Audio of meeting: November 6, 2023
Transcript of District Pastors’ Meeting With Rick Power: (November 6, 2023)
(Text in bold is for emphasis)
The main reason I’ve asked you to come together this evening is so that I could share a little bit more detail and background of the decision that I announced this week that I’ll be retiring as DS come district assembly in April.
I want to give you the basic information about why this decision was made and then talk a little bit about what you can expect going forward as we begin the transition process for the next DS, and then we’ll see what questions you have. Several months ago, I was contacted by a fellow pastor on the district who wanted to talk to me about something disturbing he had heard.
He had discovered that my daughter, Rachel, had conducted a gay wedding. This took place in January of 2019. The wedding was for the brother of Rachel’s husband, Will Campbell. When Will’s brother got engaged, he asked Will if Will would do the wedding. Will said, I’m sorry, I’m an ordained elder in the Church of the Nazareth. We cannot do same sex weddings. His brother was very disappointed. This created a lot of tension in the family and threatened a rift between the siblings. Rachel got the idea that she could offer to do the wedding. She went online, secured some credential, and she officiated the wedding. Will was there. He participated by reading a poem and by praying a prayer. When this pastor came to me with his concern about this, I explained the context just like I did for you just now and told him that I would not be taking any action against Rachel. Several weeks later, I heard from our General Superintendent, Dr. Christian Sarmiento, and he had received email communications expressing the same concern about the wedding and about some other issues, mostly related to my views and behavior toward LGBTQ people and issues.
Several email exchanges [went] back and forth with the General Superintendent. After all the details were shared and he knew what Rachel’s part had been and what Will’s part had been, he said that Rachel was subject to discipline because she’s a church member and she had violated her membership pledge to uphold the covenants of the Church of the Nazarene; and that I was wrong to allow her to be an employee of the district and to be on the ballot to be elected to district board or council. Rachel has resigned from those positions and will be working with her local pastor to deal with the local church issues that are implicated in this. That was the first thing. I should also say that as far as Will’s participation, that was not a violation of his ordination vows and he is not subject to discipline in that regard.
The second issue that Dr. Sarmiento wanted to talk to me about was a paper that I have written. It’s a paper that I shared with very few people, but that I wrote so that I could be accountable to those in leadership over me. Since he’s our new General Superintendent and I had not yet had a face-to-face meeting with him, I had not shared the paper with him.
Since all this came up, I thought it was past time for him to know my views. I sent him the paper, and in doing so, I accidentally copied someone who was not an intended recipient of the paper. This confidential communication got shared and has been shared multiple times. It now is a public document. If it hadn’t gone public, probably it wouldn’t have come up at all, even though I would have shared it with Dr. Sarmiento. But because it expresses controversial views and I’m in a position of leadership as a district superintendent, this is disturbing to people to know that in my interior views, I do not align 100% with the stated position of the Church of the Nazareth on human sexuality. I make it clear in the paper that I do not believe the Church of the Nazarene should move toward LGBT inclusion. It would be too disruptive. I also make it clear that I have, in my conduct, never violated my ordination vows by performing a same sex wedding, teaching contrary to the statements of the manual, or advocating for LGBTQ inclusion. However, these two things; my failure to take action toward Rachel and the views I expressed in this paper, led Dr. Sarmiento to come to ask me if I would let this be my last year to serve as DS. So, in our relationship at this point, he has been following the manual, paragraph 604. Probably most of you have never paid much attention to the judicial section of the manual, but there’s a lot of very interesting stuff there. Paragraph 604 just says that when there are allegations against someone in a position of leadership, whether that be a local pastor or a DS or whomever, that we should first try to resolve the matter by agreement. What that means is that it’s not through formal charges or some judicial process, but it’s simply by agreement. I have agreed with Dr. Sarmiento that I will retire at the time of our next assembly. I haven’t been asked to surrender my credentials. I haven’t been removed from ministry. I’m free to take any assignment that might come to me after this. I’m not being forced to retire. We’ve reached this decision by agreement. That’s it in a nutshell. I think the most important thing I will say in this meeting is that I love this district just like you love your local church and you work hard for the strength and health of your local church.
I am deeply sorry that my words or actions have caused this disruption in the life of our district that has created division between some of us. I’m so sorry and I apologize to all of you for that. Going forward, here’s what will happen. At times like this, when there’s a transition in district leadership, the district advisory council comes into play, and that’s a larger group than the district advisory board. It’s 10 people. It’s the district advisory board, it’s our district officers, our district secretary and district treasurer. Charles is already part of the advisory board, and then Sharon Santiago, our treasurer, the heads of our auxiliary organization, so that’s Brad Kinoshita for NYI, Pua Kanealii for NDI, and Gayle Ragle for NMI. That’s 10 people. As I was looking over that list, I was really pleased to see that there are five women and five men. There are five laypersons and five clergy. There are- I just figured four people from Oahu and six from the neighbor islands. That’s a really good representative group for our district. They will meet with Dr. Sarmiento and with Stan Reader, who’s our regional director. They’ll meet with him for the first time on November 25th, and they’ll start the process.
Former Nazarene 