Go Ask Alice: Cedar Falls woman 'answered the call' in a new way
How one preacher became an 'ally'
CEDAR FALLS — Alice Shirey made a choice. It permanently altered the course of her ministry.
She said “yes.”
She agreed to preside at the wedding of a young woman she had been counseling.
The person the young woman loved and wanted to marry happened to be another woman.
To Alice Shirey, saying “no” was not an option.
“I knew I had to say ‘yes,’” she said. “I literally felt the spirit of God saying to me, ‘If you don’t say “yes,” don’t ever get up there and preach about the love of my Son ever again.”
She knew it was the end of one ministry, in the comfort of a church she’d been in for years, and the beginning of another — to the LGBTQ+ community. It’s a church without walls or borders.
She was called to it much in the same way she fell into preaching and ministry in the first place. “I didn’t mean to become an ‘ally’ — just like I didn’t mean to become a preacher!” she said with a laugh. “I feel strangely pulled along by some force greater than my own.
”I didn’t know I could speak in public until I was 35,” she said, other than 11th grade speech class at Waterloo East High School - even though she comes from a long line of preachers. And her father, David Dutton, is a former Black Hawk County attorney. She also sharpened her skills in an unsuccessful run for Waterloo school board.
“I lost, but I realized in that moment, ‘Something is working,’ ” she said. She found she could speak eloquently and with passion about the issues she cared about. “I got a lot of really good feedback from people. So I prayed this dangerous prayer: ‘God, could you us this gift somehow in the church?’ “
Though she has been raised by liberal Presbyterians, as a college student at Northwestern University she had become involved in a conservative collegiate evangelical group, as did her Waterloo-raised husband-to-be, Craig Shirey, at Harvard University,
Unaware of how she would be accepted as a woman preacher, she took the plunge. “I felt like I’d landed in my skin the first time,” she said. She followed the advice her attorney father had given her — “prepare, prepare, prepare.”
Folks started to listen. Some of her sermons were among the most watched online. She preached more regularly, worked into the regular rotation and began coaching other teachers and preachers.
But she was raised from a different background than the one she was preaching in.
“I was raised by social justice activists,” she said. She grew up on the east side of Waterloo during the racial and social unrest of the 1960s. Her parents purposefully moved to the east side of town and placed her in Grant Bridgeway Elementary School, an experimental concept prior to desegregation, where there were an equal number of Black and white students.
Her father, as county attorney and a Republican at the time, supported more minority hiring in law enforcement and her mother was active in the League of Women Voters.
In recent years, “I was developing some frustrations…George Floyd, COVID” she said, and included those topics in her preaching. “I was gently pushing the edges.”
Then she began meeting with the young woman, who herself showed promise in ministry, but was engaged to another woman.
“I started to get to know this couple, and hear their pain,” Shirey said. “I had never seen the damage and the pain up close. I fell in love with these girls and my heart was broken.
”They asked me to officiate their wedding. I knew I had to say ‘yes,’ ” she said, and she also knew it would mean a parting of ways with her previous ministry.
“But I spent about three months in a deep time of discernment,” she said, talking to a spiritual advisor, family, friends and in prayer. “And then I said ‘yes.’ ”
She wrote about her change in ministry on her blog. It only has a few hundred followers. That particulary post had 10,000 reads. “The feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive” she said.
”In order to do this, I was choosing to give up the thing I most loved to do in this whole wide world,” she said. “I didn’t know if I could find another venue.
But “I had to give this up in order to say ‘yes.’ I gave it up,” Shirey said. “And it was excruciating. But I knew I did what I was called to do. I knew it.
“It was one of the most holy weddings I ever officiated,” she said.
A second epiphany occurred soon after. She was asked to officiate at the 2023 funeral of Jim Raymond of Waterloo, a John Deere retiree who performed for decades as the drag queen Ruby James Knight.
“I never met him, but I learned about him though his family and friends,” she said. A large portion of the gay community turned out, including drag queens, in drag.
“I got to say such good words to those drag queens about how much God loves them, and created them, in all their flamboyant glory,” she said.
A large number of gay people “came up and spoke to me with tears in their eyes after that funeral,” she said, speaking of past hurt and trauma from some previous church experiences, “I held their faith within my hands and listened to their stories. And I thought to myself, ‘This now is my church.’ I don’t know how else to say it.”
This past spring Shirey co-sponsored and brought San Diego pastor and author Colby Martin to Cedar Falls He authored the book, “Un Clobber: Rethinking Our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality.”
Lang Hall on the University of Northern Iowa campus was reserved for Martin’s program. When he saw the venue’s size, he doubted he’d be able to fill it, especially on the same day as the University of Iowa women’s basketball team was playing for a national championship.
But the audience filled the space below and part of the balcony above. Shirey said it was an affirmation of community.
“What I’m hearing from the queer community that was there, is, it wasn’t even so much Colby, it was the fact that they looked around and all of a sudden they saw the Cedar Valley,” Shirey said. “People with gray hair, church people, wanting to learn how they can and should and must be welcomed into the church with open arms. That was so inspiring to so many of them.”
It has to do with bridging boundaries, she said. “That’s how I see Jesus. He touched the leper. That was against the law. He let women touch his feet. He called the Samaritan good. All these boundaries, borders and walls that kept people out, Jesus broke through them.”
Shirey’s now a teaching associate at a different church.
The Book of Matthew says, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
For Alice Shirey, she’s found her life — and is receiving back a hundredfold.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. Click on their links below to sample their work.
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What courage and what a call! Great story, Pat--I sent it on to Tristan. Thanks!