Whatever happened to Pastor Ann?

By Lynn La

Pastor Ann Kansfield believes there is a war going on—a cultural crusade against her family values. Raised by a father who was a pastor himself in downtown Rochester, N.Y, she is a huge proponent of marriage. She believes she is “way too conservative” to not get married. Asked why she got married within a year of meeting her spouse, she jokingly said it was because she wanted to be a good Christian girl and do it before the couple moved in together. She believes that God weeps over divorces.

That’s why she doesn’t plan on getting one anytime soon with her own wife, Pastor Jennifer Aull.

Kansfield’s wedding ceremony with Aull became the talk of Greenpoint back in 2004. The couple had decided to get married after Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriages, which New York recognizes despite being performed outside its state. Rather than being asked the usual questions like how many people were in attendance or what was your wedding song, Kansfield remembered being asked questions like, “What is your sexual orientation?” and “How do you know you’re gay?”

The questions came from the general assembly of the Reformed Church in America. The assembly needed to ask these questions to determine if her father, Doctor Norman Kansfield, had violated church law by officiating his daughter’s wedding. In the end, it decided he had violated the law. On June 2005, he was defrocked, stripped from his professorship and indefinitely suspended from his ministry position at the church. “It was terrifying in many ways,” said Kansfield.

Kansfield has gelled cropped hair and wears glasses and baggy jeans. She spoke on a wet Thursday afternoon, as her church, the Greenpoint Reformed Church, was getting ready for its food pantry service. It lies on Milton Street and sits between the towering Saint Anthony of Padua Church and Saint John’s Lutheran Church, two churches nearby that swallow the tiny Protestant church. Unlike other churches, Kansfield’s church does not have a screening process for its pantry participants, and does not require financial paperwork from those who want to join. In the last couple of months, the number of people who work their way up the short steps and walk by the creaking wood floors of this church to receive bags full of pantry food has nearly doubled.

Sitting a few feet from the church’s unlit fireplace (which has given the church an odd amount of attention because of its 1870s tile work depicting steamboat inventor, Robert Fulton), Kansfield put aside the empty plate of banana pudding she finished eating and thought back to her post-wedding memories. “I woke up and my face was on the cover of the local paper with like, ‘Lesbian Pastor Gets Married’ or ‘Pastor Father Gets Fired,’ written on it. I felt really vulnerable.”

Then again, that was five years ago.

These days, Kansfield is occupied with other concerns—like caulking her leaking bathtub and getting enough food for the church’s soup kitchen, which opens every Wednesday and serves dishes like fried catfish and steamed squash to the needy and homeless. She and Aull are also raising their son, John, who Kansfield gave birth to two years ago. John’s father, she says, is “some number out of a catalogue.” Meanwhile, Aull is seven months pregnant with a baby girl. To keep the children blood-related, the couple decided that both would come from the same sperm donor. “Plus, John came out pretty cute, so there’s that,” said Kansfield.

Another thing that occupies her time is the Somewhere program. Kansfield started this church LGBTQ youth group with other congregants after a string of recent gay teen suicides across the country garnered heavy media attention. The idea is to create an intimate space for young people struggling with both their sexuality and their faith. According to a bulletin for the program, “Young people shouldn’t have to choose between growing in faith and being who God created them to be.”

“Churches do not necessarily have the reputation of being opening and welcoming to anybody that’s different,” she said. “Which is ironic, given that Jesus was a victim of bullying and was very different. He was the complete archetype of a bullied person.”

The youth group’s strong flyer takes a line from Psalm 16:1: “Keep me safe, O God, for you in I take refuge.” Also prominently displayed on the flyer is the line, “There’s a place for us… Somewhere,” a gentle reminder of the constant outsider-status given to those in the homosexual community.

Even though she gripes little and jests often (on one occasion, she tells the same story to at least three different people and it includes several punch lines, one of them being, “Of course I’m gay, come on, I look like a small boy!”), Kansfield is familiar with feelings of isolation. She said she wishes there was a church group like this around while growing up.

“When I began to figure out that I was gay, I definitely thought rather seriously about killing myself because I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “I definitely got the message that being gay was sinful and that I was not included in God’s love.”

Over time, through the support of her parents and friends, Kansfield realized that it wasn’t God who had a problem with her being gay. It was other people—other people who can hold prominent positions at church, who can launch a cultural and religious campaign against homosexuality, who can take away her father’s ministry and politicize her wedding. When she finally came out to her father, she confessed that she thought he would no longer accept her because of the church’s rhetoric against gays. Her father replied that instead of protecting her from watching “Bambi” during her childhood, he should have protected her from other Christians.

“It’s a cruel trick, but if you want to mess someone up, screw with their faith,” said Kansfield. “The fact that the religious right has boiled down family and Christian values into the issues of abortion and homosexuality is really terrible because the message of Jesus is focused on so many other things.”

During the trial, Kansfield said she grappled with her own “internalized homophobia,” a form of self-hate she believes every gay person deals with (“No matter how confident we can look”). She says the fact that so much had to be sacrificed in order for her to get married led her to believe at the time that perhaps she somehow deserved it all.

But again, that was five years ago.

Kansfield is not one to hold grudges. Her line of work doesn’t really allow her to do so. She considers residual anger to be a waste of her time. “In the United States, a country that is so affluent and has so many freedoms of speech and religion, we don’t usually have to pay such a price for our faith,” said Kansfield. “And so, it was a bit of an honor and a privilege to had the opportunity to make such a sacrifice because of my faith.”

Gay marriage it turns out, is not the downfall of American society, said Kansfield. The world is still turning and Kansfield is still happily married. She has a kid and another one on the way, still has the support of her family and friends, and she has a viable ministry she is able to preach to, despite not being able to hold sacraments and baptisms yet (instead Aull, who is finished with the ordainment process, officiates these types of ceremonies). And although Kansfield believes it is a sin that her father, someone she considers to be an amazing theologian and a marvelous thinker with a Ph.D, is still barred from the ministry, she found the whole ordeal liberating: “This horrible event freed me up to truly be the person who I am, and who God told me to be.”