Jon Middendorf faced a heresy trial in 2018. A panel of clergy and administrators convicted the senior pastor of Oklahoma City First Church of the Nazarene with charges vague enough that his conviction was deemed not worthy of punishment. Middendorf had dedicated a baby as part of a service in his Northwest Expressway church, and while that’s a typical pastoral function in many Protestant churches, the parents of the baby are a lesbian couple.
It was an ecclesiastical slap on the wrist, but more importantly, it was a bellwether of a trend that has now affected pastors and professors in California, Hawaii, Idaho and Oklahoma.
On April 27 this year, Middendorf’s congregation voted to disaffiliate from the Church of the Nazarene, an international evangelical denomination with headquarters in Lenexa, Kansas. The vote was overwhelming, with just six votes to remain affiliated out of hundreds cast. Before proceeding, a quick explainer will help.
The Church of the Nazarene (COTN) is in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, so they’re cousins, so to speak, with United Methodists, and both find their American roots in John Wesley and the Second Great Awakening. The COTN is administrated on a modified diocesan model so that six General Superintendents (roughly equivalent to archbishops) have responsibility for pastoral, administrative and doctrinal issues in assigned geographical areas. They are elected at General Assembly — an entire church meeting similar to the Southern Baptists’ Annual Convention — and they provide oversight to a roster of District Superintendents, who function much like bishops in U.S. states and foreign countries.
The charges
When Middendorf was brought up on heresy charges, the district managed the trial. Middendorf’s guilty verdict didn’t trigger any official reprisal, but members of the church and former professors at Southern Nazarene University (SNU) said the trial accelerated a campaign of disenfranchisement against OKC First Church that was made clear when staff members were disinvited from teaching at SNU and the School of Ministry no longer sent college interns to work at OKC First.
At issue was COTN’s position on same-sex relationships, but Middendorf insists that the real issue is larger and viewing it as pro-gay versus anti-gay is reductive.
“We did not vote to disaffiliate because of LGBTQ issues,” Middendorf said. “That has been the understanding outside of the church, but there were three key issues that drove our decision, and the most important has been a fundamental disagreement between the people of OKC First and the larger Nazarene Church over how people are drawn to Christ. It’s not by exclusion and threats; it’s via an open table where all are welcome.”
The second issue is one that evangelicals around the country are contending with as the definitions and shapes of American Evangelicalism are shifting post-2016. Middendorf points to another fundamental disagreement about how the Bible is “read, interpreted and embodied.”
“It’s a come-and-see Gospel,” he said. “As church practice relates to scriptures, Wesleyans have always read it all and interpreted the whole story, not focused on pieces of the story.”
That led to Middendorf’s third point: a proper Wesleyan theology of pastoring calls for a “generous, long-suffering posture toward disagreement.”
“The breadth of points of view within the denomination was a feature, not a bug,” he said.
The controversy
Like many evangelical denominations, COTN is facing sharp declines in church attendance, down 34% in weekly church attendance since 2008. The drop in attendance and the shrinking percentage of self-identified Christians has been well documented by polling groups like Barna Group, Pew and PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute), but pastors are seeing the decrease on the ground and in the pews, to say nothing of church budgets. It’s no exaggeration to say that the first Trump presidential campaign exacerbated the generational divide, as millennials watched their evangelical parents vote for a man who didn’t embody axiomatic Christian values, calling into question the whole discipleship approach of Christian formation that had been the norm in evangelical congregations since the mid-20th century.
In one large-scale poll of millennial Christians, pollsters reported that 75 percent of women and 57 percent of men approved of same-sex relationships, including marriage, and 54 percent of the women said greater acceptance of transgender people is a positive development. Again, it’s no exaggeration to say that older evangelicals, especially leadership, are not embracing this trend, and the local church has been the cultural battleground, with millennials leaving in droves as churches fail to navigate the evolving understanding of human sexuality, which brings us to 2024 and the Great Lesbian Bus Controversy.
OKC First sends kids to Camp Bond in Tishomingo for summer camp. It’s an age-old tradition among fundamentalist and evangelical churches, and in Oklahoma, some of the names are household terms: Falls Creek, Turner Falls and Kanakuk among them. In summer 2024, the OKC First youth headed for camp in a bus driven by the mother of the child Middendorf had dedicated in 2018, leading to his heresy trial. She is also a registered nurse, so she served a dual capacity at camp, neither of them religious in nature.
Middendorf said that per COTN rules, any two elders from any church in the world can bring charges, and in the first trial, they were from Indiana and Alabama. But in the lead-up to what would have been a second heresy trial, OKC First does not know who complained to district leadership about the bus driver being a lesbian. The couple have been at the church for nearly a decade now, and OKC First — per Middendorf’s pastoral philosophy — has long been home to LGBTQ members. It’s important to note that during this time, Middendorf and his staff walked a “knife edge,” to quote one board member who prefers anonymity, to incorporate gay and lesbian members without breaking COTN Manual rules about LGBTQ persons being in church leadership positions. All that to say, is driving a bus leadership?
District Superintendent James “Jim” Bond is on record saying no one threatened the ministerial credentials of any OKC First pastor, but emails and conversations with staff and board members show something else entirely. After the camp issue, verbiage like “outside orthodoxy” and “church in crisis” started appearing in communications with and about OKC First. The latter is an important legal designation that allows the district to seize control of a Nazarene Church. At a contentious meeting earlier this year, OKC First board members say Bond threatened Middendorf with yet another heresy trial, and it’s fair to say that a conviction would have led to the surrendering of his credentials, so Bond’s claim that he never threatened credentials is contested by people actually at that meeting.
OKC First eventually hired Nelson Madden Black LLP, a New York City firm that specializes in religious law, and Barry Black was present to explain the legal ramifications of the vote on April 27. Black led the congregation through a history of Oklahoma City First Church of the Nazarene, beginning with its incorporation in 1912 as First Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, and then to 1927 for the name change to First Church of the Nazarene and 1937 for the articles of incorporation, a point at which Black interjected, “It was clear they (the elders) didn’t want to be part of the new Nazarene denomination. They chose to be an independent church in terms of that new development.”
Black’s presentation, complete with primary historical documents, shows that OKC First Church has always been “spiritually affiliated with the Church of the Nazarene, but they’ve never been legally affiliated.” The decision not to legally affiliate was reaffirmed in the 1990s when Stan Toler was senior pastor. This is, of course, a point of legal contention in a lawsuit filed by the district on May 20.
Oklahoma City First Church of the Nazarene filed a motion on Wednesday, June 4, in response to the district’s lawsuit. Per the verbiage in the motion:
“Plaintiff’s application must be generally and specifically denied because the property at issue is owned by OKC First and plaintiff can show no right to the property or to its possession,” the motion states. In response to Bond’s and the district’s claim to ownership, the motion somewhat snarkily (and accurately) notes: “Plaintiff fails to even include the deed to the property as an exhibit. This is not surprising, because the deed makes no mention of or reference to any entity other than OKC First.”
In most diocesan models, the governing church body owns all property and assets in all geographic regions. In other words, when OKC First Church voted to disaffiliate, Superintendent Bond assumed the property and assets would become the property and assets of the Oklahoma District, even going so far as telling The Oklahoman that the district has a legal right to the property. If Black is correct, and his research seems thorough, Bond and the district will likely be unsuccessful. With the lawsuit now filed, Bond and others have not returned calls for comment.
As for OKC First, Middendorf said the board has decided to take a year to rewrite the church’s statements of belief, policies and procedures. And they’re looking at forming informal alliances with area churches, like St. Luke’s Methodist Church and 8th Street Church, a congregation in Midtown that also voted to disaffiliate.
Visit okcfirst.com.
This article appears in Oklahoma Gazette Online.