The Rev. Tiffany Steinwert linked arms with others outside the 2000 General Conference of the United Methodist Church, in protest of the church strengthening its stance against homosexuality.

As they sang hymns like “We Shall Overcome,” an anti-gay protestor waved a Ken doll with a noose around its neck to get across the point that God would kill the gays. A group across the street stressed ‘fags’ could be converted.

“I wanted to put my body where my theology was, where my politics were,” Steinwert said.

Steinwert and about 200 other protestors were arrested on civil disobedience charges, but she returned the next day because attendees inside the conference didn’t see their protest.

They entered before the conference delegates’ voting session, holding hands in another act of disobedience, despite the risk of being arrested again. Steinwert wore a rainbow pin into the stadium-seated room of thousands of fellow United Methodists.

The room was silent, until a woman above her climbed atop the balcony railing to say, “I’m lesbian, and I know God loves me, but I cannot do this any longer.” Those nearby had to stop her from jumping, Steinwert said.

What she witnessed at the conference was part of what led her to co-found Cambridge Welcoming Ministries in 2002. The Somerville, Mass., congregation welcomes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons to the United Methodist Church.

After nearly a decade as its senior pastor, Steinwert started Monday as the first female dean of Syracuse University’s Hendricks Chapel. She said her new role suits her passions of being a pastor, a scholar and a community organizer.

The position was attractive to Steinwert because it offered an opportunity to create interfaith communities and encourage discussion about moral and ethical questions, not just in the university setting but in the world, she said.

Steinwert doesn’t stick to one tradition, but instead reaches out to other faith traditions and is respectful of views that are not her own, said Bryan Stone, her academic adviser at Boston University during her Masters of Divinity training and doctoral work.

“In that sense, I think she’s perfect for an interfaith chapel,” Stone said.

And she advocates for more than the LGBTQ community, Stone said.

“Even though her activism has been primarily around the issues of LGBTQ rights and marriage rights, she’s much broader than that,” Stone said. “She does have a passion for social justice and caring for the poor and workers rights that goes well beyond the hot issue of our time.”

Social justice has been Steinwert’s passion since she was at least 5, when she pulled a red wagon around her Cincinnati, Ohio, neighborhood each day to collect cans for a soup kitchen.

She soon realized the vans of food she collected would never end world hunger, let alone the problem she saw in Cincinnati.

“I was burnt-out at five, so by the time I got to college, I continued to be burnt-out because I had never found a satisfying community that could sustain me with the hope and energy and courage that I needed to continue to do this work, which I really thought was my calling in life, what I was meant to do,” she said. “It was a passion that would not go away.”

After years of searching in groups like Girl Scouts, her high school’s teen council and a bisexual-gay-lesbian union in college, Steinwert found the community she had been searching for.

“I had been told by someone who was involved with a Christian group on campus that I couldn’t do both — I couldn’t be both a social activist and a Christian,” she said. “That seemed to be a horrifying choice.”

So Steinwert told her pastor she couldn’t go to church anymore because God was calling her to continue doing social justice work instead.

But he told her you can’t be a faithful Christian in the United Methodist tradition without working for social justice. And you can’t continue to work for social justice without a faith base, he said.

This, Steinwert said, was what she had been missing all along: a reason to keep going when she couldn’t make a dent in Cincinnati’s poverty.

‘I needed something to ground myself in that could show me that the work that I was doing was making a difference and that justice would come,’ she said. ‘For me, the Christian faith offers that hope.’

Steinwert embraces that philosophy to this day, believing that God is just and those called to ministry are meant to manifest the love and inclusion of all people, said Julie Todd, a colleague and friend.

Steinwert, who is married and not gay herself, said she focused her interests on the LGBTQ community once she witnessed the internal divides it caused in the church. She sometimes introduces herself as queer, in reference to her being in solidarity with people marginalized by their sexual orientation or gender identity, Steinwert said. This negates the privilege that comes with labeling herself a ‘heterosexual ally,’ she said.

Hate mail has come over the years, and the funding of Cambridge Welcoming Ministries was threatened when the United Methodist Church General Conference ruled against financially supporting groups that promote homosexuality, Steinwert said.

But Steinwert worked to make Cambridge Welcoming Ministries as inclusive as possible, said Tallessyn Grenfell-Lee, the congregation’s music director since 2004. Grenfell-Lee and Steinwert worked to find new ways to include people with mental and physical disabilities. They also tried to welcome the transgender community by working around phrases like ‘sisters and brothers’ during worship services.

Like she did in front of the 2000 General Conference of the United Methodist Church, Steinwert will once again put her body where her theology is, this time at an interfaith chapel.

“What I hope to add as dean,” she said, “is the creation of a rich community that can wrestle together with these big moral, ethical and theological questions, and not just simply wrestle with the questions, but work together for some common purpose.’”

Published on March 8, 2010 at 12:00 pm