A small, struggling Presbyterian church in Anderson, South Carolina, has taken the bold step of hiring an openly transgender woman as its new pastor.
North Anderson Community Church, Presbyterian (NACCP), a member congregation of the mainline denomination, Presbyterian Church (USA), has hired the Rev. Laura Bethany Buchleiter as its stated supply pastor (a temporary minister appointed to serve a congregation that is not seeking an installed pastor). Buchleiter will begin her ministry on August 2. The North Anderson church, on any given Sunday, has an average of about 20-30 parishioners in attendance.
Whether that decision results in growth or decline of the congregation remains to be seen.
In a 2023 book review published in Christian Century, Buchleiter, in addition to being transgender, also self-identified as intersex.
“My journey in discovering my intersex variations and navigating gender dysphoria,” she wrote, “challenged my addiction to answers and pushed me toward what [author of the book being reviewed] calls an ‘acceptance of the space around the lines as a necessary part of the image itself.’”
She is not the first PCUSA transgender minister. That distinction belongs to the Rev. Dr. Erin Swenson, whose ordination in the denomination as a male was upheld by Greater Atlanta Presbytery in the mid-1990s as a transgender woman.
In 2019, the denomination ordained its first openly transgender ministers, including the Revs. Alex McNeill and Jess Cook.
Buchleiter, previously ordained by a member congregation of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), studied at the conservative Moody Bible Institute, earned a bachelor’s degree in communications and Christian ministry from equally conservative Dallas Baptist University, and received her Master of Divinity from Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis.
She will be the first openly transgender minister to serve in Foothills Presbytery, the regional body of which NACCP is a member, and the first such PCUSA minister in South Carolina.
Buchleiter is no stranger to being first. According to a story published in Baptist News Global in June 2021, she was “the first known transgender person ordained by a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship-affiliated congregation.”
She announced in a Facebook post on July 12 that she would be “moving to Anderson, SC, the first of August — bringing an end to a three-month nomadic season of life.” The position at NACCP is part-time, which, in Bucheiter’s words, will leave her “time to keep working on other jobs and projects.”
There are only a handful of openly transgender ministers in North and South Carolina. A 2022 documentary, “Proper Pronouns,” estimated that out of 30 in the United States, six were in North Carolina. An internet search identified three such ministers in South Carolina.
Time will tell how an intersex, transgender activist minister will be received in the small and quite politically red city of Anderson. Buchleiter was quoted in the Baptist News Global article as saying, “I want to answer the call to go places where I can continue to be the question. I don’t want to be a disruptive force, but I do want to be a counter-cultural force.”
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