Gay Methodist pastor challenged – again
An openly gay Clifton minister who withstood one effort to push him out of the United Methodist Church is now being subjected to another challenge from within the denomination.
The Rev. David Meredith, 61, exonerated in October of two of three charges brought against him in a local church court, will face another hearing Friday in a regional Methodist court in Indianapolis.
He will appear before the North Central Jurisdictional Committee on Appeals.
That internal Methodist court is larger than the first and has authority on denominational matters in the upper Midwest.
“There’s a mean-spiritedness to it,” said Meredith, the popular pastor of Clifton United Methodist Church since July 2012. “They refuse to let me and other gay and lesbian clergy and our communities simply be in the church.”
The appeals process will either affirm the decision made in October by the Committee on Investigation of the West Ohio Conference of the United Methodist Church or tell that body to reconsider the three charges brought against Meredith.
The West Ohio Conference com- mittee did not certify charges against Meredith for being a “selfavowed practicing homosexual” or for immorality. A charge of disobedience, however, was certified. That latter charge relates to a rule in the 2012 edition of the United Methodist Book of Discipline: “Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches.”
The counsel for the church, a formal position that functions as counsel for the original 10 complainants against Meredith, is the Rev. Gregory Stover, the retired pastor of Armstrong Chapel United Methodist Church in Indian Hill. Stover decided to make the appeal to a higher church court after conferring with the complainants.
Meredith said he and Stover know each other and that their roles in the decades-old denominational battle over homosexuality are not personal.
“He and I have been called upon to represent two very different viewpoints of Methodism in this region,” Meredith said.
Meredith and his partner of almost 29 years, Jim Schlachter, were married on May 7, 2016.
Two days after the wedding ceremony, the first complaints about Meredith’s sexual orientation as a Methodist minister were filed with the West Ohio Conference.