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John M. Linscheid
(1953 - living) U.S.A.

John Linscheid

Pastor

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John was born in 1953, one of three sons of J. Willard Linscheid (1923-1992) and Ruth Linscheid (b.1931). He grew up in the rural, ethnically low German Mennonite town of Goessel, Kansas. At age 18, he was baptized and became a member of the Goessel Mennonite Church.

In high school and at Bethel College (North Newton, Kansas), John actively participated in the peace movement, opposing the Vietnam War. He majored in Bible and Religion, graduating with a B.A. in 1975. He studied for two years at The School of Theology at Claremont, California, and then transferred to Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, where he received his M. Div. degree in 1980.

In 1980, he became the first pastor to be hired by the Lawrence, Kansas, Mennonite Fellowship (now Peace Mennonite Church). His pastoral duties included maintaining strong ties with the Lawrence Coalition for Peace and Justice and he helped to lead the coalition in conducting referendum for a Nuclear Weapons Freeze.

John came out as a gay man to his family and a few friends in the late 1970s but remained publicly closeted. In the early 1980s, John wrote a number of pro-gay articles for the Brethren Mennonite Council for Gay Concerns (BMC). In 1983, he became one of the first Mennonite pastors in the United States to come out publicly.

The congregation, divided on how to respond, decided to retain him as pastor on an interim basis. However, the district conference demanded John's ouster as a condition for continued funding. In May 1984, John left Lawrence. Although John had been approved for ordination (he had been licensed until then), his coming out brought a cancellation of plans for that step.

In September 1983, about 6 months before his ouster, John met Ken M. White and the two became lovers. In 1985, they moved to Philadelphia. John took a position as an assistant editor at The Other Side magazine, a position he would hold for five years.

While at The Other Side, John authored a seminal article "Reading the Bible with Gay Eyes." In that and subsequent articles, John eschewed pleading excuses to answer antigay elements. Instead, he started with LGBTQ experience and asked what keys it might hold to unlocking scripture. Instead of arguing whether it was "okay to be gay," John's articles uncovered queer dynamics in texts such as creation stories, the destruction of Sodom, and the Gospel of John.

When John moved to Philadelphia, he had joined Germantown Mennonite Church, the oldest Mennonite congregation in North America. The congregation began accepting gay and lesbian members about the time he joined in 1986. Although one of the congregation's regional conferences, Franconia Mennonite Conference, was officially hostile to gay and lesbian people, it made a special agreement with the local congregation to permit a more tolerant approach.

However, in the early 1990s, the conference, under fire from conservatives, abandoned an early decision to leave membership decisions to the congregation. It demanded the congregation conform to its antigay/lesbian policies - effectively demanding the excommunication of gay and lesbian members. John was one of several congregational representatives who attempted to negotiate a "third-way" agreement to maintain a window of tolerance in the conference.

However, after failing twice to excommunicate the congregation in open conference sessions, denominational leaders put out a mail-in ballot that provided no option to support the Germantown congregation. In 1998, the congregation was excommunicated.

The congregation's final ties to the Mennonite denomination were cut by its other regional conference, Eastern District, when the congregation decided to ordain an openly gay man, David Weaver. John was again among the congregational representatives who attempted to preserve some level of tolerance on the part of the denomination, without success.

In between the time of the initial expulsion by one body and the final expulsion by the second, John's activities were seriously curtailed. In the late 1990s, Primary Schlerosing Cholangitis, a serious liver disease, took its toll on John's health. In September 2000, he received a liver transplant. Within a year, he was again able to pick up some leadership responsibilities in his local congregation and to preach from time to time.

At present, John Linscheid works as an office manager at the University of Pennsylvania's Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department.

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Website: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~linsch/JLpage.htm

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