A reflection more than a review of “The Nominee”

Looking back at 1991 for the Disciples of Christ

Michael Kinnamon tells us he’s written a work of fiction.

That’s technically true. He’s certainly written a piece of excellent prose, easy to read and fast-flowing, running quickly through a series of events in 1991 which have analogies [cough, cough] to the real world of that year, which I happen to recall pretty well, myself.

Michael says in an Author’s Note at the end about his novel’s protagonist Matthew McAvoy: “We bear resemblance, but we are not the same.” 

The core of the narrative is a man who is nominated (hence the title) for the office of General Minister and President of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in 1991. He is not running for office, as modern electoral politics normally frame such matters, but he does need to get a super-majority for approval, a two-thirds vote to affirm his nomination. As it happens, that happened to Michael Kinnamon. The way it happens for Matthew McAvoy is . . . different. Sort of.

Spoiler alert: he is not ultimately approved for the office of GMP. By which I mean Matthew, but I could say that about Michael as well. Other “differences” include how in the book the vote from the General Assembly, which is the effective climax of the story, comes down to 3602 in favor, 1827 against, which from a total of 5,429 voting results is a 66.3% margin, still less than the necessary 66.667%.

In the real world, as published in “The Oklahoman”: “The vote of 3,679 for and 1,944 against Kinnamon was 65.11 percent - barely under the two-thirds needed, said Cathy Hinkle, communications official.” [Except that totals to 5623, which comes out to 65.4% by my math… but see below on abstentions.]

Adding to the fog of fiction versus fact, in “The New York Times”: “The candidate, the Rev. Michael K. Kinnamon, dean of the Lexington Theological Seminary in Kentucky, won 65.1 percent of the 5,651 votes cast by delegates to the denomination's General Assembly, which was meeting in Tulsa, Okla. The result left Dr. Kinnamon just short of the two-thirds vote he needed for approval.”

We get clarity from the LA Times, which explained “Kinnamon, a well-known ecumenical expert and dean of Lexington Theological Seminary, needed a 66.6% majority to win election to a six-year term but received just less than that, 65.1%. The final tally gave 3,679 votes to Kinnamon, 1,944 votes against and 28 abstentions.”

Okay then. 5651 is the total of ayes, nays, and abstains, to get the 65.1% total which fails by a whisker to reach two-thirds. Michael’s fictional vote doesn’t get into details like abstentions, and I agree anyone abstaining doesn’t deserve note anyhow. But he takes 77 votes away from those for him, and reduces those opposed by 117. Does any of this mean anything? No, almost certainly not.

Because in the vote totals as in the rest of the book Michael is making incremental changes to support a fictional structure around his Matthew character, while in no place severing the clear ties between the novel and the events of that year. In fact, he goes to the somewhat unnecessary but congenial extent of specifying in an afterword that the character “Duane” is actually John Humbert . . . though I can’t help thinking there’s a bit of Duane Cummins in the fictional persona given us, as well. It doesn’t really matter.

The last line of his “Author’s Note” gets at what I think does matter here to him, and why he wrote this fictional treatment of his real life experiences: “If this novel helps raise awareness of — and opposition to — ongoing discrimination, I will be gratified.”

Full disclosure: in 1991 I was not an ally in any meaningful sense to LGBTQ persons, neither was I an opponent. I was largely ignorant of the issues around the inclusion and affirmation of people in that community other than on a very shallow and literary more than theological level, and I say that not as an excuse, but simply an accurate description of where I was at. My ignorance looks more willful today as I look back and realize I could and should have known more, in high school or college, let alone seminary, but simply chose to not make the effort, and left such questions to one side.

By 1991, I was a few years ordained, now serving in a semi-rural county seat Disciples congregation, and even more walled off from the issue or people in the LGBTQ community. So count me as one of those forced to look more closely at questions of justice and inclusion by Michael Kinnamon’s candidacy for GMP.

I was a vocal advocate for Michael, not least because I knew him, and had taken multiple classes from him while he was at CTS, before he left as I entered my final year in seminary for Lexington, which is the setting for Matthew’s deanship in “The Nominee.”

And while I wasn’t engaged in any meaningful way with LGBTQ issues, I was infuriated for some semi-personal reasons with the line of attack taken towards Michael over his refusal to deny his support of LGBTQ persons . . . which both his fictional counterpart Matthew and the actual man said was not all that vehement in the first place.

I’m going to leave the “Leo" storyline for someone else to parse and interpret, though it is . . . interesting. And his description of “Disciples for Biblical Witness” being represented by “Chuck and Jeremy” made me chuckle, plus his frustration with “Disciples Forum” not covering events was shared by many at the time.

It was Harold Judkins and the Farmington Declaration, though, that really pulled me up short. Because there’s no question he’s talking about Floyd Legler and First Christian Church in Remington, Indiana. 

In 1991, the Remington church was still involved with the Disciples, and the district and regional activities, especially at Camp Barbee and through the Christian Men’s Fellowship, or CMF. My dad was getting very active in CMF matters on the district and regional level, along with his friend and my former Scoutmaster, Bill Eckert.

Floyd Legler was a thorn in my father’s side. He was a pain, there and further down. He was loud, bombastic, and demanding; to put it more charitably, he wasn’t like my dad at all. To be fair, he was a bit more like Mr. Eckert, and one of my dad’s many frustrations with Floyd was how he brought the loud and bombastic side of Mr. E out.

As the fictional Matthew wished the semi-official “Disciples Forum” publication would say more about the GMP nomination debates, my dad wished the Indiana region would help more with his struggles in keeping Floyd Legler from dominating every discussion at Barbee, at district men’s meetings, and around the northern half of the state. He felt like he was left to his own devices, with one associate regional minister telling Dad more than once “just ignore him.” Which to Ron Gill’s thinking was no strategy at all.

Flash forward: today, as I’m sure you’d imagine, First Christian in Remington is independent, and has online documents making clear that only men can preach or serve as elders there. A recent Facebook post in June 2024 said "Men, you are to lead in the home, and in the church.”

This was my dad’s point: he was, in 1991, not an LGBTQ ally either, but he saw where Floyd was heading, and it was opposite where he felt the church was or should be going. My home congregation in Valparaiso, Indiana just north of Remington had only had female elders for less than a decade, and was going through some internal tension around women in ministry even still. My mother’s childhood minister, who married her and Dad in 1958, was a woman, and they both had very firm views about the appropriateness and even necessity of women in leadership and ministry from before I was born. Floyd was an advocate for “Disciple Renewal” (see “Disciples for Biblical Witness” above) which became Disciple Heritage Fellowship, and worked closely with Richard Bowman and Doug Harvey (see "Chuck and Jeremy” above) and Kevin Ray, but Floyd was focused mostly on Indiana.

Until the Kinnamon nomination became public. As the “Christian Standard” put it: “The "Remington Declaration," which opposed Kinnamon's nomination, was mailed to all 4,105 Disciples of Christ churches prior to the convention. The declaration stated Kinnamon fails to accord proper authority to the Bible by not considering homosexuality a sin.”

Floyd ran Remington Freight Lines, a Midwestern trucking company, and he had the wherewithal and office staff to put out a mass mailing (or two, or three) in opposition to what was going before the General Assembly in Tulsa in October, 1991. I saw the mailings, and like the James DeForest Murch mailings of the 1960s around Restructure, they were “anonymous” but everyone knew pretty quickly who was putting them out, and what they were intended to do.

And they worked. Just enough people were made uneasy by the issues around Michael Kinnamon (and in the book, Matthew McAvoy) that he failed to reach two-thirds approval. It was a disappointing outcome, but perhaps equally disappointing was how we got there.

In “The Nominee,” Matthew meets with Harold Judkins, and they nearly come to an agreement, which later is withdrawn without explanation. And there’s a hint of if not quite regret, but of understanding, just before the vote . . . and a grace note of recognition in the crowd during the closing scene. I would love to know, and would like to think, that Floyd did meet at some point with Michael, and that he did try to communicate some sense of understanding as the vote was taken . . . but I doubt it. This is one place where I hope the fiction is truth, but probably isn’t.

There is a scene where it’s suggested that Floyd, I mean Harold, has been put up to this all by the conservative group led by Dick & Doug, I mean Chuck & Jeremy. And Michael/Matthew says “he strikes me as a good man who came up with a bad idea all on his own.” I can recall my own father saying exactly that about Floyd Legler.

Floyd died in March of 2023. It’s hard for me to not wonder if the timing of “The Nominee” wasn’t in part in deference to the obvious counterpart to Harold Judkins. Especially if the novelistic narrative is closer to reality than I might think, but if the later Floyd would have been unwilling to see himself in that light even under the shroud of fiction.

His obituary said “He came to faith in Jesus Christ in 1974 at the age of 39.  His words and actions exhibited that faith for the rest of his life.  It is because of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and his faith in that sacrifice that we have confidence that Floyd is in Heaven with our Lord now.” Godspeed, Floyd. You and Dad can now continue some discussions never finished back at Barbee years ago.

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https://www.clapperfuneralservices.com/obituary/floyd-legler

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The final scene of “The Nominee” is Matthew coming to the platform with two speeches in his jacket pockets, “if I win” on one side, “if I lose” on the other, but in the moment, he reads from neither, but speaks from his heart. I strongly doubt any of that is fiction.

Dad and I got to talk a while with Michael Kinnamon after a Sunday worship service in a Des Moines church during the 2019 General Assembly. It was a pleasure, and the memory brings a tear to my smiling eye just typing those words. Michael engaged with my father in conversation about Iowa roots and personal history, and in an aside noted the many similarities between his father, and mine. Dad would die seven months later, but Michael and I still have all that in common.

Michael would also move away from Disciples affairs after 1991. Not entirely, and perhaps he’d argue with my characterization, but he shifted his interests and energies away from denominational matters to the ecumenical area, which was one of the criticisms leveled at him by opponents during the nomination process. I think it became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, but it’s true he always had a deep and abiding passion for ecumenical efforts on the global and national stage as a necessary witness to Christian unity. This was, he would argue I’m sure, a part of our true Disciples’ heritage, to be leaders and advocates for the unity of all Christians.

For me, personally, reading “The Nominee” reminded me, or perhaps I should say brought to my thinking more clearly, how I was less interested in the denominational life of the Disciples of Christ myself after “the Tulsa debacle” (as many of us did and still would describe it). Maybe some good came out of our confrontation with internal divisions and factions willing to prioritize conformity over unity; perhaps we moved more surely to becoming a more inclusive church because of that startling (to at least 65.1% of the voting representatives) turn of events at our usually congenial General Assembly. But I do know I had no interest after Tulsa in getting into regional or general ministry as my own plan for the future.

I do think, not to argue with Michael’s assertion that John Humbert is a “hero” of the story, that the general church realized in the course of the failure of the Kinnamon nomination they could not remain a magisterial and detached neutral body. Too many factionalists and self-interested parties were active out across our landscape of congregations and regions for the regional ministers to stay isolated as independent hierarchs, or for the general offices no matter how autonomous to stay siloed as they had been (and largely still are). “Duane” in the book refuses to put a visible thumb heavily on the ecclesiastical scale, as does “Disciples Forum,” and I think it’s fair to say there’s regret communicated in the book that their restraint was, perhaps, too cautious.

And I’m hesitant in how to imagine our alternative future under a . . . Matthew McAvoy general ministry. If Michael had gotten his 67%, how would that have gone? Would we have moved more aggressively to inclusion, but with a better sense of how to maintain ties with “a good man who came up with a bad idea all on his own”? Watching the Presbyterian Church (USA) discussions around the Olympia Overture I’m not sure we’ve yet figured out how to be expansively inclusive, but I know that’s what Michael would have tried to pursue. He did meet with “Chuck & Jeremy,” and Richard Bowman was given a platform to explain himself at Lexington Theological Seminary, in chapel and in their publication, during the decisive 1991 year. Those voices weren’t shut out, and dialogue was attempted. Where dialogue wasn’t the goal, but disingenuousness was, that’s not on Michael.

Don’t get me wrong: I served on regional boards and commissions and task forces after 1991. My family knows I’ve spent time trying to help maintain ecumenical ties and our own Disciples institutions on many levels. But on a foundational level, my core commitments since the Kinnamon election have been on a more local footing, in congregational life, to issues and advocacies where we can count on meeting our opponents face to face, both as a Christian advocate for gospel values and as a person who believes in community institutions as the best setting for a faith to be lived out. I may have begun to be skeptical of big picture, broad brush issue advocacy and majority mustering efforts after seeing Tulsa’s 65.1% failure of nerve.

What “The Nominee” has also made me think about is that whole issue of when to pursue support, and where you simply have to make a stand. I heard long before 1991 from older clergy that you didn’t want to accept a call to a church where you just got a majority vote. That almost seems self-evident.

But what about 75%? If 25% of a church said “no” to you coming, do you go and try to win them over? Is 77% enough to secure you and your family in making a move to accept a call? Yet one of the hardest ministry seasons I’ve ever known was when the tally was a hundred some to three . . . and those three did not rest in their opposition over many years until I finally left. So it’s not about percentages, let’s say.

Maybe we should have, as some said, called from Microphone 5 for a suspension of the rules, asked the chair to rule on accepting a plurality of 65.1%, and sustaining that decision with a simple majority affirmation. I’ve heard postmortems for over three decades now as to whether it would or would not have worked. That deference to “the process” did not even allow the motions to be made, and I suspect both Michael and his avatar Matthew would have declined to accept such a resolution.

Yet if Floyd Legler had actually been willing to say “I understand and support you” and we’d muddled our way into a Kinnamon era (not that Bill Nichols did a bad job, not at all, but I think it fair to say we made no real “movement” as a faith tradition in his six years, either), I believe we would have had losses, maybe even the Remington church, early on. But would the total losses have been less if we’d been decisive, and clear, and affirmative about the direction it was clear we were going? As with the whole era from 1926 to 1968, the numbers dropped only officially afterwards, but the total decline was cumulative across forty and more years. Restructure tried to pull off the bandage slowly, to reduce the pain. Did it?

So too with the Kinnamon candidacy, or to keep to the phrase he preferred, “The Nominee.” I’m not saying we wouldn’t have lost churches and members if we had elected him our General Minister and President. I’m asking if it’s possible we would have lost less, in energy and initiative let alone numbers, if we had taken action then to become the church body we are now.

Reading Michael Kinnamon’s novel, I think so.