Bishop Minerva Carcano of California Nevada, my home area of my now former denomination, is currently the respondent in a public church trial. Since leaving ministry just around a year ago my interest in church issues and politics has naturally waned significantly, but this one captured my attention for some reasons that have become clear over the past couple of days.

The charges against the bishop included some financial malfeasance and an overstepping her authority by illegally (by church law) taking decision making authority away from the trustees of her church area. 

Both are important and serious, but it is the other two charges: one for discriminating against a pastor for daring to go on maternity leave and another for undermining the ministry of others made me take some interest in this case. 

Allegations brought up in testimony in the trial include the bishop acting vengefully toward people either in her staff or under her episcopal leadership. Some of these people had come to the bishop with concerns over the appropriateness of one of her direct reports hiring the bishop’s daughter for an administrative position and that the bishop’s daughter was being provided with free housing at a church property in San Francisco and others were involved in an official inquiry over the matter.

These people, who had worked closely with the bishop, testified they were quickly blackballed by the bishop in day-to-day communication, some reported they had been informed the bishop was actively speaking to people from their previous jobs to find negative information about them, and most reported the they had been informed the bishop planned to use her power to appoint clergy wherever she wanted to gain some retribution against them.

One of the bishop’s direct reports reported he was heavily pressured to provide negative information about his colleagues under threat of being removed from his current job and having him and his family moved to a church completely out of their current home area, when it known his son, who has special needs, was about to enter his senior year of high school.

Testimony also alleged that the bishop changed the plans to fund a pastor’s fulltime salary to plant a church when she realized the pastor was pregnant with her first child and would be on maternity leave when the official appointment to that position was to begin.

It was all disturbing. Especially seeing much of the testimony coming from faces that I found familiar from growing up in that area of the United Methodist Church. 

What I found most disturbing and what I realized piqued my interest about this trial is that none of what I heard in this testimony was shocking. These kinds of stories about treatment of clergy and church staff by superiors are unfortunately commonplace. These stories are not limited to tales of vengeance from a singular rogue bishop but stories like these extend to the behavior of many church officials at a variety of levels from bishops all the way down to local church pastors. 

The peculiarity of this trial is usually similar stories I know of within the UMC seem end with a church system that urges silence getting what it wants. Public silence for the sake of the church and if not for the church for the sake of that person’s livelihood. Clergy and church staffers may share their experiences with people they hold close in life, but suffer silently through heartbreaking and sometimes career shattering ordeals brought upon them by someone who wields relatively unchecked power over their position.

I spoke to my dad on the phone about the trial and when I relayed some of the testimony about the bishop’s behavior he said, “If this is true she was in the wrong job,” to which I replied, “actually I think it would mean she was in the right job.” There have been rumblings about this bishop’s inappropriate treatment of clergy people dating back to before she came into California Nevada in 2016. Along the sides of a road she has walked that has included some wonderful ministry lies a wake of people who have been unnecessarily hurt by her as their leader. Despite this history, this is the first time she’s faced any potential consequences for that kind of behavior. I’ve heard other stories of other bishops acting completely out of line toward clergy who are supposed to be under their care as well, but none of them have faced any consequences to this day. 

If the testimony and other stories that have not made it to testimony are indeed true Bishop Carcano was in the right job for her because very few jobs allow someone who wanted to treat people the way she has treated people with such impunity.  For such behavior to be met with such silence. The United Methodist Church is filled with many wonderful people, leaders, and bishops who mean well, but are hampered by a system that in many cases compels these people to, sometimes unwittingly, to protect the powerful even as they do harm.

This trial interests me because it’s the first time I’ve seen silence broken so publicly and I’m both interested in and anxious about how the church responds to it. I do not mean by how 12 people on the jury feel about the convictable facts in this singular case. I’m more interested in the questions: 

Does the church hear the pain that is bigger, more structural, and more hampering to the mission of the church than people want generally admit?  Does hear the pain the church respond with structural changes and culture shifts that disrupt the power dynamics that are ever so convenient for those who wish to engage in abusive, degrading, inappropriate, illegal, and/or tyrannical behavior? 

Or does the church bemoan this as unfortunate and complex one-off and scribble “no further action required” on its collective conscience?

One UMC pastor bemoaned publicly, “When all is said and done, it would be interesting to know what “just resolutions” (generally confidential settlement) were offered that might have spared the church the money and embarrassment of this trial.”

Isn’t the embarrassment that this was happening and not that it was revealed? Isn’t there harm in defaulting to bemoaning that victims’ claims come public? Jurgen Moltmann once wrote that their practice of crucifixion was too uncomfortable to speak about and was considered impolite to discuss in society. Christians are now supposed to be trained to look toward the cross a symbol that was once a sign of terror for an oppressed public that was turned into a symbol of life, love, atonement, healing, grace, and resurrection.

Maybe the church would be wise to look toward something now that causes embarrassment and discomfort so it may both act and find God’s grace in those places. I wonder what kinds of life, love, atonement, healing, grace, and resurrection the church could be found in the voices that it all too often seems to silence. 

As one of the great influencers of my own faith once said, “God can always be found in the places where you don’t want to look.”

I recently watched a short film set in the American Wild West by the Coen Brothers called “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” The main character in the film is Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson), who is a gleeful, musical, kindhearted, but ruthless gun slinger. Scruggs does not go looking for violence but seems to just happen upon it as his sunny disposition and kindness is met with aggression and threats from those around him. His violent behavior is more of a product of Buster’s environment than Buster’s nature. 

In the end, Buster is gunned down in a duel by a younger man (Willie Watson Co-Founder of Old Crow Medicine Show), who challenges Buster because the younger man wants to claim Buster’s title as the best singing shooter in the west.

The film ends with the two men singing a strange, yet catchy duet called “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings” in which the seemingly relieved spirit of Buster Scruggs leaves his life of violence behind singing “No more jingle jangle I’ll lay my guns down” while ascending to heaven.

In the last lines of the song Buster Scruggs says:

“There’s just gotta be a place up ahead where men ain’t low-down and poker’s played fair. If there weren’t, what are all the songs about? I’ll see y’all there, and we can sing together and shake our heads over all the meanness in the used to be.”

Buster’s life in the west, in which his kindness only runs him into meanness and gunfire has come to an end. The singer/shooter wants to keep singing but is happy to leave the shooting in the used to be.

This song was stuck in my head on Monday when I picked up my daughter from school here in our new home in the UK and I still couldn’t shake it as she convinced me to go on an impromptu train ride as we passed our town train station on the way home. On the train is where I saw the news about the school shooting in the town where I’ve spent my adult life, the town where my daughter was born, a town full of people I love, and I felt many things.

I felt sickened, I felt relieved that I was on a train with my safe and happy 3-year-old in a place where she won’t have to do active shooter drills in schools and I won’t have to try to explain to her why the adults around her haven’t done enough to keep school children safe, I felt disoriented, I felt sad.

While part of the reality of mass shootings (especially school shootings) is now in my direct family’s “Used To Be” it will always hurt because I’ll always love, be connected to, and care about so many of the wonderful things and people that make up the fabric of the country I’ve lived in for all but four months of my life.

The gun violence and the meanness that goes into excusing all of it, like somehow trying to pin this one on the trans community as a whole, needs to be looked at as something that can be and needs to be put into the American Used To Be. The cost is simply too high (and has been for quite a while) to go on shrugging our shoulders then turning our heads to a different topic of interest, leaving the bullet riddled school hallways and the bodies of school children out of sight and mind until the next tragedy strikes.

Plausible ways to make it harder for people who want to go shoot a bunch of strangers need to be investigated and acted upon. Plausible ways to repel some of the meanness and neglect that drive people in the American society to want to go shoot a bunch of strangers needs to be investigated and acted upon.

I don’t know the answer to how this all can be solved, but I do know that like Buster Scruggs, most people in America, even people who live by the gun, would much rather spend their time singing together than shooting.

So maybe one thing Americans (both at home and abroad) can do is sing in the way we can. Sing with our lives and actions. Sing together of a safer and more peaceful America for children, work to soften hardened hearts that stand in the way of that becoming a reality. Be tough when standing for what needs to be stood for, but with a measure of tenderness and grace. Bring kindness into unexpected situations and hope to unlikely people.

Hurt and anger are natural and appropriate in reaction to another murder of school children, but love and grace must be present as well lest we contribute to the meanness that drives all this madness.

Like many issues in America, school shootings won’t ever be a full part of my Used To Be until it’s a part of everyone in America’s Used To Be. I don’t know when that time will be or if I’ll ever see it, but until then please take care of one another and be as gentle as you can with one another on your side of the pond and know my family and I are hurting with you and loving you over in our little part of the UK.

Looking forward to the day when we can sing together and shake our heads over all these shootings in the Used To Be.

For a long time, I’ve held to a belief I first latched onto when I read Inferno by Dante Alighieri in high school. The belief came from a passage in which Dante enters the First Circle of Hell: Limbo. In Limbo Dante encounters a bunch of good and smart folks like Homer, Socrates, and Aristotle. These people were virtuous in life but lacked faith in their lives as well. In this place of Limbo these virtuous people are all enjoying themselves but are kept out of heaven basically because in life before and after death they are limited by their own logic and conceptions in the world instead of being open to greater wonders than they could have ever conceived. Heaven is not out of reach for them but they are limited by relying only on their own experiences, so they do not reach for heaven. 

My belief that stemmed from this passage is heaven is too grand and vast for us to experience on this earth, it is beyond human experience and comprehension.

But something happened a few months ago. I was getting ready to put my daughter Gwennie to bed and we started dancing to some music. I was holding her in my arms and moving back and forth when I asked her if she wanted me to spin her around. She nodded in approval. We started spinning around, she closed her eyes and smiled. As we were spinning the whole world around us became blurry and all I could see clearly was Gwennie, smiling and at peace, the air lifting her hair as she trusted me completely to keep her safe as she spun around and around.

I realized in that moment is that Dante had it wrong. Heaven can be experienced here in this life, on this Earth because that moment along many other moments I’ve had with Gwennie and my wife Susanna and the feeling that came with those moments was certainly heaven. 

When I first felt my call to pastoral ministry, I wasn’t a husband or a father. I didn’t realize how called I’d feel to take advantage of being present for as many moments with my family as possible and how the evening meetings and weekend commitments of pastoral ministry would conflict with that call.

When my wife and I started pondering a move abroad it came with the question of what I would do. There are certainly churches that need pastors outside of the United States, but I found myself feeling not enthusiastic about exploring pastoral opportunities in the UK. I felt more enthusiastic about being in a job in which I can work set hours during weekdays, come home and be with my family. A job that doesn’t give me my beloved 15 minutes of speaking words of my faith into a microphone each week but gives me a little more time in heaven here on Earth.

There are plenty of clergy, who are wonderful parents, who can be fulfilled in family and work life, I just found that I’m not one of them.

This past Sunday was my last Sunday as a pastor and clergy person. After an almost 10-year journey through the seminary and ordination process I’ve ended this part of my journey less than a year away from potentially being fully ordained. Even though I found this wasn’t for me in the long term I don’t regret the decision I made to pursue this as a career in 2013. While in this process I have grown tremendously as a person and in my own faith, I connected with my now wife, and I have met and been blessed by an exorbitant amount of incredible people. 

All of this and so much more that I don’t have time to list has prepared me for this next phase of life in which, while I won’t be a pastor, I still plan to live out my faith, to love God, neighbor and self. I just plan to do that while being able to be more present with my absolutely awesome family and soaking in all of the heavenly family moments I can with the time I have.

So as of today I’m no longer a clergy person, but I’m still a person living out my call. For the ability to do that I am happy and grateful as my family and I move into this new chapter of our story, a chapter that I hope will include a little more time in heaven. 

When my wife and I got married in August we both changed our names from Scott Kimball and Susanna Marshall to Scott and Susanna Marshall-Kimball. I’d like to take the opportunity to explain how and why this decision was made. Before I get into this I want to make it clear that I do this with the intent of sharing and not with the intent of arguing that this is something every single couple should do.

I also don’t think I’m any kind of hero for changing my name. My past, present, and surely future are all riddled with chauvinistic behavior and attitudes; some I’m aware of and regret and some I’m not aware. The hero in this story is my wife, who was and is strong enough to speak a difficult truths to me and stand up for what she believes.

Shortly after we got engaged, Susanna told me that she wanted to have a discussion about what our married names would be. She told me that she didn’t feel it was right to limit the discussion to “Are we both going to take the name Kimball, or are we both going to keep our current last names and give our kids the last name of Kimball?” She told me she thought the only right way to go into that discussion was to weigh each of our names equally. To her, this meant that she thought we should consider us both taking her name, Marshall, as much as we should consider us both taking my name, Kimball. She also suggested the idea of us both hyphenating our names.

I’ll admit that I felt frustrated, confused, nervous, and a little guilty when she said this. The thought of changing my name was tough for me. The name Scott Walter Kimball means a lot to me, and I’m very proud of each part of it.

My middle name comes from my maternal granddad, Walter Fromm, who was a truly amazing individual – a hero to me. I love having his name as part of mine; it’s a reminder that he’s a part of me. When I sign my name, I remember him, and I feel grateful for my time with him.

Through the Kimball name, I feel tied to my immediate family – to my parents and my siblings. My mom felt it was so important to be tied to my sister and me through the name Kimball that she kept that name after my parents divorced.

We would check in over the months that followed, and I would let her know where I was at, and would usually tell her I needed more time. This was tough for me.

As I kept thinking about what my name meant to me, I just could not bring myself to the point where I felt I could let go of it. It was too important to me.  As I came to that conclusion I also knew that if my name was so important to me, maybe Susanna’s was just as important to her.

I couldn’t in good conscience try to force my name on Susanna or tell her that she could keep her name as long as the kids were raised with the Kimball name.

I went to Susanna and told her I was coming closer to feeling like hyphenating our names was the right thing to do, but I still needed some time to work things out. Here are the most prominent things I had to work out and my explanation for how I reconciled these concerns:

1)      It’s not fair. I’ve live my whole life thinking I’d never have to change anything to do with my name.

In the end it hit home to me that in reality the thing that’s even more unfair is that women are always expected to change their name, which is a vestige of when marriage was more of a business transaction with a woman becoming property of her husband and therefore taking that name. That really sucks, and it shouldn’t stop me from considering that my wife has as much right to her name and our kids having her name as I do.

2)      What are my family, friends, and strangers going to think?

My dad and brother are the only two direct relatives of mine that have the Kimball name still as my mother died in 2013 and both of my sisters changed their names when they got married. I wondered if they’d be disappointed if I changed my name to Marshall-Kimball. I then realized that nobody in my family gave my sisters any grief over changing their names so in fairness I should be able to do whatever I want with my name too. I also realized that both men care about me deeply and would continue to do so no matter what happened with my name.

As for what would my friends and outsiders think question, it’s fair to say that there are many people who find that a man hyphenating their name is a sign of weakness or shows one to be less of a man. It’s also fair to say that doing this has raised the eyebrows of some of my friends and it’s likely that there will be times when people who don’t even know me will make assumptions about me when they hear or read my name.

In the end I realized that what other people think of me should not stop me from doing what I know is right. Seriously, if someone thinks I’m less of a man for hyphenating that’s fine, they can think that all they want as I continue to be happy with who I am and happy with a name that honors me and honors my fantastic wife.

3)      It’s going to take so much longer to fill out paperwork.

This is true, but it’s worth it.

4)      We hope to have kids someday. What will they do with their names when they get married? Their names could get really long.

Our kids will be adults by that point and should be able to figure things out for themselves.

That was the thought process. I went to Susanna one last time and told her I really could not let go of my name, but I realized that meant she shouldn’t have to either. We both decided that hyphenating our last names was the best thing for us.

So here I am, Scott Walter Marshall-Kimball, it’s taking some getting used to, but I like it. I think it reflects nicely part of what it means to get married, I am still who I am, I still come from where I come from, but I have the joy of joining my life and joining who I am to my wife Susanna whose name I am honored to carry as well.