How One Columbia Resident's Faith Journey was Shaped by Curiosity

Columbia, Mo. (Oct. 17, 2024) - Growing up in northern Georgia, Christianity was an ever-present factor of Rebes Bennett’s early life. Her location in a socio-geographic area of the US known as the “Bible Belt” meant following a Christian religion felt socially mandatory. In society around Bennett, most people followed the Baptist traditions, but she was raised with the more progressive Methodist faith. While religion was always important to Bennett, she often took things one step further.

“My siblings and I laugh about it now, I was such a goody-goody,” says Bennett. “I followed every rule…didn’t drink till I was twenty-one, and even then I debated the pros and cons of if it was still morally viable…That’s how deep I was into just wanting to be the best, good, right person.”

Throughout high school, Bennett’s faith and devotion continued to grow as she strove to be her best Christian self.  She developed an unwavering trust in preachers based on the extraordinary example of her own father, believing they only wanted the best for their congregations. However, she began picking up beliefs and teachings such as “being gay is a sin” which became unhealthy as she discovered her own queerness and that of her siblings. Conflicts between familial bonds and her devotion to the Church and its teachings raised several questions over time, and Bennett found answers contradictory to the Church’s teachings. Her solution: ask more questions.

At Georgia College, Bennett joined her campus’s Wesly Foundation, a nationwide campus ministry organization sponsored by the United Methodist Church. It was here that she began carefully probing for answers among people who were absolutely certain in their beliefs. It was also here that she met future roommate and close friend Emma Smith, who shared many of the same disagreements about the Church.

“It’s kind of walking on eggshells,” Smith said about the Wesly Foundation. “Like, I don’t want to say something that somebody else doesn’t agree with, and is then going to tell somebody that I don’t agree with this, and so then I get kicked off leadership.”

Bennett had a similar experience with the ministry, noting how her questions frequently made her “the odd one out”. Little did she know, it was only the beginning of what would become a trying time of reflection and self-discovery. All it needed was a spark, which came in the form of a Liberation Theology class during Bennett’s junior year. It provided Bennett with new lenses to discover the words to express her answers to questions she had long been considering.

“I felt more like I could have something substantial to say back…,” Bennett explains. “It allowed me to then have those tools to say ‘Oh, I knew that didn’t sit right, but here’s a way that I can reframe that that, to me, also feels like it makes sense and allows for a broader view of what faith can be’”.

It was during this time that she also became engaged to her current husband, Austin. When the couple graduated college, they moved to Missouri and began marriage counselling. Austin knew the pastor working with them fairly well, and Bennett had even stayed with him for two nights when she had first moved. Before counselling began, they individually filled out questionnaires that had a short answer question at the end asking for their opinion of a given Bible passage. Bennett paused when the passage stated that women need to submit to their husband’s authority.

Bennet had a vastly different understanding of this dynamic since her parents treated marriage as a partnership where neither had absolute authority. She explained this view and used tools from college to apply historical and cultural context to the passage. The pastor proceeded to spend the counselling session explaining why her theology was wrong. He then claimed that Bennett would not be ready for marriage unless she changed such beliefs, and refused to continue counselling. The couple got married anyway, but not before the pastor added insult to injury by secretly taken further steps to dissuade Bennett’s marriage.

“I later found out that he…pulled my husband aside three or four times between [counselling] and when we got married to tell him that he didn’t think he should marry me because I wouldn’t submit to his authority.”

With her trust in Church leaders shattered, and her own devotion put into question, Bennett fell into a period of deep and painful contemplation. She more fervently looked for answers to new questions and revisited old ones, but stayed silent about the issue. She felt she had no space to process such a sudden and grievous challenge to a significant aspect of herself. On top of it all, Bennett was forced into isolation when the COVID-19 pandemic began soon after her wedding.

However, Bennett was not alone in her newfound faith challenges. One summer day during isolation, she received a text from Emma Smith.

“…About a year after we graduated, I texted and was just like ‘Hey, I’ve been going through all this and I feel like maybe we should talk about it,’ and she was like ‘Oh, I have too, let’s talk’…It was maybe not as revelatory or dramatic as one would have it out to be, but it was definitely…like ‘Oh, we should have been doing this the whole time”.

Bennett eventually developed her own unique relationship with her faith through these conversations and other individual investigations. Even after two years of wrestling with her faith, she couldn’t deny her call to play a role in the Church. However, no church met her new terms until she came across the Missouri United Methodist Church in Columbia. Intrigued by the church’s emphasis on asking questions and being curious about faith and what the Bible says, she investigated and discovered it was also openly LGBTQ+ affirming. Bennett applied for a ministry role and is currently employed as the Director for Next-Gen Ministries.

“This church was the first church I had come in contact with personally…that was openly affirming,” Bennett explains. “I think that did a lot to help heal and sort of restore faith…and that they were saying they were openly affirming even though the Church as a whole was not. That, for me, did a lot of good and a lot of healing…”

Bennett also has aspirations of higher ministry. In April of 2024, the United Methodist Church formally decided to remove harmful language from their Book of Discipline, which contains rules to guide the Church and its pastors. In August of 2024, Bennett began her candidacy process for becoming a pastor in the United Methodist Church. The autonomous nature of the process allows her to keep working with the ministry organizations she loves while she takes the next steps on her faith journey.