in strict confidence.

His parents noted that unlike other boys, Erik had a flair for the arts and design and never took a romantic interest in girls. But the once-conservative banker and pediatric nurse never discussed their son’s sexuality.

“We knew for probably a long time,” Patti Koepnick said. “Deep down we knew.”

The Koepnicks were not surprised when their middle child came home from college as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and tearfully announced that he was gay.

“We were just, ‘Halleluiah! Praise the Lord!’” Patti Koepnick said, relieved that Erik no longer bore the burden of his secret.

The relief was mixed with trepidation for their son.

“We did cry because we knew that this would be a hard road,” Patti Koepnick said.

The hard road

Erik had gone off to college with the intention of becoming a musical therapist. The program was dissolved before he got started, and his fallback major was anthropology. In the meantime, Koepnick said, he took a religious studies class.

“I loved the professors, and I was doing really well,” he said.

Koepnick joined the university’s Rainbow Alliance for H.O.P.E., which stands for helping others perceive equality, at a time when an amendment to the state’s constitution to recognize only marriages between a man and a woman was being taken to referendum. Koepnick became president of the organization and an activist for gay rights.

He and members of the group went door to door seeking votes against the referendum to invalidate same-sex marriages and were met with hatred.

Koepnick said things became physically and emotionally violent. He was referred to as “one of those people,” one of his professors was pushed down a flight of stairs and he was chased across campus.

As a result of his experience, the university hired a full-time employee to teach students and faculty acceptance of diversity.

Koepnick also was invited to speak at a Martin Luther King Jr. celebration where non-violent resistance is advocated. At the celebration, Ralph and Carol DiBiasio-Snyder, co-pastors of First Congregational Church in Oshkosh, won the Community Service Award for their acceptance of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. The church, which is also designated “Open and Affirming,” offered the Rainbow Alliance space in its church to meet, Koepnick said.

The call

Back home in Delavan, Koepnick’s younger brother, Evan, an actor, had met McLeod while working on a Delavan-Darien High School theater performance that McLeod helped with. For Mother’s Day, Evan Koepnick asked his parents to attend the Delavan UCC where McLeod presided.

Tim Koepnick was raised attending Christ Episcopal Church in Delavan, and Patti Koepnick grew up attending Delavan United Methodist Church. The couple had always been faithful and had attended the non-denominational Como Community Church but at that time had been having church at home, Patti Koepnick said, when Evan asked them to go to McLeod’s church.

Also around that time, Patti Koepnick’s father, Charles Torgeson, was approaching the end of life. McLeod, who served as a hospice chaplain, talked with Erik Koepnick as they sat with his grandfather, and he told her of the open and accepting UCC church he’d discovered in Oshkosh.

Koepnick said his strength as an activist was meeting one on one with people and helping them get through difficult times. At the same time, he had heard UW-Oshkosh professor Kathleen Corley give a lecture about why it was wrong to use the Bible against LGBT people, and had changed his major to religious studies.

“Laura said, ‘It sounds like your call to ministry,’” Erik Koepnick said.

Changing ideals

Raised in a conservative, Episcopalian family with a mother who came from a Southern Baptist background, Tim Koepnick was raised to believe homosexuality was wrong.

“I very much felt that way,” he said.

Koepnick said he was a conservative thinker on a lucrative career path as a banker when the death of his infant daughter, Katie, in December 1986 caused him to rethink his priorities.

He went back to school to become a teacher in the early 1990s and changed his way of thinking. By the time his son revealed his sexual orientation, “I was ready to accept that,” he said.

Patti Koepnick’s family was Methodist and her father was Democratic and belonged to a union. Erik said when he told his grandfather he was gay, Torgeson was unfazed.

“He said, ‘Are you still going to mow my lawn?’” Erik Koepnick said.

Path to ministry      

Erik Koepnick graduated from UW-Oshkosh where he met his partner of more than seven years, Ryan Reichard. The pair moved to Chicago where Koepnick attended the Chicago Theological Seminary for three years.

During training in the seminary, Koepnick worked with homeless people and discovered that more than half of the young people who are homeless are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. They’re without a place to live because their families turn them away, often based on religious beliefs, Tim Koepnick said. But, Erik Koepnick said, the rejection is deeper than roofs over their heads.

“There’s a spiritual homelessness for LGBT people,” he said.

UCC member Galin Berrier, an unrelated member of the Koepnick family, said homosexual people experience the same rejection in their search for a church family.

“If you are gay and you’re looking for a home, you’re often rebuffed,” he said.

Officially open

Delavan United Church of Christ has always welcomed people of all sexual orientations, ethnicities and socioeconomic statuses.

“We always were a very welcoming congregation,” McLeod said.

But, she said, the church made that stance official with its “Open and Affirming” designation.

“We really challenged the congregation to contemplate what it meant to put it out there,” she said.

The congregation formed a 13-member committee that included McLeod, Berrier and Tim, Patti and Erik Koepnick to direct the process of becoming “Open and Affirming.” The committee organized Bible studies, listening sessions, a panel discussion and a showing of the movie, “For the Bible Tells Me So,” for church members to participate in before voting on the designation.

McLeod said about 75 people engaged in the process, and the vote, taken May 4, was 88.8 percent affirmative.

Some congregation members spoke out against taking a vote because they didn’t feel it was necessary. Others didn’t feel the eight-month study process was necessary to put practice into policy and wanted to vote immediately, Berrier said.

“A lot of people were like, ‘Aren’t we already open and affirming?’” McLeod said.

When the vote was taken, only one person spoke out against the designation, and for the first time, Patti Koepnick said, she realized the hatred her son experienced as an activist at UW-Oshkosh.

Erik Koepnick said the strongest and loudest voice is the one that says, “Let me find the verse in the Bible that I can condemn you with.”

Ministry to homeless

After Erik Koepnick is ordained May 31, he will continue his work at the Guest House of Milwaukee – where he has worked with people experiencing homelessness for 2 ½ years.

As an ordained minister, he will be able to administer the sacraments of baptism and communion and will occasionally lead worship at the Delavan UCC.

The UCC hopes its “Open and Affirming” designation will invite people of all walks of life looking for a church home to come through its doors. Berrier believes the invitation will be a test of the congregation’s acceptance.

“When it comes down to practice, are we really?” Tim Koepnick said.

Time will tell, and Berrier said the church will keep listening as it strives to constantly understand the messages it receives with its slogan in mind:

“God is still speaking.”