The Rev. Jim Luallen was a 23-year- old divinity student when he experienced a defining moment. He was working on his master’s degree at the Iliff School of Theology, studying to be a United Methodist minister, and was an intern at a small church in Brush.
He had been there about a week when the wife of a parishioner died. He visited the widower’s home to discuss the funeral arrangements.
“Clarence Bruce was a fellow who had lived on the Eastern Plains all his life,” Luallen said. He was “leather tough and a free spirit, still riding his motorcycle at the age of 80. He was not the kind of guy you’d expect to cave in to anything.”
This had been Bruce’s second wife. His first had committed suicide about 20 years earlier, “and the conservative minister of the church at that time had used her funeral as an opportunity to try to scare people into heaven,” Luallen said.
The preacher had condemned her, saying she would suffer eternal damnation for the sin of taking her own life.
The experience was so devastating, so traumatic for Bruce that upon the appearance of Luallen, he collapsed into tears. “I remember he said, ‘Just don’t say anything mean,”‘ Luallen recalled. “That stayed with me.”
The young clergyman finished his theological studies and began his life as a minister, and for most of the next 20 years, he found it enormously satisfying work.
But then the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks occurred and everything seemed forever altered, even the congregation at St. Paul’s Church in Boulder where he was pastor.
“I think since the psyche-rocking events of that time, the religious right stepped up its aggressiveness and decided to join forces with the Republican Party,” he said. He found it all deeply troubling, especially last fall.
The political divisiveness of the election created deep rifts within church congregations. As conservative factions became more vocal and strident, moderates increasingly took cover – or left.
There was little reason for them to stay, he said. “There’s a lot of cowardice in the nonconservative evangelical clergy.”
So Luallen made a decision: He wouldn’t preach politics from the pulpit, but he would begin expressing his views in letters to the editor.
Five were published in the Boulder Daily Camera, and “a couple of them were fairly provocative,” he said.
Among other things, he questioned the morality of the war in Iraq and of the president.
“I got tremendous affirmation from a lot of folks,” he said.
But at the church’s annual meeting in January, he was criticized sharply by other members of the congregation.
“I was vilified, pilloried,” he said.
He spent an hour and a half that night holding his shaken wife, trying to help her recover from the experience.
Then he spent the next week “in a kind of monastic contemplation.”
In the end, he decided it was time to leave.
“I’ve spent months thinking, praying and reading,” he said. The book “When Religion Becomes Evil,” by theologian Charles Kimball, helped him understand his own alienation from the institution of the church. George Lakoff’s essays on the linguistic framing of issues by the right motivated him to find his own voice.
“It’s a matter of conscience,” he said.
Many of his colleagues tried to convince him to stay, “yet they understand that I’ve become zealous about standing up to the bullying of the religious right,” he said.
So this week will be Luallen’s last as a United Methodist minister. In July, he will begin a new career as a financial planner and political activist.
It’s “a new calling,” he said, one that moves him with the fervor he once had for the church back when he still felt welcome there, back when he felt free to comfort Clarence Bruce and help him find peace.
He vowed back then to be that kind of minister and that kind only. His conscience, his faith, his God would never allow him to be anything less.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.