Written by: United Theological Seminary February 23, 2019

Awaiting the Results: A United Student Reflects on the General Conference

“The special called 2019 General Conference [of the United Methodist Church], set for Feb. 23–26 in St. Louis, will focus on moving the denomination past its decades-long struggle with issues around homosexuality. Proposed plans offer ways to stay together and ways to split.

The One Church Plan, Traditionalist Plan and Connectional Conference Plan and several other pieces of legislation related to homosexuality will be considered by 864 delegates from around the globe.

Katie Matson-Daley is a United student (class of 2019) and a United Methodist candidate for ministry, below are her reflections before General Conference this weekend:

Saint Louis, Missouri, is one of my holy places. For two summers in college, I experienced a dynamic multi-racial ministry that took the charge to take care of orphans, widows and immigrants. Saint Louis is a place where I experienced the life-changing love of being accepted as God’s beloved daughter. In my geography of faith Saint Louis, Missouri, on the edge of the Mississippi River, is a place where I would, like Joshua and the Israelites crossing the Jordan, stack stones together and say, “Look at what God did here.” My call to ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church, and my call to United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities is deeply rooted in what God did in my life seventeen years ago as a college student in Saint Louis.

My beloved church is heading to my beloved city this weekend. While I am in the Twin Cities, a part of my heart will be in Saint Louis this week.

When I interned in an educational enrichment and immigrant/refugee resettlement in Saint Louis with an evangelical church nearly two decades ago, my understanding of scripture was rooted in literalism.

Some of that literalism was life-giving and electrifying. The words of the prophets were clear that we should care for orphans, widows and immigrants. We spent days playing with preschoolers who lost parents in the conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. Other interns did yard work for low-income widows in the Saint Louis summer heat. The words of Paul were clear: you have been adopted as a full son or daughter of God through Christ, you are worthy because of who God is, nothing you do can make you more or less worthy of love or belonging.

Other aspects of taking the scriptures literally were less liberating, but I accepted them. Paul was clear that he did not permit a woman to preach, so while I felt alive in the church office, and loved studying scripture and had a gift for communication, it was clear that I was NOT called to the ministry of the pastor. I had known amazing gay and lesbian people, but scripture was clear that we were to love the sinner but hate the sin. So LGBTQ+ people were outside of God’s kingdom.

Feeling a strong call to ministry, but certain that God would not call someone like me (a woman) to pastoral ministry, I enrolled in the Community Ministry Leaders program at Bethel seminary in 2008. When I graduated in 2011, I had recognized two things and started to question a third.

First, there is no pure reading or interpretation of scripture. We all have a hermeneutic, we all have biases. As one professor put it, knowing God fully and interpreting God’s will perfectly is “beyond my epistemological ceiling.”

Second, my first journey to seminary, while carefully designed not to prepare me to be a pastor, revealed that I was called to pastoral ministry. I love preaching, offering pastoral care and leading congregations.

Besides these realizations, I also started to question what I had previously believed about LGBTQ+ people. I made a commitment to pray for wisdom, study and discern whether my theology needed to shift. As my understanding grew I was drawn to United to complete my MDiv and pursue ordination as an Elder in the United Methodist Church.

As Methodist Christians, we believe, like other Christians that, “The Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation” (Methodist Articles of Religion, Article V), but unlike other Protestant denominations, we are not a “sola scriptura,” tradition. We read the scriptures through what twentieth-century scholar Albert Outler calls the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: scripture forms the base of our understanding, but we interpret scripture through reason, tradition and experience.

Reason and scripture influenced my transformation on LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion, but it was experience and tradition that convinced me. Jesus says, “They will know you are my disciples by your love,” and “a tree is known by its fruit.” Over the years, I have seen faithful gay and lesbian Christians whose lives are marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control. These folks love Jesus and have chosen to stay in the body of Christ in the face of lots of hurt. I also experienced the pain as beloved friends and students found my beloved church too traumatizing for them as trans, gay and bisexual people.

Our tradition has a history of splitting, often because of racial segregation and slavery. The parallels between the mistreatment of people in black bodies, and the mistreatment of people in queer bodies are too eerily similar. Our tradition’s sin of excluding people ought not be repeated, not on the basis of race, nor on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. An elderly African American woman, who remembers the racial segregation of the United Methodist Central jurisdiction (from 1939 to 1968), recently told me, “God doesn’t make junk. It was wrong to keep Black people out of the larger body then, and it is wrong to keep gay people out now.” I had to say, “Amen.”

As Methodist Christians, we are called to the spiritual practice of the General Rules. The first of these rules, is “first, do no harm.” Exclusion, hurtful language and forcing clergy to live closeted and semi-closeted lives are doing great harm.

I have compassion for those in favor of a traditional understanding of marriage and ordination. I’ve been in that space and understand how a more progressive understanding seems to offend God’s holiness. It is no longer a belief that I hold, but I have compassion for those who believe differently than me. I also have compassion for clergy and lay people around the world who live in countries were homosexuality is against the law, and the challenge of contextualizing decisions made in the United States to their ministries. I understand that we will not all think alike, but like John Wesley, I wonder if we could not love alike. My prayer for the coming week is that we will remove the harmful language from the Book of Discipline, and that if we split or if we remain the United Methodists, we would continue to love one another. But I cannot ask that our unity be built on the oppression and exclusion of LGBT+ people any longer. I have compassion for people with traditional beliefs, but I do not have patience for the Traditionalist Plan. We may read scripture differently, but we ought not punish one another or push each other out based on our reading.

My invitation to the larger United body is that you would be in prayer for my United Methodist Church this week. That you would offer extra compassion to both the LGBTQ+ people in your life and the Methodists you know (many of us are both). My invitation to the UMC is that we would make sure that there is a place for everyone at the table.

Katie Matson Daley is one of several students pursuing ordination in the United Methodist Church at United as part of Methodist Studies program.

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October 9, 2026

Alums Homecoming News Releases

Rev. Dr. A. Leon (Lee) Tredwell (’06) Honored As a 2026 Distinguished Alum

United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities is excited to announce that Rev. A. Leon (Lee) Tredwell, PhD—who earned his MA in Theology and Biblical Interpretation from United in 2006—has been selected as a 2026 Distinguished Alum. An accomplished preacher, teacher, and published author, Dr. Tredwell has championed biblical narratives that affirm the divinity of all people, regardless of their race, creed, color, class, gender, or sexuality. Adopted at age four, Lee was raised in the Baptist faith and felt called to ministry as a child. Even so, after earning a degree in Political Science and Sociology at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, he spent the first ten years of his professional life as a grain trader for Cargill. After connecting with Drs. Ralph and Alika Galloway, Lee found United, and his call was reignited. He remembers Rev. Dr. Carolyn Pressler (Professor Emerita of Biblical Interpretation, 1990–2020) and Dean Richard Weis* with great affection. Both teachers, he observes, “taught us to wrestle with the biblical text until it opened up and spoke.” They also introduced Lee to Black and post-colonial hermeneutics, and Rev. Dr. Weis led him to passages in Jeremiah 38 (Hebrew Bible) that sparked his interest in learning more about a Black character named Ebed-Melech. Lee also cites the influence of Rev. Dr. Christine Smith’s (Professor Emerita of Preaching 1992–2013) preaching courses on his life. In Colorado, at the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology, Lee completed a joint PhD program with a concentration in Religion and Social Change in 2017. Ronald Smith, a former United student who nominated Lee for this award, notes, “Dr. Tredwell has demonstrated that he is an innovator and compassionate leader who has served both inside the academy as a professor of African American Preaching at Iliff School of Theology, University of Colorado, Boulder, and in the larger community; he has served as [a] pastor, civil rights and human rights activist, and [a] chief executive officer in Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, and Texas.” Lee’s new book—Black, Queer and Blessed: My Story and the Biblical Story Churches Don’t Teach—was published in June 2025. As the description reads, “For all who believe God-Yahweh is angry, mad, disgusted, and against LGBTQIA+ folx, regrettably, you been had, misled, took, hood-winked and bamboozled! Black, Queer and Blessed, through lived experience and the excavation of the subjugated biblical narrative of Ebed-Melech, demolishes society’s antiquated mores.” The book is part memoir and part theological reflection on the Ebed-Melech revelation. In addition to his roles as teacher, preacher, and author, Lee has specifically worked to promote adoption of Black children from foster care and create affordable housing. These days, he serves as the pastor of Theology and Community Engagement at Allendale United Methodist Church in St. Petersburg, Florida. As Ronald Smith asserts, “Dr. Tredwell is the embodiment and an exemplar of United Theological Seminary’s mission, vision, and values.” * of blessed memory About United Founded by the United Church of Christ (UCC) as a welcoming, ecumenical school that embraces all denominations and faith traditions, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities has been on the creative edge of progressive theological thought and leadership since it was established in 1962. Today, United continues to educate leaders who, through the eyes of faith, engage in the dismantling of systems of oppression, explore multi-faith spirituality, and push the boundaries of knowledge.

Lena K. Gardner (’15) Honored As a 2026 Distinguished Alum

[caption id="attachment_11955" align="alignnone" width="1920"] photo by Bethany Birnie[/caption] United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities is thrilled to announce that Lena K. Gardner—who graduated with an MA in Justice and Peace Studies in 2015—has been selected as one of our three 2026 Distinguished Alums. A highly respected social justice activist and community leader, Lena is the co-founder and executive director of Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism (BLUU), a nonprofit founded in 2015 that creates life-giving and life-saving opportunities for spiritual community and Black-centered organizing. According to Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel (’13), Lena has “been a force in the Twin Cities’ religiously rooted justice ecosystem for the last 15 years.” Dr. Voelkel, Lena’s nominator, traces Lena’s justice-organizing acumen back to 2011, when she served on the Faith Organizing Roundtable—a body that coordinated religious communities’ opposition to the anti-marriage amendment. Lena went on to champion marriage equality in the 2012–2013 legislative session. After a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed Michael Brown, Jr., an unarmed 18-year-old Black teen, in 2014, Lena played a key role in transforming the Faith Organizing Roundtable into the Multifaith Anti-Racism, Change & Healing or MARCH. “In that same period,” Voelkel notes, “Lena was a core team organizer of Black Lives Matter Minneapolis and served on its steering committee.” Lena was deeply involved, quoted in many national and local articles, and interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio after former police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in 2020. In April 2021, after a Brooklyn Center police officer killed Daunte Wright during a traffic stop, Lena co-wrote an article in the Sahan Journal demanding that Attorney General Keith Ellison prosecute the case, and that the Hennepin County attorney be removed. More recently, Lena embarked on another ambitious project. In May 2024, through the BLUU Cooperative Housing Initiative, she co-hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for an affordable housing complex for single parents in North Minneapolis. In a MinnPost article about the groundbreaking, Lena explained, “It’s really about trying to give back to one of the communities that made me…. We really see providing stable housing in a cooperative framework as one of the many paths to collective liberation and Black liberation. Ultimately, it’s about self-determination.” When Operation Metro Surge arrived in the Twin Cities in late 2025, Lena took action again. As Voelkel observes, she “returned to the MARCH steering committee…. When MARCH organized a clergy call (in five days) to which 700 clergy came, the ability to create and host such an amazing event owes part of its success to Lena’s relationships with communications specialists, graphic designers, and organizers.” Lena was also a driving force behind Neighbors Helping Neighbors (NHN), a mutual aid group she and Anna Stamborski founded in late 2025 to connect vulnerable ICE-targeted families with congregational networks whose members could provide shopping and transportation services. Through all of Lena’s indefatigable contributions to working for justice, Voelkel asserts, she “has focused on Black excellence, Black power, Black spiritual wholeness, Black beauty, and how non-Black folks can act in solidarity and followership of Black folks, particularly Black queer women. She has done so skillfully through building relationships across differences in ways that facilitate and deepen genuine relationships.”

Cori Berg (’98) Honored As a 2026 Distinguished Alum

United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities is elated to announce that Cori Berg (’98)—advocate, artist, and educator—is a 2026 Distinguished Alum. Cori earned her Master of Arts (MA) in Theology and the Arts in 1998, and for more than 27 years, she has integrated creativity, art, and spirituality into her field. Cori arrived at United in the 1990s, having majored in theater and minored in studio art during her undergraduate studies. “I knew I had an artistic voice,” she recalls, “but it didn’t make sense in any of the traditional contexts.” After seeing an advertisement for United’s Theology and the Arts program, Cori drove from Dallas to the Twin Cities to visit as a prospective student. A campus art exhibit by Merle Janis was all she needed to see—“this school had something I needed: strength, boldness, vulnerability.” For Cori, “life is liturgy.” She credits United with introducing her to “the freedom in a progressive faith.” At United, Cori learned to expand her creativity, which became a launching pad for a vibrant career. “United gave me a safe, nurturing space to explore, dream, and execute big things,” she writes. “I’ve continued that through the rest of my career as an artist, an educator, an administrator, and a speaker.” Art is central to Cori’s work and features prominently in her curriculum development for children. Her art was featured in the 2012 opening parade for the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas, TX, a project that involved “seniors, children, and adults in all aspects” from a local Methodist community program. Ministry with Children and Spirituality, courses taught by Rev. Dr. Barbara Anne Keely (Professor Emerita, 1991–2015), were particularly formative for Cori’s future in education. “I remember she taught us to get on the floor and view the church nursery from a baby’s point of view,” Cori reflects. “I use this today over and over as I teach early childhood educators…. She introduced the idea of seeing oneself not as a separate body, mind, or spirit, but when one part of my being is suffering, to use the other parts to help lift that part.” More recently, Cori has been an active community member at Dallas Meditation Center, where she is known for her moving dharma talks that weave Buddhist themes into contemporary storytelling. In public schools and congregational settings, Cori has applied what she learned as a United student to the field of early childhood education, for which—nominator Rev. Jim Peck (’99) points out—she has become “one of the nation’s leading advocates.” When facing challenges in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cori leveraged her ingenuity and creative vision to support educators with online training resources. As a teacher and an administrator in spaces where lack of institutional funding and support are commonplace, Jim observes, “she uses her [United] education to work for justice and equity,” to “nurture relationships in the early childhood settings where she has served, with an expertise in working in settings in crisis to encourage recovery, healing, and new paths for serving the future.” In May 2026, Cori completed her MEd in Curriculum and Instruction at American College of Education, where she immediately enrolled to begin her EdD in Early Childhood Education. She serves as an executive director at the University of Kansas (KU) and anticipates returning to Dallas to live near her family at the end of the year while awaiting her next opportunity. We are delighted to celebrate Cori and her decades of faithful, innovative leadership in the field of early childhood education and art. About United Founded by the United Church of Christ (UCC) as a welcoming, ecumenical school that embraces all denominations and faith traditions, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities has been on the creative edge of progressive theological thought and leadership since it was established in 1962. Today, United continues to educate leaders who, through the eyes of faith, engage in the dismantling of systems of oppression, explore multi-faith spirituality, and push the boundaries of knowledge.