Digging into Grace City’s original “101” Document, Tackling the Homophobia
Trigger warning: this post contains references to suicide and homophobic slurs.
Trigger warning: this post contains references to suicide and homophobic slurs.
A source reached out to me this past week. They said that they read my piece on Grace City Church and the struggle for temporal power in Wenatchee, Wa. and offered to give me a rare document from GCC’s past. What makes it rare is that, according to my source, it created quite a stir when it was released and used as a new member intake document, during Grace Covenant’s transition to Grace City. It created such a stir I’m told that quite a few folks left the congregation because of it and that prompted church leaders to change the document. They also asked for all the copies to be returned to be “recycled” as my source said. They declined to return the document and instead kept it for safe keeping, just in case. So when this source read my piece last week they reached out through a third party and described the document, I was interested. We met up, I scanned it and made a few copies. After reading through it once it’s obvious why GCC leaders wouldn’t want it to be seen by the general public. They write talk their plan about how to “saturate” the Wenatchee area and:
“…make it impossible to live in Wenatchee without regularly bumping into a disciple-making disciple of Jesus…”
The other thing that I found very telling and troubling about the document was the faux-legal threat against any resistance or retaliation against “church discipline,” as they put it here.
“I invite this sort of loving care and oversight into my life, and renounce my right to pursue legal recourse against GCC or it’s officers should they take church discipline action against me.”
Typo aside, this line is one of the most telling in the entire document for anyone trying to gain a better understanding of GCC culture.
The other thing that took me by surprise this week was the feedback I got after publishing my piece last Sunday. First, a publisher from back East reached out to me about running my final piece, which validates that I am onto something here. I’ve known this the whole time, but it’s nice to have a publisher from out of state reach out and confirm it.
Second, feedback from both locals and ex-locals has been overwhelmingly positive. Sure, I’ve been called a Nazi, a pedophile and liberal [insert sexual slur that starts with the letter F here] this week, but I was expecting that and honestly I can’t tell if it’s because of what I wrote or what I said on TV. When I decided to write what I wrote and say what I said I knew I was crossing a Rubicon of sorts, and I was prepared for blowback. But blowback is not what I got – at least not from people I respect. Instead I was approached in public by people who I consider pillars of the community and they said they support and appreciate what I am doing. All are lifelong Christians, and one in particular expressed concern that the message of Jesus Christ was being warped and used in troubling ways by Grace City’s leaders. I also heard positive feedback from folks in the legal, medical and business communities both in person and online, but the one message that I made the most impact on me was from Greg Mares, an East Wenatchee native who has since moved away from the area. He’s an incredibly talented creative photographer and videographer who is currently traveling the country making breathtaking visual content. He reached out to me on Instagram with this message:
Hey Dom! Just wanted to say that I appreciate the light you’re shedding on Grace City and their incredibly toxic and manipulative culture. They cause so much harm in Wenatchee fueled by judgment, fear and hate. The unfortunate yet common hypocrisy of churches preaching love and acceptance while simultaneously rejecting everybody outside their bubble. Ugh. Reading your recent posts is a reminder of why it was so hard for me to feel like I could safely express myself fully in Wenatchee, especially as a queer person.
I thanked him and then thought to ask him if I could quote him on my blog and asked him a few questions:
Me: …what age would you say you realized you were queer and at what age did you come out? Also, did you hesitate to share your sexual identity with people in Wenatchee because of religion?
Greg: Realized I wasn’t straight at age 6. I have a vivid memory of being at my grandma’s house after school in first grade and asking her if boys could marry other boys. Basically, from the time I had any knowledge of what relationships and sex were I knew I was queer, but didn’t have the vocabulary for it. I didn’t come out until I was 22. There are a lot of factors to the hesitancy of coming out, but the culture of Wenatchee as a whole was the biggest. It’s a place steeped in religion and homophobia.
He described being called the F-slur for gay men frequently in high school. Some of his peers told him he should kill himself, and some even said they would kill him and that “God hates f*gs.” At one point, Greg attempted suicide. You can read the interview transcript via the link at the bottom of the post, but I want to quote what he had to say specifically regarding Grace City members and their speech regarding the LGBTQ+ community in public:
Greg: “Fast forward to adulthood and I’m in Caffe Mela overhearing a conversation between a customer and a barista — both very involved with GCC.
barista — “are you allergic to anything?”
Customer — “only gay people!”
Barista — laughs “you and me both, I hate f*gs”
This kind of homophobic banter was not uncommon, and as I continued my career in the Wenatchee Valley and began to meet more and more business owners, the more homophobic banter I overheard and the more I realized how much power GCC and other churches have in Wenatchee and the culture of the valley. There are businesses who will seemingly only hire people who go to their church, extending their personal school of thought to employees, and consequently to customers and the public. I vividly remember overhearing one statement a GCC member that stuck with me — ‘We need to eradicate all gay people in the valley’. Pretty welcoming for a f*g like me!”
You can read our entire Instagram direct message interview here via an open Google doc. I’d like to thank Greg for going public with this stuff and commend his bravery in sharing his experiences. More and more people are willing to do so now that I have started publishing what I have, and there is strength in numbers. So if you have a story or an experience you’d like to share, reach out to me via a direct message on Twitter.
The obsession with denigrating the LGBTQ+ community is also apparently a major theme in the Vector Academy curriculum as well, and this type of rhetoric is laced throughout GCC’s messaging. You can watch the marketing video here. I think there’s a lot more to this angle of the story, but it’s not the only one. Other huge themes are the political machinations, the money stuff and trying to sell the GCC campus as a “community center,” which is an argument that was dealt a blow last week when KPQ Radio moved its school board candidate forum from GCC’s Sunnyslope campus to the studio after facing increasing pressure from candidates and community members. More on that stuff later.
What I would like to end this post with is Wenatchee’s Pride’s official statement on GCC’s Vector Academy, which board members composed and sent to me months ago. I put it in my Vector Academy/GCC story beats slide deck but I want to include it again here in case folks haven’t read my previous posts.
This is what Wenatchee Pride had to say about Grace City and Vector Academy:
“Grace City Church’s Vector Academy is incredibly harmful to the LGBTQ+ community. Their promotional materials tell the viewer that identifying as a member of the LGBTQ+ community is wrong and that it’s a problem that must be solved or overcome by attending Vector Academy. LGBTQ+ folks, especially youth, are already at increased risk for isolation and rejection from their families and communities, leading to alarmingly high rates of self-harm and suicide. Wenatchee Pride strives to foster a safe, inclusive, and equitable environment for all. Grace City Church’s Vector Academy is actively working to undo the progress that we’ve made and disseminate hate, bigotry, and discrimination. We hope that church leaders are able to recognize their harmful impact on our community members and instead recognize and promote that LGBTQ+ folks are invaluable community members.”
One of the questions I keep coming back to after thinking and writing on this is this: how can we quantify the loss of talent, intelligence and creativity that has left the Wenatchee Valley in form of persons who identify as LGBTQ+ who didn’t feel welcome in their own home towns?