Key Points:
- Glendale United Methodist Church is a living example of how a congregation can thrive in the 2020s.
- From 12-25 people attending Sunday services nine years ago, the church has grown to about 125 people at worship today.
- The church is well known for its inclusivity, especially of the LGBTQ community.
A cinder block thrown through a sanctuary window and a sign from a sign helped convince Glenda Gladden and her wife, Sandra Sullivan, that Glendale United Methodist Church was the place for them.
“We were literally walking in the door, and we had been praying for a sign from God as to where we needed to go (to church), and that sign fell over and hit my wife on the head,” Gladden said of the lightweight banner in the entryway of the church.
That same morning, July 9, 2023, the first arrivals to the church discovered a cinder block that had been chucked through a window, making a mess of shards of glass.
Church members believe the vandalism was tied to Glendale’s inclusive policy, which has attracted many LGBTQ people as church members. It wasn’t the first incident. The church lets all its telephone calls go to voicemail because of frequent harassment calls.
“I walked in the church that morning and I could hear the singing, and see people who should be angry, and yet they were praying for the people who threw the block through the window,” Gladden said.
The cinder block, now painted in a rainbow of colors, is still displayed in the sanctuary today.
“From the very first time we walked in, we felt welcomed, accepted. We’d gone to other churches where we felt tolerated,” Gladden added.
Back in 2017, Glendale was down to 12-25 worshippers a week. Steven Adair, a church leader who has attended the church all his life, knew that changes had to be made or Glendale would eventually close.
“I watched my church die a slow death in front of my eyes for the first 30 years of my life,” said Adair, who also is worship leader and oversees social media at Glendale.
One Sunday in 2017, lay leaders of Glendale held their breath and announced some changes.
“That was definitely a last-ditch effort to keep our doors open because we couldn’t afford a fulltime pastor at that point,” Adair said.
Sunday services were moved from 11 a.m. to 10 a.m., because it’s a better time for people with young children. This was a leap of faith, because in 2017 there were no children at Glendale. Today, about 25 children are at the church on a typical Sunday.
The church added projectors to the sanctuary to liven the atmosphere, updated all its printed materials and ramped up social media activity. It decided to hold Holy Communion every week instead of once a month.
Most important, the church leaned into its identity as a Reconciling church that welcomes everyone, including LGBTQ people. This was seven years before the United Methodist General Conference changed its Book of Discipline so that gay people could get married in United Methodist churches and gay clergy could openly serve as pastors.
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Glendale made itself visible as a friend of LGBTQ people by participating in the annual Nashville Pride parade and festival.
“Sexuality and faith is a big sore subject for many people, but I think it’s a really beautiful conversation that should happen more,” said Clayton Waller, a gay man and Glendale member. “Religion has been weaponized against gay people for a long time. … But there is a way of having healthy theology and a loving posture.”
Another 2017 change was adding a welcome message that is read out loud every Sunday, Adair said.
Here’s the message: “We at Glendale United Methodist Church want you to know that no matter where you’ve come from or where you are going; what you believe or what you may doubt; what you are feeling or just not feeling; what you have or don’t have; and no matter the color of your skin, who you love or how you identify — all of you are welcomed into this community of faith by a God who loves you and knows you by name.”
Another key piece of the puzzle was hiring a pastor. Because it was no longer able to afford its own pastor by 2017, nearby Crievewood United Methodist Church had been rotating its four pastors, each preaching once a month at Glendale.
One of those pastors, the Rev. Stephanie Dodge, felt like a good fit, and she agreed to take the job, although it was not the career path she had planned. At Crievewood, she served as youth pastor.
“It was never my intention to become the lead pastor of a church,” said Dodge, a deacon. “I actually prefer serving under someone else.
“But when we had that rotation for a year of four different pastors in the pulpit, we decided we really need one person to be here because when you’re in the pulpit only once a month, it’s hard to even get to know people’s names.”
Dodge, who took the job as Glendale’s fulltime pastor in 2020, is a unique lead pastor. She is a soft-spoken introvert who prefers to do her sermons at the front of the sanctuary — just slightly elevated compared to the worshippers, instead of looking down on them from a pulpit. She reads the message off a tablet rather than making dramatic gestures.
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“Steph is amazing,” said the Rev. Susan Woodard, a retired pastor from Mississippi, who moved to Nashville in 2024 and now is a member of Glendale.
“Steph’s leadership is to invite people to partake, and so there’s a lot of lay leadership in the church,” she said. “Our worship service has got tons and tons of lay involvement in it, and Steph is really good about not holding tightly to the reins and inviting people to come in and take ownership in what’s happening.”
The changes caused about 10 Glendale members to withdraw from the church, Adair said.
“When they walked out the door, there was nobody to say ‘no’ anymore,” Adair said. “We could be flexible; we could try new things.
“That’s what helps spark new life, and we gained so much more than we lost.”
Patterson is a reporter for UM News. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
