Travis Myles' Thoughts on DBCC

As part of our month of stewardship, we ask members--new and old--to talk about what Douglass means to them. Here's what Travis Myles had to say:

What does Douglass mean to me?  Wow!  The thing is that my standing up here and sharing this is nothing short of a miracle for someone who had come to believe that miracles stopped happening. Where I’ve come from, I’ve been told that I couldn’t do this.  That I couldn’t worship.  That I couldn’t be involved in church.  That I wasn’t wanted by God.  And that God forbid, pun intended, that I want to share this experience with someone that I love.  So, I had decided about five years ago that if God didn’t want me, there was no real reason for me to want Him.  And  I was pretty vocal about it, much to the dismay of my partner.

When I first stepped into Douglass, and the first time was in the gym and not in a service, it was a little like walking into the Twilight Zone.  You…We…were showing Fish Out of Water.  I watched the film and looked around at people from the back of the room.  The film talked about how the Bible has been wrongly used to cut off the LGBT community from the church for years.  No one in the crowd walked out.  No one took exception with the film’s viewpoint.  Many were in tears, including me.  I thought, if this goes on in the gym, I have to wonder what happens during church.  Now you can imagine the look on Scott’s face when I came home and announced that I’d like to go to church.

Getting ready for church that morning took me back to a place where I heard only bad things about myself.  I thought that maybe I had made a mistake.  But then we got here, and all of you came up to us and introduced yourselves, passed the peace, and became our friends.  You treated us, well, just like any other couple.  And you haven’t stopped yet.  And that would have been plenty.  But then I found out so much more about this church.  You joined fairness boards; you went to fairness lobby days.  And then you made a unanimous decision to put those convictions into action by changing the way you perform marriage ceremonies, all to stand with the LGBT community.  I’ve cried fairly often in these pews over the year or so that we’ve been coming here, but the tears are polar opposites of the ones I’ve cried before when thinking about church.

Douglass has for the first time helped me see the true Christ.  But more than that, you are living the true Christ with your actions.  I had never become a member of a church before I became a member here.  And I’d be hard pressed to find a different church that I would ever want to join instead.  That’s what Douglass means to me.