Florida Agenda

By Dale Madison

One could say without any irony that Greater Fort Lauderdale’s Gayborhood is truly blessed in its abundance of places of worship, where both the LGBT and the straight can find comfort and connection to the mysteries of the universe with likeminded (and “like-souled”) individuals seeking nourishment for the spirit. One congregation that calls Wilton Manors—and, more specifically, the antique district—“home” is Shine Ministries, a small Pentecostal church located on North Dixie Highway, led by “out” pastors Jayeson Owen and Michelle Lugo.

Owen—known as “P.J.” growing up in South Carolina and North Florida—recalls getting more serious about his faith following graduation from high school, when he decided to attend the Assembly of God College in Lakeland. Early on in his academic life, he decided that he should be “up front” about his sexual identity with the school’s dean, so he scheduled an appointment, and announced that he was gay. In a line reminiscent of “Sordid Lives,” the dean told Owen, “You are not participating in your own recovery.”

After returning to South Carolina to enroll at Clemson University, Owen began working with a group of transgendered and transsexual persons, and he was asked to work with the group in “drag.” During his first year working with the T community, Owen found himself running late for a meeting one night, so he compensated by speeding over the posted limit.

“I saw the red and blue flashing light behind me,” Owen, now 34, recalls. “I pulled to the side of the road, and was arrested for going 10 miles per hour over the limit.” That was only the start of it.

After being booked into jail, Owen asked a corrections officer for permission to use the restroom. The answer was shocking. “We don’t allow faggots to use the bathroom,” he was told. It’s the kind of moment that can have a profound impact on the rest of one’s life, and work.

After finishing school, Owen moved to Broward County, and took a job teaching. “I loved teaching,” says Owen, but he knew that “there was just something missing. I heard about Shine Ministries, and I liked what I saw.

Words to gospel songs had always kept me close to God. I was at the beach one day listening to a couple near me, and they were also discussing Shine Ministries. That week, I attended my first Pride event, and Shine had a booth— it was the first time I knew there were gay Christians,” Owen remembers. “I began a Bible study in my home.”

Owen began to work more closely with the ministry at a time when he was experiencing his own personal upheaval, one familiar to a great many. “At the time, my home was in foreclosure. I was trying to get through this— and to personally ‘shine’—when I was notified that someone had passed on, and had left me some money for a new home.” At around the same time, Owen continues, “the call came from First Congregational Church, and they asked me to teach a small class.” His life had taken a 180-degree turn for the better. Owen has no hesitation about whom he credits. “HE truly does work in mysterious ways.”

Of the worship at Shine Ministries, Owen says, “We reject the legalism of Pentecostalism. We embrace that God is love 100 percent. We also believe in SODA: ‘Significance, Opportunity, Destiny, and Authenticity.’ We believe this is how we should live our lives— that you have to put yourself out into the Universe.”

Shine Ministries—located at 2401 North Dixie Highway, in the same building as the Scissorium and Cricket Finds—holds services at 10:30 a.m. on Sundays, and 7 p.m. on Wednesdays. For more information about services, and a wide array of activities like snorkeling in the Florida Keys, music festivals, free weekly flapjack nights, and other events, visit mayweshine.weebly.com.

By CLIFF DUNN

Something this week put me in mind of how long can be the passage of just 40 years. Those of us who were alive during the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade may be shocked—shocked!—to learn that people sitting right next to you at this very moment may not have been alive 39 years ago. I don’t mean to sound like a drama queen here, but the truth is that today we take for granted many things that weren’t remotely on the radar—not to mention gaydar— screen 50 years ago.

Take the current presidential election year. In 2012, Lord Alfred Douglas’ “love that dare not speak its name” is sounding a loud blast on both ends of the political spectrum, with religious and social conservatives mobilizing to keep marriage equality out of the state house law books from sea to shining sea, while the Democratic National Committee deliberates including the issue as part of its national Party Platform (see inside this week’s Agenda National News story, “Democratic Leadership Considers Adding Marriage Equality to Party Platform”).

And—seriously—it’s only a matter of time before President Obama comes out squarely in support of gay marriage (my from-the-hip guess would be on Nov. 7, the day after he wins—or loses—reelection).

Now let’s stretch back a few years B.C. (“Before Cliff”) to 1962—precisely 50 years ago–when the White House was occupied by another “minority,” the Roman Catholic John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The fallen JFK–a wounded combat veteran who served his country in World War II and whose assassination threw his nation into a depth of despair that had never been felt since the murder of Lincoln—has been a fairly regular punching bag for GOP presidential candidate and fellow Roman Catholic Rick Santorum—a lawyer and failed professional politician whose “service” to his nation includes sponsorship of failed 2005 legislation would have prohibited the National Weather Service from releasing weather data to the public without charge where private-sector entities perform the same function for profit. Santorum took campaign money from the bill’s backers but hey, whatever: service is service).

Santorum got into ideological as well as the stylistic kind of hot water last month when he criticized Kennedy’s call for a strict “separation of church and state” that is “absolute” during his successful 1960 presidential campaign. JFK, of course, was trying to assuage the concerns of Protestant America, who were concerned that, if elected, he would take his marching orders from the Pope.

Santorum, in a cheap effort to cull support from the base of social conservatives that has entrapped his candidacy, said that Kennedy’s enjoinder made him want to “throw up,” and that it represented an early liberal effort to “force God out of the public square.”

I don’t mind so much that Santorum has clearly never picked up a history book; nor apparently watched a movie. For those of us who have done both, it seems pretty clear that the Founders meant to allow religion in the public square, but they were afraid—terrified might be a better word—that it would become the largest, most oppressive building in that square.

Hoping to clarify things—but in many ways, muddying them up—Thomas Jefferson responded in 1801 to a letter written by a group of religious supporters. These included a group of Danbury, Connecticut, Baptist ministers who wrote to congratulate the new president on his election, and to express a feeling of insecurity. As Baptists, they were a minority in Connecticut, sandwiched between the much larger— and much better politically connected— Congregationalists and Episcopalians (the latter formerly Church of England, don’t you know?).

A little-known fact about prerevolutionary America is that nine of the original 13 colonies had “statesponsored” religions that were supported financially by the colonies’ governments. Those Christians (and Heaven help those Jews) who weren’t members of the dominant two faiths faced hostility and even outright persecution.

The Baptists of Connecticut were concerned about the nation’s guarantee of religious freedoms. “Our constitution of government is not specific” on this crucial point, they wrote. In his response the following year to the Danbury Baptist Association, America’s third president wrote “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

It’s true that John Jay, post-colonial America’s great jurist, urged the people “of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers,” and that the Declaration of Independence cites “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” but it didn’t specify the name of that God or his son as “Jesus Christ,” or in any way connected to him. Don’t get me wrong: for every Jefferson (Deist), there were ten Jays and John Adams (Episcopalian and Congregationalist/Puritan, respectively).

But all of them came out of the 18th Century Enlightenment as much as they emerged from the Second Great Awakening, and although George Washington refers to God in his letters, they are vague references to things like a “Grand Architect,” all of which made for an accessibility for all Americans to practice their religion in the public square—an accessibility thatSantorum and his ilk seem to seek to diminish. God help them.