Their Stories

Reverend Renee Waun

A call that Changed Her Life

I'm always looking for role models for change. I never thought I'd find one in church. But there she was, spouting fire and brimstone from the pulpit. It wasn't what you might expect. Reverend Renee Waun was educating us on how the patriarchal church gave women a one-two punch. I knew she had a story to tell. . . . . . . . . K.J. Bryant

When it happened, I was 37, a wife of 17 years, mother of two daughters and a respected teacher. Nothing could have been further from my mind. I was sitting in the choir at the First United Methodist Church of McKeesport, Pennsylvania watching a middle aged woman being ordained. Then all of a sudden, it was the weirdest thing. I heard this guttural roar from within, "You will be ordained. This will be you." Someone later told me, "Renee, you know that voice was in your head, don’t you?" And I said, "Well of course it was in my head." The important thing was, it was there.

I wasn't sure what to do with this new voice. It came out of the blue. All I could think of was, how the heck am I going to tell my husband? Up until that time, all the voices I had heard told me what I couldn't be. Here was a voice telling me what I was going to be.

I heeded the call. I went to seminary and it was there that I found my own voice and began to see myself for the first time – smart and with opinions of my own. I discovered I was a swan.

I became a minister and for seventeen years I served the First United Methodist Church of Pittsburgh. And then the voice called me again, to an even more authentic place within myself. I embraced my feminist world view and went about aligning my life with it. I left a marriage that wasn't good for me. I become a Unitarian. And I wrote about how the church can become more accepting in my book, More Than Welcome: Learning to Embrace Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Persons in the Church. Now 62 and divorced, I serve three Unitarian churches in Western Pennsylvania.

My advice to others? It’s never too late. Every moment is your powerful now and you can always choose again in this moment. What’s most important to me is being authentic and being aligned with who I really am. Everything else flows.

You'll soon be able to read more about Reverend Waun ’s transformation in Journeys: 50,000 Miles of Wise Women.