Rev. Anna Bredel is a pastor, public theologian, author, and graduate of the University of Iowa’s Religious Studies program. She received her Master of Divinity from Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. Rev. Bredel has served as student pastor on the University of Iowa campus since 2014.
After being affiliated with the United Methodist Church (UMC) for 109 years, the Wesley Center student ministry declared independence in 2022 amid the UMC’s refusal to reverse its anti-LGBTQ doctrines, which have led to a formal complaint against Bredell, the center’s executive director, for being an openly queer clergyman.
In May, the UMC General Conference finally voted to lift longstanding bans on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage, but only after roughly a quarter of UMC churches chose to withdraw in defiance of recent calls for progress and acceptance.
Meanwhile, an Iowa City ministry that has no plans to rejoin the UMC said this month:The sacred groupa place for mentally misfits,” Bledel said. Little Village.
“Compared to when I took office, the board is more queer, more transgender, younger, less white, more radical, and less United Methodist. Sharing risk, growing together, and loving one another are core practices in our community culture.”
Bredel is also co-founder and co-director of enfleshed, an organization providing spiritual nourishment for collective liberation and publishing Bredel’s free monthly column at enfleshed.com.
Last month’s historic vote came just as Bledel was preparing to present her doctoral dissertation at Drew University in New Jersey. Little Village I met with the pastor, who will soon be completing his doctorate in theology and philosophical studies, to discuss faith, heresy and liberation.
Tell us a little bit about your faith journey. Did you grow up in the church?
I was baptized in a small church in a small town in Louisiana and grew up attending church often twice a week. My family moved a lot during my childhood, but through all the changes, The United Methodist Church remained my spiritual home, my faith community, and my place of religious belonging for most of my life.
My family moved to Iowa when I was in middle school. I was beginning to come out as queer and genderqueer (non-binary transgender was not yet a common term). I struggled to find a place in conservative youth groups, but I ended up attending an adult Sunday school Spiritual Formation class that was life-saving and spiritually healing. The adults in that class mentored me, listened to me, and affirmed me. They taught me to pray in verse, to ask big questions, to question superficial answers, to wrestle with faith and belief, and to encounter God as love.
During college, here at the University of Iowa, I found spiritual home in the Wesley Center. With the support of my beloved campus pastors and mentors, Paul and Marsha, I became a peer minister and started a queer coffeehouse for other LGBTQ+ people who wanted to engage at the intersection of queerness and spirituality. I loved writing prayers and liturgies and leading small group conversations.
I was already openly gay when I first felt a calling to the priesthood and headed off to seminary. In college, I also became fascinated with the academic study of religion. I sought ordination within the UMC, even though it was officially forbidden. I wanted to use my relative power and access within the denomination to effect change from within, to play a role in leveraging the best of our tradition to move the world toward justice and freedom.
How has your understanding of religion, community, and justice evolved throughout your career?
I believe we all have three fundamental spiritual needs: the need to love and be loved, the need for meaning and direction in life, and the need to belong to a community.
I became less willing to silently submit to unjust policies, rules and practices, and more willing to speak up, stand up and practice courage. For as long as I can remember, I have always been something of a mystic, a bit of a heretic.
I fell in love with Marguerite Porete. She was part of the Beguines, a movement of heretics and mystics who were tired of the corruption and hypocrisy of the church, but who passionately loved God and the world. They wrote theology and gave public sermons and teachings. In the late 1200s, Porete wrote a book about mystical union with God. She eventually claimed that one could experience union with God without a church, priest, or sacraments. Bishops and priests were not very happy that she questioned their authority. They publicly burned her books, told her to stop circulating them, and to stop preaching in public. She refused to be silent. She was imprisoned and accused of being a “relapsed heretic.” In 1310, she was burned at the stake in Paris. She took her book with her to the stake. Her courage, faith, and conviction were very deep.
In 2017 you Little Village About your desire to help students find joy in love and service, values rooted in the history of the Methodist Church, yet paradoxically requiring you to break church laws and collect complaints. What was it like living and working within that paradox?
To be honest, it was painful, exhausting, and unsustainable — but, as is so often the case, it also opened up opportunities for transformation and connection.
In June 2016, in a moment of personal privilege, I stood up and testified surrounded by hundreds of United Methodist clergy and laity across Iowa. I publicly asserted my queerness and formally used language that criminalized my queerness. “I am a self-described, practicing gay man,” I said. “Or, in my own words, I am an out, queer, partnered clergyman.”
Within the hour, three clergy colleagues had filed formal complaints, all cis-hetero white men, none of whom had any direct connection to me, and they had misspelled my name. A week or so later, as I was leaving town to attend a writing retreat in the hopes of finally getting some focus and attention on the paper, I received a formal notice of complaint from my bishop.
Thus began an intense, three-plus year chapter in my life under very public scrutiny as a very private, introverted person. Tyler Schwaller, another out queer clergy member ordained by the Iowa Conference, officially became my clergy support person and eventually clergy legal advisor. I was interviewed and invited to teach, preach, and speak in public forums, pulpits, and classrooms across the country. I preached at the National Cathedral. I wore a clergy collar while serving as grand marshal for the local Pride parade.
As grievances piled up over the years, broader solidarities blossomed, withered, and morphed. Queer and transgender liberation movements within the UMC splintered into movements for assimilation, acceptance, and individual gain. I felt too isolated and alone amid the onslaught. It was damaging to my health. It was traumatic. And I don’t use that term lightly.
As I write this, I have lost my sense of belonging to religion or church and am building a wilder, more untamed form of spiritual belonging in the world. The sacred group Both physical and embodied people are unstable. The two combined barely provide a livable income. Neither is guaranteed for more than the next few months. I am learning to live with this uncertainty as best I can, and I am learning that this means practicing love, magic, and healing with every precious breath.
How does UMC’s new breakdown over LGBTQ acceptance change that paradigm? What does it mean to you to have these discriminatory rules repealed?
For me, and for many of my family, there are feelings of celebration, but also of deep and sacred sadness, anger and betrayal.
I have no words, but I want to bear witness to the truth, such as having to watch multiple people who have filed complaints against me celebrate “It’s a new day!”. Those who have caused so much harm to so many of my people for so long have suddenly become rainbow-clad allies. Those who have declared us divisive, destructive, and too extreme, and who have turned their backs on us, abandoned us, and abdicated responsibility, are celebrating the fruits of the labor they condemned. What will they do to right this? I believe in transformative justice.
Many people have lost a lot, [the vote] It’s not possible. Many of the people who gave the most and lost the most were not there. Anything that makes life more livable for queer and trans people right now is worth celebrating. For this policy change to be worthwhile for queer and trans people, the work must start here. It shouldn’t end here.
What role do you think the church should play in Iowa right now? What can Iowans do to be on the side of justice when it comes to systemic violence?
Iowa has a pretty radical and rich history. It’s heartbreaking to see our state move so quickly to the right. But I believe in the transformative power of being a good neighbor.
The first congregation I pastored right out of seminary was Osage, Iowa. We were unfamiliar with each other in many ways. But we did the faithful work of leaning in to learn from our differences, with courage, with curiosity and attentiveness. When rural white people are homogenized as hateful, I think of the beautiful people there. I don’t want to ignore the real violence that comes from the rise of white supremacy and so on. And I received death threats while I pastored there, and people would bang on my door in the middle of the night trying to intimidate me into silence. But I also had people who left me extra tomatoes, or taught me how to garden and plant flowers, or offered to protect me if a threat came up in the middle of the night. They were much more numerous and frequent.
Whatever power, privilege, or status we have, we can find creative ways to use it for the collective good. We need to fight desperately for each other.
Religion and its expression are prominent in Palestine solidarity events. What do you think about religious coalitions rallying around the anti-Zionist cause?
Anti-Zionist Jews are refusing to be told their traditions cannot support them, and are standing up for themselves, rallying together in a brave and powerful witness. My spiritual and social community includes many, many radical Jews, many queer and trans people, who have long been on the front lines of rallying for racial and economic justice and a free Palestine.
It was Jewish activist and poet Emma Lazarus who taught us that “None of us are free until we are all free.” None of us are free as long as Palestinians face genocide, occupation and apartheid. None of us are free as long as anti-Semitism (real anti-Semitism, not the one that’s peddled to stifle dissent) remains rampant.
Salvation comes from the word salve, which means to heal. Coming together in solidarity with one another and working together for our collective liberation is a salvation practice that liberates and heals us.
What do you think is the most important thing people can do to strengthen their community during Pride Month?
The growing tendency to enforce obedience to ecclesiastical, social, and civil/political law and order scares me far more than bans on certain clerical ordinations or marriage bans. As long as police and militarism reign, a world in which queer and trans people can get what they need to survive and thrive will remain simply impossible.
Pride is an invitation and a provocation to rise up and create holy chaos in a time of urgent need for change. Yes, I am talking about Pride and I am talking about the UMC and I am talking about Palestine.
This article originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of Little Village.
