The Rev. Dominique “D” Deming is not on a stereotypical path to the priesthood. She grew up in what she describes as a “cult,” hid her sexuality for a decade and converted to Catholicism.
When she found the Episcopal Church, Deming realized the voice nudging her toward the pulpit could be a dream transformed into reality.
She arrived in January at the Episcopal Campus Ministry at the University of Georgia, appointed by the Most Rev. Robert Wright. Deming serves as interim campus missioner on her path to ordination.
Q: What did your faith story look like — discovering your faith and deciding to pursue ordination?
A: I grew up in a cult. Have you ever watched the Amazon documentary, “Shiny Happy People”? That IBLP (Institute in Basic Life Principles) group, extreme fundamentalism, that’s what I grew up in.
I don’t remember exactly when, telling an older woman in our church, “If I were a boy, I would be a pastor.” She said, “Oh, you’ll make such a great pastor’s wife.” I grew up knowing that this was my calling, but being told I had the wrong genitals.
I probably hadn’t attended church in three years. I realized, “I don’t know if I can still consider myself a Christian.”
Now, that was an identity crisis.
I Googled the Episcopal church in Warner Robins, Georgia. I get on their Facebook page, and there’s a “Happy National Coming Out Day.” Coming out for me was the feeling of I had been drowning and suffocating for so long. I get my first breath of air, and all of a sudden I could breathe again. I was like, “I need to find a way to read the Scriptures that brings me that kind of life.”
I start applying for seminary because I decide that whether I become clergy or not, I do want to do a Ph.D. in religious studies. I get in at Candler (School of Theology). I’m currently a transitional deacon.
Q: How has being gay impacted your faith?
A: Growing up, I absolutely heard sermons from the pulpit talking about how it’s a sin to be gay and gay people will go to hell.
I stayed in the closet for over a decade. It’s a miserable life to just try to completely deny and hide such an integral part of yourself.
I’m comfortable with saying the Bible is a bunch of human authors who had encounters with the divine and did their very best to name and identify those encounters. They wrote about it in ways that are very confined to their times.
I think that we meet God in the literal words on the page, sometimes we meet God in the spaces — what’s not said or what’s left out or whose voice is left out.
Q: What kind of community are you hoping to build with ECM or across UGA?
A: I want students to have an encounter with God. It might be during Eucharist, it might be having a conversation with someone during dinner, it might be a chance encounter.
The goal is always to have more participants in every way. Not just because it makes me feel good, but because the whole reason that I do what I do is because I want people to experience God and Jesus the way that I have. I want them to know the God that is all love and wants nothing more than to have a relationship with us, to be reconciled with us, for us to know God’s love and for God’s love to be spread through us.
Comments trimmed for length and clarity.
Alexis Derickson is a graduate student in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. This story was produced in the Religion Reporting course.
Show Comments (1)
N.T .
It is 100% false that IBLP is a cult. That’s absurd. Conservative, yes. But nothing like a cult. This is a terribly irresponsible thing for this person to say.