The church’s unique civil rights legacy extends back more than 50 years. For nearly 30 years, Saint Mark has exemplified progression and inclusion, embracing Atlanta’s LGBTQ+ community and hiring gay clergy. In a time when the global Methodist Church is still wrangling with anti-gay doctrine written into its Book of Discipline, Midtown Atlanta’s Saint Mark UMC may offer a blueprint for the future. The couple, who met in 1980, were officially wed on December 30, 2016. “We refer to ourselves as recovering Baptists,” jokes Jim.
Now married, Harper and Card (now also Harper) are longtime members of Saint Mark, where Jim, now 67, is also a staff assistant. “Across the street, at Saint Mark United Methodist, the congregation and the pastor were handing out water.” “On one side of the street, Atlanta police officers on horseback had been hired by the First Baptist Atlanta church to keep gay people off their property,” recalls Harper. Growing up gay and Baptist, Jim Harper and Darrell Card noticed the stark contrasts in Christianity as they marched to the corner of Peachtree and Fifth Streets during an early 1990s Pride parade.
