“A church is like a green house. Different plants growing under the same roof. If you go into ministry, you’ll have to learn how to give each plant what it needs,” Dick Arnold said to me in 1976. He was my mentor, as I hurried to complete my undergraduate degree and begin the process of becoming an ordained UMC clergy-person. A wise and patient man, exactly what I needed. I believed in a GOD WHO SPEAKS IN CAPITAL LETTERS. His God was quieter.

It was winter in Maine, and the previous afternoon I had been scrapping the ice off my windshield, so that I could attend a campus ministry fellowship dinner, when across the parking lot I saw a car with a license plate that read “TREAD,” in capital letters. I took this to mean that I should boldly tread into the next available Pagan-versus-Christian argument. It didn’t take long for me to find a worthy fight. There on the bulletin board at A-frame, church-like, campus ministry building was an invitation for interested students to attend an LGBTQ event being held the next weekend in that building.

Of course I went and complained to Dick Arnold that campus ministry was no longer a Christian enterprise. He smiled. He didn’t question my dependance on license plates to discern the will of the almighty. Nor, did he tell me to search the gospels to see if Jesus ever condemned homosexuality. (He doesn’t). Instead, he told me his vision of the church. “A church is like a green house. Different plants growing under the same roof. If you go into ministry, you’ll have to learn how to give each plant what it needs.”  At the time, I thought this a terrible non-sequitur.

I’m not sure if I know exactly where Dick Arnold stood on the LGBTQ issue, which still troubles our church some forty-eight years later. I think he sympathized with the campus ministry staff. They had this greenhouse, you see. They had to nurture and protect every student that came to them. Jesus faced a similar task as broke bread with zealots and tax collectors at the same table.

“Christ calls us first to be compassionate. Being right is less important,” Dick Arnold said.

 It would be decades before I incorporated Dick Arnold’s simple philosophy into my own calling as a clergy person. Perhaps the license plate was God’s way of sending me to Dick so that I could hear this wisdom.