Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park

By Pastor Nancy Goede

In worship on Reformation Sunday, October 26, our congregation will affirm commitments we’ve been making and expanding since 1992 to fully welcome LGBTQ+ people to Augustana.

At the annual meeting in January of 1992, the congregation voted to adopt a Statement of Principle that allowed us to be recognized as a Reconciled in Christ congregation, a church that would welcome gay men and lesbian women. At our meeting in 2017, we voted to Expand the Welcome by adopting a continuing resolution of our Church Council as an addendum to our constitution.

Now, Reconciling Works, the body that now administers Reconciling in Christ status for our national church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is asking every congregation and body to revisit their Reconciling in Christ commitments and in essence say, yes, we still mean it, we still want LGBTQ+ people to join us fully as part of the body of Christ and this congregation.

Much has changed in the world and the church in thirty years. Now LGBTQ+ people can marry, which has led to ordination as deacons, pastors and bishops in the church. And now, many conservatives in our country are working to end this ability to marry. Thirteen states have kept “zombie” laws on their books, hoping for an opportunity to once again outlaw any sexual activity that cannot lead to procreation, which would mean a return to a time when LGBTQ+ people had to hide who they were in order to keep a job or get a mortgage or have custody of children.

You can read about what life was like in the 1970s and 1980s for many LGBTQ+ people in this interview with Augustana member Will Host. It’s easy to lose sight of how much has changed and how quickly, to underestimate how much LGBTQ+ folk have to lose if our society walks backwards, and to underestimate how important our support is for this part of the body of Christ. It’s important to say, no matter what happens, you are still a part of us.

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“Remember that we (the LGBTQIA+ community) never come out just once,” Will told me as we talked about LGBTQIA+ people, “but over and over again, every time we meet someone for the first time – and then many of us must discern whether or not we should.”

“That’s been my life,” said Will Host, a friend and now a member of Augustana for over thirty years. Will came of age at a moment when being a gay man who was out was suddenly possible. Over the decades, he has watched a lot of young people take that crucial step, which alters their lives in ways they cannot predict.
Will was the oldest of four children whose parents were high school sweethearts from Philadelphia. His father was in the Navy during WWII and eventually became an architect; his mother worked as a beautician from home, giving permanent waves in the kitchen sink. After the family moved to the suburbs in time for junior high, Will began to experiment sexually with other boys his age. “I was always looking for a best friend,” he said. He understood that he was gay at an early age.

When it was time for college, Will chose Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, about an hour northeast of Philadelphia. He soon got involved with the school’s Lutheran Campus Ministry (LCM). It was a revelation to him.

“There was never any talk in church about sex” when he was growing up, Will said. But the pastors who served in campus ministry were very upfront about talking positively about the place of homosexuality in students’ lives, and that drew Will into a close relationship with Lutheran Campus Ministry.

When he was ready to graduate, there was an opening for a field secretary with Lutheran Student Movement (LSM), and Will took it. His territory was everyplace east of the Mississippi; he bought a three-month Greyhound Ameripass and began crisscrossing the country, visiting Lutheran Campus Ministry sites and recruiting students for the Lutheran Student Movement.

At about this time, the Lutheran Church in American (LCA) and the American Lutheran Church (ALC), the two bodies who would eventually partner to create the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), began to see the need to address homosexuality in their teachings. The Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969 were for many Americans the first time they considered that gay folks might have rights and might want to be open about their sexuality.

So in 1974, the American Lutheran Church’s Church in Society division put up $5,000 to fund a focus group on LGBT issues. The organization known then as Lutherans Concerned for Gay People (LCGP) was launched from that ALC focus group. Will remembered that the annual dues for someone to be part of the group were three dollars. Will didn’t realize it at the time, but by this point, many LGBT people in other United States mainline church bodies were beginning to take similar steps, “but there was no coordination among them. It was as if the Spirit was moving among us.” Will said.

Later in summer of 1974, one member of the ALC’S focus group, LCGP Co-Coordinator and student at the University of Utah, Allen Blaigh attended the annual Lutheran Student Movement assembly held at St. John’s University in Collegeville in Minnesota. It was there that Will first learned of LCGP. Allen requested that LSM hold a special interest group about LGBT issues which the board approved but asked that it be held after all other activities and not be widely advertised. To the board’s surprise the unannounced workshop was an SRO event. A similar situation occurred at the annual Conference of campus pastors held the following week.

LCGP, eventually (Lutherans Concerned/North America, LC/NA) held hospitality gatherings at synod and church-wide assemblies through the 1980s and 1990s. No publicity. Word of mouth only. And the rooms were packed. The main reason for the secrecy, besides lack of permission, was to protect the identity of those attending. Protecting the identity of the membership has always been a primary concern of LC/NA. The clergy were particularly sensitive to this. In fact, a separate organization called the Lutheran Network, open only to ordained clergy, was formed in the 1980s. Not even LC/NA officers had access to their membership list. The “Network” was instrumental in designing and guiding LC/NAs theological responses to the larger church.

Will moved to Chicago in September of 1975 as the Midwest field secretary for LSM. The following year a promotion led to him supervising other LSM secretaries, handling administrative duties for the organization and acting as a Student Movement representative to the Lutheran Council USA. When he arrived, he didn’t know anyone in the city, and he didn’t know of anywhere to meet other gay men. So he called a helpline that was directed at the gay and lesbian community. When he asked about gay bars in the neighborhood, Will said that he could hear the person on the other end of the line flipping through a Rolodex. The only information he had, the caller said, was that he could go to a bar called Jimmy’s on 55th Street in Hyde Park. He should sit at the first four stools at the bar, the caller said, and someone would probably approach him. It worked, Will laughed. “It was all word of mouth,” Will said. “You really had to put yourself out there. A lot of being gay was learning survival techniques.” You also had to know the signs to watch for, depending on place and circumstance – for men: a pinky ring, a stud in a certain lobe, different colors of bandanas; for women: in the early days a boutonniere of violets and later the symbol of lambda. Some gay men and lesbian women wore pink triangles, the symbol the Nazis had used to label homosexuals in 1930s Germany.

By 1977, Will was in candidacy with his home synod of Southeast Pennsylvania and a part-time student at the Lutheran School of Theology (LSTC). The chair of his synod’s candidacy committee had a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy which was not official, but known to candidates. It was something Will learned during his time with Lutheran Campus Ministry in Kutztown.

In the summer of 1977, Will was one of two LCA youth delegates to the sixth Lutheran World Federation (LWF) assembly in Tanzania. The trip was life-changing. On the way to the conference, he stopped to visit the Taizé community in northern France. “I thought it was going to be one building with about six monks,” Will said. “But it was huge.” On behalf of the Lutheran Council’s Division of Student Affairs he made stops in Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and Kenya to discuss their student movement programs before arriving at the LWF meeting, where he found himself speaking on behalf of the youth caucus on the floor of the assembly.

Will’s experience as staff for Lutheran Student Movement quickly led to opportunities like planning LSM conferences, meeting with officials of the Lutheran Council and its church bodies, and attending the opening at Navy Pier of the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) biannual assembly. But the necessity of meeting and working with church officials also led to jealousy and conflict. Those responsibilities along with a picture of Will addressing the LWF chosen for the cover of the LCA magazine “The Lutheran” and a section of the LCA Yearbook, led fellow students to accuse Will of “brownnosing in order to get ordained as a gay man.” In 1978 and the close of his contract with Lutheran Council and LSM Will left LSTC and then the church in general. He put his experience in event planning to work in a new job that led to a decades-long career.

In 1980, Will met his now-husband, Denis Frankenfield. As their relationship became serious, Will began to think about telling his family about Denis. He had never had a reason or perfect opportunity to come out to any of them. His sister Beth and his brother Rick had figured it out on their own. One day when Rick and Will were driving in Rick’s truck, Rick said, ”We’re riding in the GayMobile!” and that was how Will knew that Rick knew. On the other hand Will had to come out to his brother Bob after his girlfriend threatened to tell Bob he was gay because Will wasn’t fond of her affiliation with the Mormon church.

Will was hesitant to tell his mother about being gay although she had met Denis. The one thing many LGBT folks fear the most is the reaction of their parents. But when he finally gathered the courage to come out to her, her response was, “Thank God, I thought you lost your job.”

A decade after the formation of Lutherans Concerned, the organization in 1984 began a new program, Reconciled in Christ, which identified congregations who would welcome gay and lesbian people. By that time, Will had reconnected with church through Lutherans Concerned, acting as administrative assistant, secretary and eventually international co-chair for LC/NA. Will was involved with Lutheran Concerned/Chicago for a number of years as well.

Troy Hedrick, then the pastor at Christ the Mediator Lutheran Church in Bronzeville, “married” a lesbian couple in 1972. One of the women was a student at LSTC who received an M.A. degree after being denied an M.Div. In 1975 after an elderly couple expressed concern that her sister was lesbian, Troy and those couples started the LC/Chicago chapter that led the congregation to be the first congregation in Chicago to become Reconciled in Christ in 1985 (Augustana became RIC in 1992). Resurrection Lutheran Church in Lakeview, the place where the Chicago chapter found its permanent home, followed later that same year.