CALL STORY - Kenneth Crooms
When I was a child we moved many times, almost every year until I was 16. My parents had me baptized in a Lutheran church when I was 3 months old. As a child I went to church occasionally whenever someone would invite to their Baptist or Pentecostal, or Methodist church. At age 14 my religious awakening happened at a Baptist vacation bible school. The following summer I discovered a Lutheran church nearby and received confirmation. After high school I came to terms with being gay and eventually left the Lutheran church, which did not approve of homosexuality. In my twenties I began a lot of spiritual exploration in the New Thought movement, all kinds of New Age things like Tarot cards, astrology, channeled writings, etc. The writings of Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, Joseph Campbell had a big influence on me. Later on I discovered Matthew Fox and Creation Spirituality and began to make connections between spirituality and social and political issues. About this time I also discovered modern Bible scholarship and the Jesus Seminar and discovered a way of honoring the Bible and Christian tradition without considering them the "word of God". In 2002 I joined a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Today I am most influenced by Fr Richard Rohr, Fr Thomas Keating, Thomas Merton, Alan Watts. I consider myself a person of faith whose roots are in Christianity and I am learning to integrate my Christian heritage with everything else I have learned so far on this journey.
As a teenager I felt called to ministry but I also felt I needed to do more discernment work to see if I really was called. Later I began to discern a calling to teach and was ordained a deacon in the Apostolic Catholic Church, Tampa, Florida. In 2005 I was ordained a minister by the Temple of Mystic Light in Clearwater, Florida. That church was affiliated with the Universal Life Church.