Controversy leads to outrage, then understanding

Isaac Grody-Patinkin worried that things could get violent in Del Norte, a small town in the San Luis Valley, after an online video showed a pastor cleansing his church through prayer in response to a gay man telling his coming out story there a few days earlier.

The LGBTQ community and its allies were livid and demanded an apology. Protesters gathered outside the Gateway Church. Facebook threats against the pastor and the church were so serious that the social media company removed them.

“My intention was, ‘How do we interrupt this?’ ” said GrodyPatinkin, a prevention services coordinator in nearby Mineral County. “Because no one wants to go there.”

This is the story of what happens when faith, personal expression and sexual identity collide — and how a tense town in southern Colorado talked its way out of trouble.

Cutting the mike

The San Luis Valley Rural Philanthropy Days conference came to Del Norte on Sept. 17 — a twice-a-year program that brings together local nonprofits, grantmakers and community leaders. The goal of the three-day gathering is to give the opportunity for smaller, rural nonprofits to get much-needed face time with donors and to expand professional networks.

It’s an area that Justin Garoutte

knows well. After all, he grew up in Antonito, a San Luis Valley town of less than 1,000 people and 6 miles from the New Mexico border. The conference steering committee wanted to feature storytellers from the region and chose the 29-year-old to give a keynote speech.

On Sept. 17, Garoutte took the microphone in the Gateway Church and — for the first time in his life — publicly told his story about coming out of the closet. He talked about going to confession every week, praying hundreds of Hail Marys and Our Fathers in hopes that the priest would “perform a miracle and straighten out my life.” He spoke about spending late nights researching conversion therapy, noting the irony of the venue in which he spoke.

Then his microphone went dead. The church’s pastor, Greg Schaffer, yelled from the back for Garoutte to watch what he was saying in the southern Baptist church.

“I thought it was just technical difficulties,” Garoutte told The Denver Post. He later learned that Schaffer had shut off audio on purpose.

Garoutte’s mike eventually came back, albeit at lower levels, and he finished his story. After coming home one night from college with a hickey on his neck, he told his mom it was from a boy. Tears flowed down her face. His youngest sister hurled homophobic insults at him.

When he finished telling his story, the crowd of about 300 people gave him a standing ovation, he said.

“I was very emotional,” Garoutte said. “I was teared up. It was really touching to share.”

But as Garoutte absorbed the emotions of telling his personal story, Schaffer had an entirely different reaction.

Less than a week later, the story blew up.

A video posted on YouTube showed Schaffer telling his congregation that they “do not endorse homosexuality in the church,” that they believe it’s a sin. He then told those in the sanctuary to bow their heads and do a “prayer cleansing.”

The video ignited a firestorm in the community. Organizations from the conference issued an array of statements denouncing the episode, affirming their support of the LGBTQ community.

Leadership from the conference steering committee and its partner organizations, the Community Resource Center and Anschutz Family Foundation, said in a statement that the committee “spent a year collaborating to design and present a conference that reflects our shared values of equity and inclusion for all people – including those from the LGBTQ+ and faith-based communities.”

In the future, the statement said, it will choose partners and venues committed to its values.

As protesters outside the church and on social media demanded a public apology from Schaffer, the rhetoric grew increasingly hostile.

Grody-Patinkin saw something needed to be done.

“Reaching across divides”

At the heart of the chasm, Grody-Patinkin found, was a lack of understanding from both sides. He called Schaffer. They talked for an hour.

“I started working with Greg on really understanding why the words he used were hurtful,” Grody-Patinkin said. “And to his credit, he showed up.”

Over the next 2½ weeks, they spoke for nearly 12 hours. Schaffer explained that Garoutte’s story about coming home with a hickey may not mean much to some people, but it was something that made the pastor and his congregation highly uncomfortable.

“This is a holy place,” Schaffer told The Denver Post, regarding his church. “And that kind of language is something we don’t condone or promote in any way.”

The cleansing prayer “wasn’t meant to be addressing the LGBT community,” he said. “It was more saying we don’t align ourselves with language like that in church.”

The church live-streamed every sermon, he said, but the video was never meant to go on YouTube. The church has since decided to stop filming its services and has shut down its social media accounts.

“If you go on social media, you get one side,” Schaffer said. “If you think you know me from listening to a three-minute clip with no back story — even I look at it and say, ‘That’s pretty heavy. That’s rough.’ ”

As he kept the dialogue open with Schaffer, Grody-Patinkin met with members of San Luis Valley Pride and The Del Norte People’s coalition, along with other LGBTQ allies who had organized the protests. For six hours across two meetings, the groups took a step back, thinking about what they wanted their community to look like in five years. They envisioned a world in which any kid identifying as LGBTQ can feel safe in school or comfortable walking down the street.

The culmination of these conversations arrived Wednesday when Schaffer and the president of SLV Pride, Scott White, wrote a joint letter to the editor of the Alamosa Valley Courier.

“The controversy did not end quietly,” the letter said. “It grew into a deep practice of reaching across divides, understanding where each other’s language was experienced as hurtful, and why. That is the story we hope to share.”

Joint letters

Below the joint statement, Schaffer apologized in this own letter, writing that he hoped his words would lead to “healing and understanding,” and that the community could reach a place of mutual respect despite their differences.

“I understand now that the impact of my words were deeply hurtful, especially to the LGBTQ community and for that, I am truly sorry,” Schaffer wrote.

San Luis Valley Pride and The Del Norte People’s Coalition responded in their letter, expressing appreciation for Schaffer’s willingness to reach out and apologize, as well as acknowledging the miscommunication that led to the keynote speeches being house in the Gateway Church.

“We look forward to a day when all people can sit down, break bread despite differences, and recognize the full value each of us brings as a human being,” the groups wrote.