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Jimmy Creech
(? - living) U.S.A.

Jimmy Creech

ex-UMC pastor

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Jimmy Creech, a native of Goldsboro, North Carolina, is a former ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. He holds a BA degree in Biblical Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Master of Divinity degree from The Divinity School of Duke University. In 1965 and 1967, he studied with the Institute for Mediterranean Studies at Hebrew University and Hebrew Union Theological Seminary in Jerusalem, Israel, and at museums and archaeological sites. He served as a pastor in churches of the North Carolina Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church from 1970 to 1990.

While at Fairmont United Methodist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, (1987-1990) he helped to create the Raleigh Religious Network for Gay and Lesbian Equality, an ecumenical group whose purpose was to publicly counter antigay religious rhetoric with a faithful message of God's love for and inclusion of all persons, regardless of sexual orientation.

Creech served as the Program Associate with the North Carolina Council of Churches from 1991 to 1996. He was the Council's Legislative Liaison with the North Carolina General Assembly, representing the Council on a broad range of issues including gun control, health care, AIDS/HIV funding, campaign finance reform, farm workers, children, and the repeal of North Carolina's Crimes Against Nature Law (aka "Sodomy Law").

He helped to create and was the first chairperson of The Covenant with North Carolina's Children, a coalition of nonprofit agencies providing services to children. He also helped to create People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, and served chairperson of its Board of Directors. While he was with the North Carolina Council of Churches, the Council voted approval of the membership application of the Gulf Coast District of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, the first state Council of Churches in the U.S. to do so.

In July of 1996, Creech was appointed Senior Pastor of First United Methodist Church in Omaha, Nebraska. In September of 1997, he conducted a covenant ceremony for two women who were members of First Church. Consequently, a judicial charge of "disobedience to the Order and Discipline of The United Methodist Church" was brought against him based on an amendment to the Social Principles of The United Methodist Church adopted by the 1996 General Conference.

The amendment read: "Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches." In March of 1998, he was tried and acquitted in a church trial, held in Kearney, Nebraska. Creech's defense was that the statement was not church law because it was in the Social Principles.

When the Nebraska bishop chose not to reappoint him to First United Methodist Church Omaha, Creech took a voluntary leave of absence from pastoral ministry and returned to his home in Raleigh, North Carolina, in June of 1998.

In April of 1999, Creech celebrated the holy union of two men in Chapel Hill. Charges were brought against him and a church trial was held in Grand Island, Nebraska, on November 17, 1999. In August of 1998, the Judicial Council of The United Methodist Church ruled that the statement prohibiting "homosexual unions" was church law in spite of its location in the Social Principles. Consequently, the jury in this second trial declared Creech guilty of "disobedience to the Order and Discipline of The United Methodist Church" and withdrew his credentials of ordination.

Since the summer of 1998, Creech has been traveling around the country to preach in churches and to speak on college and university campuses, as well as to various community and national Gay Rights organizations. Currently, he is writing a book about his experiences of the Church's struggle to welcome and accept lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons.

He is the Chairperson of the Board of Directors of Soulforce, Inc., an interreligious movement using the principles of nonviolent resistance, taught and practiced by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., to confront the spiritual violence perpetrated against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons by religious institutions.

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Source: The LGBT Religious Archives Network - http://www.lgbtran.org/Pioneers.asp

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