Saturday, February 29, 2020
John Ortberg Is Coming Back
The following was sent to members of Menlo Church on February 27:
DEAR MENLO CHURCH COMMUNITY,
The Board of Elders met this week and we wanted to share an update based on our discussion.
We recognize these past few months have been challenging. Since our last update, John Ortberg has remained focused on his Restoration Plan and shown great progress. John has appropriately faced difficult discussions with congregants, volunteers, staff members, and elders. In each encounter, John has sought to understand the pain and concerns his actions have caused, apologized personally for his mistakes, offered to make amends where possible, and asked for help in restoring trust. We are pleased to hear the constructive and positive feedback John has received following his meetings. John has also reaffirmed his support for and compliance with Menlo Church’s key policies and beliefs as well as those of our denomination, ECO.
After thoroughly reviewing the input from all constituencies and considering the progressive nature of building trust, and after prayerfully seeking God’s guidance, the Board believes John is ready to move beyond his Restoration Plan and prepare for his return to the pulpit. The Board has full confidence in John as our spiritual leader and together we look forward to him preaching again starting the weekend of March 7 after being away from the pulpit since mid-November.
We will now also work together as a Board and at John’s request, to consider changes to responsibilities that will involve John focusing a greater portion of his time and gifts on teaching, discipleship, and mentorship while we discern alternative means to provide excellent day-to-day operational leadership for Menlo Church.
We are so proud of our dedicated staff and volunteers and the incredible care and diligence they bring to ensuring the safety and security of all who enter Menlo’s doors at every campus. We will continue to look for ways to further improve and maintain the highest standards in providing a safe, God-honoring environment. We will also continue to provide a community where those who face challenging issues can find a confidential way to receive spiritual support.
We are grateful for your trust and patience through this season. Your prayers and intercession for the church, the members of our congregation, our staff, our volunteers, our campus pastors, John and his family, and our surrounding communities have been, and continue to be deeply appreciated. We have seen God move in response to our prayers and are committed to being obedient to his call to reach the Bay Area for Christ. And now let’s look forward together to continuing our mission of helping people find and follow Jesus.
In Christ,
Beth Seabolt
Chair, Board of Elders
If you haven't been following this story, click here for a summary.
Wednesday, February 19, 2020
"Dear Prudence, how did Slate's advice columnist find himself here?"
An interesting article about Danny was just posted at the Washington Post:
photo credit: Jackie Molloy/for The Washington Post
Dear Prudence is sitting in one of those Brooklyn coffee shops where the only two choices for milk are coconut and cashew, talking about what it’s like to take on the weight of people’s problems in a world that increasingly feels like garbage.
“It feels like a small act of neatening that I really appreciate,” says Daniel Lavery, the author of Slate’s Dear Prudence advice column. “In this limited amount of time every week, in this incredibly limited scope, you are going to, to the best of your ability, tend to problems.”
Sometimes they’re huge problems that touch on racism or trauma or abuse. Sometimes they’re frivolous problems, about weddings or gifts, that present windows to deeper ones: codependency, boundaries and so on.
The tidying-up of people’s personal lives has a singular appeal to Lavery. Each letter is a story in need of a resolution. Yes, there are real people and real complexities on the other side of the Dear Prudence letters, but the format makes each advice-seeker’s mess seem manageable. “It feels like just great, brief plots that are submitted to, like, a person — kind of at random,” he says, “who then submits, ‘Here’s how I think you should end the story.’ ”
Lavery, 33, is not just a random person. Over the past few years, the story of his life has resembled a series of Dear Prudence letters that Lavery has had to resolve for himself, culminating in a new memoir, “Something That May Shock and Discredit You.” The book is an account of his gender transition, interspersed with the types of satirical essays about literature and pop culture you might have once found on the Toast, the now-defunct feminist website that he co-founded in 2013, when he went by his birth name, Mallory Ortberg.
Dear Prudence, I think I’m trans.
Dear Prudence, I’m in love with my best friend.
Dear Prudence, I think I have to cut ties with my family.
There are no formal qualifications for an advice columnist. There are only informal ones: a deep well of empathy, a strong moral compass, a gift for being succinct without coming off as glib. “Most of us aren’t psychologists. We’re not therapists,” says John Paul Brammer, the advice columnist who writes ¡Hola Papi! for his Substack newsletter (previously for Out Magazine). “We’re your pals at the bar who you can tell your issues to, and we’ll talk you through it."
Of Lavery, he adds: “Danny has that energy.”
Perspective, too. Lavery is the most notable new figure in a field of advice-givers that has begun to diversify, reflecting an overdue understanding that cisgender white people are hardly the only ones in search of the “small acts of neatening” that columnists can provide — nor are they the only ones qualified to tend to other people’s problems.
Maybe it helps for the advice-giver to have led a complicated life — the kind that exposes you to different people, different problems, heartbreak, forgiveness and grief.
For Lavery, some of the most crucial questions and answers have had to do with family: the one he left behind and the one he has made for himself. His upbringing “shaped me and made me who I am, and I can’t change it any more than I can change another part of myself,” he says.
... Walking through the Brooklyn Museum, Lavery encounters a small exhibition titled “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt.” Some writing on the wall provides an explanation: The Egyptians believed that when a woman died, she must briefly be transformed into a man to be reborn. “The male pronoun on this woman’s coffin represented powerful magic that caused gender transformation,” reads the text on one display.
Powerful magic would be one way to describe his connection with Grace Lavery, a professor of Victorian literature at the University of California at Berkeley, whom he met shortly before the Toast was entering the loam. They became inseparable. “It was a full-on immersive experience of like, hanging out for hours a day, every day, sharing incredibly intimate stories,” says Grace, 36, a tall, British brunette who dresses glamorously in big sunglasses and fur coats — a complement to Lavery’s holographic fanny pack and deconstructed houndstooth blazer.
They began to speak of their shared desires to transition. Grace, who was assigned male at birth, went first. Lavery followed shortly thereafter, in 2016 (he jokes in his book about a “one-in-one-out policy” for their genders). They married in December.
...In the past few years, Lavery has noticed an uptick in questions about transitioning. He sometimes might answer based on his own experience, but more often the answers are about basic boundary-setting. “If their problem is the way that they’re being treated by the people in their lives,” he says, “I’ll have a baseline of, like, I think you have the right to expect this or ask for this.” It’s reasonable, for example, to tell your family to call you by your chosen pronouns or your new name.
Then again, Lavery’s own experience has taught him that there are limits to what you can expect from family.
Dear Prudence is choked up. He's thinking about his parents, Nancy and John Ortberg. A month before his wedding, he asked them about something that happened recently at the family's church.
According to Lavery, they gave some very bad answers.
A parishioner at the church, who volunteered with children, had told the Ortbergs that he (the parishioner) was attracted to children. The Ortbergs had then allowed the volunteer to continue to work with kids because he assured the pastor that he had not acted on his attraction, a church bulletin explained.
Lavery declined to comment on the situation, but on Twitter he posted a summary describing a conversation he and Grace had with his father about the incident. “We were told (1) that pedophilia was like homosexuality, (2) that the most important thing was maintaining secrecy around this affair, and (3) that we lacked standing to offer an alternative form of treatment for sexual obsessions with children because of our transitions,” Lavery wrote.
John Ortberg did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
The Laverys reported John Ortberg to the church when he declined to disclose the details himself. Ortberg took a leave of absence from the church through Jan. 24. An independent investigation “did not reveal any allegations of misconduct,” a church spokeswoman wrote. “In addition, we are reviewing our protective measures for children.”
Lavery had worried about losing his family when he transitioned. He hadn’t; Nancy had attended to him after his mastectomy, he wrote in his newsletter.
But now, “It was very, very, very clear to me what needed to happen,” Lavery says. “It was hard, but not complicated.”
He dropped his last name and cut off contact with his family.
“I wanted . . . to transition out of my bloodline and body entirely, to appear and become inhuman — covered in eyelashes, maybe,” Lavery wrote in his newsletter.
He had advised readers seeking to leave their families before, but he comes to it now with “a newly heightened awareness” of the costs.
“Even if you have total clarity on your side,” he says, “there can be a counterweight to that choice — that afterwards, the momentum slows down and the heaviness and grief, or even a sense of guilt, can settle in.”
The day after their wedding, the Laverys decamped across the country to New York. They now live in the kind of unrealistically nice New York apartment that usually only exists on TV: crown molding, a massive walk-in closet, sweeping views of the Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines that only grow more spectacular when the sun sets. After the year they’ve had, it feels like kismet — “Trading a family for an apartment,” Grace jokes, bitterly, over a cup of tea at their dining room table. The past two months have been among the best of their lives, and also among the worst.
Life is a rich tapestry. Getting through it can take powerful magic, huge acts of transformation and small acts of neatening. Even good counsel can lead to messy resolutions. But sometimes, that’s how a story ends. (Click here to read the rest of the article.)
photo credit: Jackie Molloy/for The Washington Post
Dear Prudence is sitting in one of those Brooklyn coffee shops where the only two choices for milk are coconut and cashew, talking about what it’s like to take on the weight of people’s problems in a world that increasingly feels like garbage.
“It feels like a small act of neatening that I really appreciate,” says Daniel Lavery, the author of Slate’s Dear Prudence advice column. “In this limited amount of time every week, in this incredibly limited scope, you are going to, to the best of your ability, tend to problems.”
Sometimes they’re huge problems that touch on racism or trauma or abuse. Sometimes they’re frivolous problems, about weddings or gifts, that present windows to deeper ones: codependency, boundaries and so on.
The tidying-up of people’s personal lives has a singular appeal to Lavery. Each letter is a story in need of a resolution. Yes, there are real people and real complexities on the other side of the Dear Prudence letters, but the format makes each advice-seeker’s mess seem manageable. “It feels like just great, brief plots that are submitted to, like, a person — kind of at random,” he says, “who then submits, ‘Here’s how I think you should end the story.’ ”
Lavery, 33, is not just a random person. Over the past few years, the story of his life has resembled a series of Dear Prudence letters that Lavery has had to resolve for himself, culminating in a new memoir, “Something That May Shock and Discredit You.” The book is an account of his gender transition, interspersed with the types of satirical essays about literature and pop culture you might have once found on the Toast, the now-defunct feminist website that he co-founded in 2013, when he went by his birth name, Mallory Ortberg.
Dear Prudence, I think I’m trans.
Dear Prudence, I’m in love with my best friend.
Dear Prudence, I think I have to cut ties with my family.
There are no formal qualifications for an advice columnist. There are only informal ones: a deep well of empathy, a strong moral compass, a gift for being succinct without coming off as glib. “Most of us aren’t psychologists. We’re not therapists,” says John Paul Brammer, the advice columnist who writes ¡Hola Papi! for his Substack newsletter (previously for Out Magazine). “We’re your pals at the bar who you can tell your issues to, and we’ll talk you through it."
Of Lavery, he adds: “Danny has that energy.”
Perspective, too. Lavery is the most notable new figure in a field of advice-givers that has begun to diversify, reflecting an overdue understanding that cisgender white people are hardly the only ones in search of the “small acts of neatening” that columnists can provide — nor are they the only ones qualified to tend to other people’s problems.
Maybe it helps for the advice-giver to have led a complicated life — the kind that exposes you to different people, different problems, heartbreak, forgiveness and grief.
For Lavery, some of the most crucial questions and answers have had to do with family: the one he left behind and the one he has made for himself. His upbringing “shaped me and made me who I am, and I can’t change it any more than I can change another part of myself,” he says.
... Walking through the Brooklyn Museum, Lavery encounters a small exhibition titled “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt.” Some writing on the wall provides an explanation: The Egyptians believed that when a woman died, she must briefly be transformed into a man to be reborn. “The male pronoun on this woman’s coffin represented powerful magic that caused gender transformation,” reads the text on one display.
Powerful magic would be one way to describe his connection with Grace Lavery, a professor of Victorian literature at the University of California at Berkeley, whom he met shortly before the Toast was entering the loam. They became inseparable. “It was a full-on immersive experience of like, hanging out for hours a day, every day, sharing incredibly intimate stories,” says Grace, 36, a tall, British brunette who dresses glamorously in big sunglasses and fur coats — a complement to Lavery’s holographic fanny pack and deconstructed houndstooth blazer.
They began to speak of their shared desires to transition. Grace, who was assigned male at birth, went first. Lavery followed shortly thereafter, in 2016 (he jokes in his book about a “one-in-one-out policy” for their genders). They married in December.
...In the past few years, Lavery has noticed an uptick in questions about transitioning. He sometimes might answer based on his own experience, but more often the answers are about basic boundary-setting. “If their problem is the way that they’re being treated by the people in their lives,” he says, “I’ll have a baseline of, like, I think you have the right to expect this or ask for this.” It’s reasonable, for example, to tell your family to call you by your chosen pronouns or your new name.
Then again, Lavery’s own experience has taught him that there are limits to what you can expect from family.
Dear Prudence is choked up. He's thinking about his parents, Nancy and John Ortberg. A month before his wedding, he asked them about something that happened recently at the family's church.
According to Lavery, they gave some very bad answers.
A parishioner at the church, who volunteered with children, had told the Ortbergs that he (the parishioner) was attracted to children. The Ortbergs had then allowed the volunteer to continue to work with kids because he assured the pastor that he had not acted on his attraction, a church bulletin explained.
Lavery declined to comment on the situation, but on Twitter he posted a summary describing a conversation he and Grace had with his father about the incident. “We were told (1) that pedophilia was like homosexuality, (2) that the most important thing was maintaining secrecy around this affair, and (3) that we lacked standing to offer an alternative form of treatment for sexual obsessions with children because of our transitions,” Lavery wrote.
John Ortberg did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
The Laverys reported John Ortberg to the church when he declined to disclose the details himself. Ortberg took a leave of absence from the church through Jan. 24. An independent investigation “did not reveal any allegations of misconduct,” a church spokeswoman wrote. “In addition, we are reviewing our protective measures for children.”
Lavery had worried about losing his family when he transitioned. He hadn’t; Nancy had attended to him after his mastectomy, he wrote in his newsletter.
But now, “It was very, very, very clear to me what needed to happen,” Lavery says. “It was hard, but not complicated.”
He dropped his last name and cut off contact with his family.
“I wanted . . . to transition out of my bloodline and body entirely, to appear and become inhuman — covered in eyelashes, maybe,” Lavery wrote in his newsletter.
He had advised readers seeking to leave their families before, but he comes to it now with “a newly heightened awareness” of the costs.
“Even if you have total clarity on your side,” he says, “there can be a counterweight to that choice — that afterwards, the momentum slows down and the heaviness and grief, or even a sense of guilt, can settle in.”
The day after their wedding, the Laverys decamped across the country to New York. They now live in the kind of unrealistically nice New York apartment that usually only exists on TV: crown molding, a massive walk-in closet, sweeping views of the Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines that only grow more spectacular when the sun sets. After the year they’ve had, it feels like kismet — “Trading a family for an apartment,” Grace jokes, bitterly, over a cup of tea at their dining room table. The past two months have been among the best of their lives, and also among the worst.
Life is a rich tapestry. Getting through it can take powerful magic, huge acts of transformation and small acts of neatening. Even good counsel can lead to messy resolutions. But sometimes, that’s how a story ends. (Click here to read the rest of the article.)
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Timeline (And John's Statement)
Timeline:
November, 2017
Danny tells his family he's planning to transition
July, 2018
The volunteer advises John and Nancy Ortberg of their sexual obsession with children. John encourages them to continue volunteering and traveling with children
2019
November 15
The volunteer tells Danny about their obsession with children, and that John and Nancy have known since July, 2018. Grace and Danny speak to John and he confirms the situation
November 18
Danny writes to the volunteer, sending information about therapists and suggesting they stop volunteering with children. He also writes to John, advising him to tell the church about this. John refuses.
November 20
Danny tweets that he's taking two weeks away from the Slate column to deal with a family crisis
November 21
Danny and Grace provide this information to multiple employees and elders at the church
November 22
John is placed on an unspecified Leave of Absence.
November 28
Danny publishes an article in his newsletter, saying that he has severed all ties with the Ortberg family. He doesn't give specifics about what happened. This is the first public information about the story, and where I first heard about it.
Late November/Early December
Danny and Grace move to New York
December 3
Danny tweets about completing paperwork to legally change his surname to Lavery
December 22
Danny and Grace get married
2020
January 21
Menlo Church sends an e-mail to its members, advising them of what happened, why John was on leave and that he will be returning on January 24. The message does not identify Danny and Grace as the ones told the church what was going on
January 24
John returns from his LOA, in an internal role and participating in a Restoration plan.
Added on 2/13: I believe John delivered the remarks below on Saturday night, January 25.
February 2
Danny tweets out a detailed explanation of what happened. Christian publications, as well as a few secular sites, cover the story.
February 6
In a newsletter article, Danny writes about his last phone call with his father, including quotes from John. Anyone reading closely could probably discern that the volunteer in question is a family member. As I've said in previous posts, although I don't know for certain, I believe the volunteer is John's son/Danny's brother. It's the only way the situation makes sense.
Details about all of this, including Danny's statements, the church's statement and some of the press coverage, are in the posts below.
Update on February 13. This is a transcript of John Ortberg's statement to the congregation:
November, 2017
Danny tells his family he's planning to transition
July, 2018
The volunteer advises John and Nancy Ortberg of their sexual obsession with children. John encourages them to continue volunteering and traveling with children
2019
November 15
The volunteer tells Danny about their obsession with children, and that John and Nancy have known since July, 2018. Grace and Danny speak to John and he confirms the situation
November 18
Danny writes to the volunteer, sending information about therapists and suggesting they stop volunteering with children. He also writes to John, advising him to tell the church about this. John refuses.
November 20
Danny tweets that he's taking two weeks away from the Slate column to deal with a family crisis
November 21
Danny and Grace provide this information to multiple employees and elders at the church
November 22
John is placed on an unspecified Leave of Absence.
November 28
Danny publishes an article in his newsletter, saying that he has severed all ties with the Ortberg family. He doesn't give specifics about what happened. This is the first public information about the story, and where I first heard about it.
Late November/Early December
Danny and Grace move to New York
December 3
Danny tweets about completing paperwork to legally change his surname to Lavery
December 22
Danny and Grace get married
2020
January 21
Menlo Church sends an e-mail to its members, advising them of what happened, why John was on leave and that he will be returning on January 24. The message does not identify Danny and Grace as the ones told the church what was going on
January 24
John returns from his LOA, in an internal role and participating in a Restoration plan.
Added on 2/13: I believe John delivered the remarks below on Saturday night, January 25.
February 2
Danny tweets out a detailed explanation of what happened. Christian publications, as well as a few secular sites, cover the story.
February 6
In a newsletter article, Danny writes about his last phone call with his father, including quotes from John. Anyone reading closely could probably discern that the volunteer in question is a family member. As I've said in previous posts, although I don't know for certain, I believe the volunteer is John's son/Danny's brother. It's the only way the situation makes sense.
Details about all of this, including Danny's statements, the church's statement and some of the press coverage, are in the posts below.
Update on February 13. This is a transcript of John Ortberg's statement to the congregation:
Thursday, February 6, 2020
The Statement From Menlo Church - Updated
Update: A new statement from Danny, on Thursday, February 6:
I think often, I think compulsively, about the last phone call I had with my father, certain portions of which feel permanently lodged into various portions of my brain, parroting the same phrases again and again in a 1,000-year half-life. I did not know it would be the last time I would ever want to speak to him. I used to speak to him often, and enjoy it, and looked forward to the next time I would speak with him again. Yet there was one thing I always knew, in all our talks both public and private, which was that it was not possible for a child of John Ortberg to express anger at John Ortberg. You might have suggestions, you might come to him as a supplicant, you might prayerfully encourage him to reconsider, petition in hand, but anger he would always reject right out. Sweetly at first, then with thunder. So often I would find myself choking on the one thing I wanted to say to him, the one thing I knew I couldn’t say, the one thing I would be endlessly punished for, and receive in response:
Why do you hide so often? Why are you so evasive? Why can’t you just look me in the eye and tell me what you’re thinking? I feel like I don’t know you. I feel like you’re unknowable. I feel like you only ever tell me what you think I want to hear.
You can’t take this away from ____.
It’s a very — it’s a very unique situation. That’s the thing you have to understand, is this is a very unique situation, and so you can’t just —
There’s almost no studies done about this sort of situation. Almost none. And so it’s really difficult to say what to do in this situation.
Grace and I had written down a number of questions we wanted to ask him, questions about what resources he had sought out, how he was taking care of himself, what the general safety plan was — questions I imagined he would have spent a great deal of time considering, questions he would welcome answering — questions I had no idea would make him furious.
I do — I do think therapy would probably, would probably be a good idea — but _____ is worried they might get a weird or eccentric one, who would report them for no reason. So I think it would be good, but ____’s not going to go, and you can’t make someone go to therapy.
He sounded hell-bent. I have no other words for it; I heard evasions give way to sputterings give way to euphemism give way to recriminations. He sounded like a man who had spent the last 18 months quietly building a device that would bring about the end of the world and making sure nobody else noticed.
Well, I don’t really think you have the grounds to give advice to ______ since you don’t talk much since your transition.
No, I don’t agree with that.
You have to understand, you only found out about this today. I understand how you’re feeling, but we’ve had 18 months to get used to the situation.
Well, that’s way out of bounds.
At one point Grace had written the word “anger” down on the little yellow legal pad we’d used to draw up our list of questions. I had told her before we called that it was important to me that I had the opportunity to say I was angry he had kept this information from me for so long. As the conversation went on, and my father grew more and more indignant, Grace started tapping the word, then underlining it, then circling it in bold black strokes, then jabbing at it every time I said something like “I’m not sure I understand —” and “But don’t you agree it would be safer for everyone if —” and “I don’t know —”
I never said it, of course. I had always known that within our family it was not possible, it was not permissible for anger to be directed towards him. I did not know how well I had absorbed that lesson until that day.
I’m not sure. I don’t know. I’m not sure.
I don’t think so.
I think if _____ couldn’t do this work, they would want to — they would feel like their life had no meaning.
No, you misunderstand.
No, that’s not what I said.
It was remarkable, how simultaneously “uncertain” he presented himself as, and yet how immediately and intuitively hostile to any suggestion about trying anything else – alternately gentling, reassuring, using language about “journeys” and complexity, and then in the next moment fierce, adamant, paternal, speaking ex cathedra, with a perfect explanation for why secrecy was the only possibility, no matter how wrong that might look on first blush. A flurry of understanding.
I have no doubts in ______’s character. No doubts.
I think if you approach it so suspiciously, with such judgment — I think emotions are running a little high right now.
If you inform the church now, we’re worried ______ is going to commit suicide, and we don’t want you to be responsible for that.
The last one came to Grace through an intermediary.
It was a very unique situation the kind that happens all the time and I was born to get used to it but I never did and so far no one has committed suicide which means I’m not responsible for anything even the things I’ve misunderstood.
(Link here.)
This is a little disjointed and hard to follow, but it does reinforce my belief that the church member in question is actually John's son/Danny's brother. Specifically, these statements don't sound like they're referring to a random church member; to me they read like this:
"Well, I don't really think you have the grounds to give advice to [your brother] since you don't talk much since your transition"
"You have to understand, you only found out about this today. I understand how you're feeling but [your mother and I] had 18 months to get used to the situation"
"... I was angry he had kept this situation from me for so long"
"I think if [your brother] couldn't do this work they would want to -- they would feel like their life had no meaning"
More: This was posted on Reddit; the poster says it's from an article in Danny's newsletter, presumably behind the paywall:
"During that last desperate phone call, my father finally clued me in on what being a man in my family entailed, the secret they were all expected not only to keep but to protect, not merely to protect but to enable, not simply to enable but to valorize as 'heroic."
More, part 2: This situation has gotten some coverage beyond the Christian press. There's no new news in any of these articles, they're all based on the original RNS story, the church's statement and Danny's statement. Still, it's interesting to see which media outlets have picked up the story. Click to read more:
The Mercury News
The Daily Mail
Jezebel
And one more thing. Vanity Fair posted an interview with Danny about his new book, which comes out Tuesday. I would have loved to have read what he originally wrote about his relationship with John:
The ending of the book also underwent some revision. It initially concluded with what Lavery described as “a very optimistic look at my relationship with my father,” John Ortberg, a pastor at Bay Area megachurch Menlo Church, “and my hope that he could incorporate my transition into his understanding of me.” In November, Ortberg was placed on leave after Lavery reported to church elders that his father knew a member of his congregation experienced “obsessive sexual feelings about young children,” but nevertheless encouraged the person to continue working with children unsupervised. (The Mercury News reported that a review by an outside investigator “did not reveal any allegations of misconduct within the church,” according to statements from the church’s board. Lavery’s father declined the Mercury News’s request for further comment. He has since been reinstated under a “restoration plan.”) Lavery has cut ties with his biological family, editing out most of the references to them. He has written about the incident in his newsletter.
In December he and Grace moved from Berkeley, California, to New York, in part to distance themselves from the situation, in part because they’d been considering it for a while. So far he likes it here. He had a chess date at 6 p.m. with “some lesbians I met at a coffee shop a few days ago.” He’d asked where they’d gotten their chess set, which was based on the Lewis chessmen, and they’d invited him to play.
We went back and forth about the queer scene in Brooklyn, the good parties, the interesting events. I found myself wishing out loud that I had been out when I first moved to New York, had discovered the LGBTQ community sooner. “I think that’s so key, and so much of what this book was about—it’s impossible to know that you don’t know enough about yourself,” he replied. “I’ve never thought to myself, Oh, I bet I don’t know that much about myself, until I have a moment where I think, Holy shit, I didn’t know this. But if you knew it, you would know it.” (Read the entire article here.)
"Well, I don't really think you have the grounds to give advice to [your brother] since you don't talk much since your transition"
"You have to understand, you only found out about this today. I understand how you're feeling but [your mother and I] had 18 months to get used to the situation"
"... I was angry he had kept this situation from me for so long"
"I think if [your brother] couldn't do this work they would want to -- they would feel like their life had no meaning"
More: This was posted on Reddit; the poster says it's from an article in Danny's newsletter, presumably behind the paywall:
"During that last desperate phone call, my father finally clued me in on what being a man in my family entailed, the secret they were all expected not only to keep but to protect, not merely to protect but to enable, not simply to enable but to valorize as 'heroic."
More, part 2: This situation has gotten some coverage beyond the Christian press. There's no new news in any of these articles, they're all based on the original RNS story, the church's statement and Danny's statement. Still, it's interesting to see which media outlets have picked up the story. Click to read more:
The Mercury News
The Daily Mail
Jezebel
And one more thing. Vanity Fair posted an interview with Danny about his new book, which comes out Tuesday. I would have loved to have read what he originally wrote about his relationship with John:
The ending of the book also underwent some revision. It initially concluded with what Lavery described as “a very optimistic look at my relationship with my father,” John Ortberg, a pastor at Bay Area megachurch Menlo Church, “and my hope that he could incorporate my transition into his understanding of me.” In November, Ortberg was placed on leave after Lavery reported to church elders that his father knew a member of his congregation experienced “obsessive sexual feelings about young children,” but nevertheless encouraged the person to continue working with children unsupervised. (The Mercury News reported that a review by an outside investigator “did not reveal any allegations of misconduct within the church,” according to statements from the church’s board. Lavery’s father declined the Mercury News’s request for further comment. He has since been reinstated under a “restoration plan.”) Lavery has cut ties with his biological family, editing out most of the references to them. He has written about the incident in his newsletter.
In December he and Grace moved from Berkeley, California, to New York, in part to distance themselves from the situation, in part because they’d been considering it for a while. So far he likes it here. He had a chess date at 6 p.m. with “some lesbians I met at a coffee shop a few days ago.” He’d asked where they’d gotten their chess set, which was based on the Lewis chessmen, and they’d invited him to play.
We went back and forth about the queer scene in Brooklyn, the good parties, the interesting events. I found myself wishing out loud that I had been out when I first moved to New York, had discovered the LGBTQ community sooner. “I think that’s so key, and so much of what this book was about—it’s impossible to know that you don’t know enough about yourself,” he replied. “I’ve never thought to myself, Oh, I bet I don’t know that much about myself, until I have a moment where I think, Holy shit, I didn’t know this. But if you knew it, you would know it.” (Read the entire article here.)
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