Beyond Sunday Morning: Grace-Trinity Community Church’s Pastor Zac Calvo and Husband Elliot Huemann Speak on Faith, Sexuality and Community

Grace-Trinity Community Church’s Pastor Zac Calvo with his husband Elliot Huemann walking while holding hands.
Grace-Trinity Community Church’s Pastor Zac Calvo and Husband Elliot Huemann. Photo by Three Tree Weddings

Zac Calvo, who has served for the past year and a half as the pastor of Grace-Trinity Community Church in Uptown, and his husband Elliot Huemann share a passion for the divine and a compassion for the individual — not only those in Grace-Trinity’s congregation but also in the wider community it serves.

Their life stories and their love story form the basis of their ongoing commitment to living their faith, not just having it.

A little background on Calvo: born and raised in the Seattle area, he grew up in what he describes as a Pentecostal and musical family. “The intersection of music and church was strong for me as a young person,” he says.

Calvo followed this interest by earning an undergraduate degree in music from Northwest University, a small Pentecostal school in Seattle, and he initially applied his twin interests in faith and music by working with youth and young adults at a Seattle-area Presbyterian church. While he found this work rewarding, Calvo says, “At the same time, I was coming out and realizing that the church I was at was more conservative than I had thought.” These considerations led Calvo to seek out a “more hospitable place” in which to develop his faith.

The Presbyterian Church of the United States of America (PCUSA), a denomination that ordains women and gay priests, proved to be that place. Calvo attended Princeton Theological Seminary from 2015 to 2018, a time of growth and reflection after which he was employed as an assistant pastor at a Seattle-area Presbyterian church. “That’s when I met Elliot, now my husband,” Calvo says. “We lived in Seattle for three years before we moved to Minneapolis,” where Calvo has been Pastor of Grace-Trinity Community Church for the past year and a half. The church is an interdenominational merger between the PCUSA and the American Baptist Church.

Huemann’s journey includes similar experiences. He was raised in a “very large” Evangelical Free Church in southern Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where he was “very involved” with campus ministry activities. Like Calvo, however, he found, as he was reconciling his sexuality with his spirituality, that the faith community he was with “didn’t have a lot of room for gay people,” and his own interest in matters spiritual took a back seat to his studies and other areas of life. Huemann graduated with a degree in organizational and interpersonal communication and moved to Seattle where he earned an advanced degree in counseling psychology at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. He continues the career he began in Seattle as a licensed mental health counselor in Minneapolis.

Close-up photo of Zac and Elliot in a close embrace.
Photo by Three Tree Weddings

Seeking out hospitable spiritual venues is common between Calvo and Huemann’s stories, and indeed such venues have not always been easy to find. “I’m sure there are people in this world that would object to my ordination,” Calvo says. “And I would say, one, I actually respect people’s right to believe what they want to believe. I think that’s an important foundational principle of a democratic society.”

However, Calvo says, he came to a place of realizing that the ideas of people who didn’t think he should be pastor or be ordained “were just noise,” and had no bearing on his life and work. He has built bridges with his critics, also, by seeking relationships with them that go beyond doctrinal differences. “Relationships are the place where healing happens, not in arguments,” Calvo says.

Huemann says his own faith-life journey is sustained by an ongoing “gut feeling” that “God wants a part of my life.” This feeling started with an adherence to the belief system of Evangelical Christianity, but Huemann says that when it came to the process of reconciling his sexuality with his faith, “sexuality was the string that I pulled, but this led to shaking out a lot of other questions.”

Huemann’s development led to the formation of a spiritual life that incorporates facets of both Buddhist and Christian traditions. Like many people who incorporate both of these traditions in their lives, Huemann sees no conflict in the teachings and outcomes of living his faith.

But why faith or a church in the first place? Calvo says, “We need places in our lives where we are reminded that there is something much bigger than us.” Some point to political action and activism as fulfilling this agenda, but Calvo points out, “Politics and activism ask questions that are external to the self,” but spirituality addresses more root, internal issues: “What is going on inside you?”

Through faith, Calvo says, “We recognize that we don’t have all the answers, there are things that are mysteries to us. I don’t think politics is engaged in questions of mystery. We don’t have all the answers, and we are in a dangerous place if we start thinking that we have them.”

Calvo sees his own church and ministry as moving away from “proscriptive” Christian doctrines (which some believe dictate the ideal self) to a more inclusive, community-oriented mission that takes the importance of Sunday morning worship and expands it to “learning to share physical space and relationships with people across significant differences.”

Calvo’s faith community, therefore, functions as an outreach to not only LGBTQ+ populations but also to anyone seeking to encounter the divine within themselves. Faith motivates people to be in relationship with each other, and so is a conversation, not a lecture, Calvo believes.

A final question for Calvo and Huemann: what is the root of their relationship, or any good relationship? “The start of a good relationship is always you knowing yourself,” Huemann says. Sharing the self is impossible if you don’t know who you are to begin with, he says, and this plays out in the couple’s own relationship and marriage. “When I met Elliot, he was pretty grounded in himself,” Calvo says: “It was very natural, it was very organic.”

Zac and Elliot walking down a path while holding hands.
Photo by Three Tree Weddings

Calvo believes differences are as important as commonalities in relationships. “In my experience, Elliot and I are very different,” he says, and this friction forms part of their attraction and is a part of what makes their marriage work.

Also, “There are certain freedoms you give up when you make a commitment — there’s a sacrificial element to a relationship.” One’s needs remain important, but must be balanced by an ongoing consideration of one’s partner’s needs, Calvo noted. In other words, a partnership implies sacrifice as well as benefit.

Grace-Trinity hosts an intimate congregation of about 70 people on Sunday morning, and Calvo is proud of the “great choir and great music” this Sunday morning experience offers, reflecting his background in faith and music.

The church’s outreach activities are growing, and include a yearly art show, food shelf support, and work that looks at issues of housing and the homeless. The Gay Men’s Chorus has offices in the church building as well, and NA and AA meetings happen on-site almost every evening.

Who is welcome at Grace-Trinity? Everyone. But no one should be forced toward a spiritual life or position, Calvo believes: “The only people who should be in church are people who want to be there,” he says. “Our resources are here for us to share.”

Grace-Trinity is located at 1430 W. 28th St. in Minneapolis. For more information, go to the church’s website: gracetrinitychurch.org

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