No hope for Colorado lesbian’s ‘dignity in death’ at New Hope Ministries

“New Hope Ministries in Lakewood, Colorado is a place where those bound by drugs, alcohol, gangs, and violence can find an ‘Ounce of Hope,’” says Pastor Ray Chavez’s church website. Apparently an ounce of hope and a $400 payment isn’t enough to ensure that a scheduled funeral will actually occur — even if mourners have already arrived.

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Vanessa Collier died late December. Her friends, wife, and family gathered to mourn her loss at New Hope Ministries. After an open-casket visitation, friends and family sat down to wait for Pastor Chavez to begin the sermon.

 Five minutes passed. Nothing happened. Ten minutes passed. Still nothing. Fifteen minutes after the funeral was supposed to begin, Chavez announced that it would have to be moved due to “technical difficulties,” says Vanessa’s friend Jose Silva, a dean at Catalyst High School and a spokesperson for the family.

 “Is this a joke?” Silva thought. “Is this true?” What sort of ‘technical difficulty’ could prevent a pastor from officiating the funeral of a person whose body was lying right in front of him?

 “Chavez asked for the pall bearers to have the body moved,” Silva says. “That’s when we knew it was real. The family handled it with grace, but you can sense the horror they felt.”

“The entire funeral, casket and all, were moved,” wrote Vanessa’s friend Yvonne Maes on Facebook. “As it turns out, the reason for moving the funeral was because the minister didn’t support gay marriage and refused to continue with the service. Vanessa’s wife, two children, family, and friends were devastated.”

 Silva attended New Hope Ministries as a teenager. He, his friends, and his family left the church because of the bigotry of Chavez’s teachings.

Chavez was unavailable for comment.

Out Front spoke with an employee at New Hope Ministries who declined to give her name. She said, however, that she was in charge of funerals. “We left the premises to [the family], and they are the ones who chose to leave,” she said.

She said she did not know if anybody at the church had spoken to the family about Vanessa’s sexual orientation or marriage. Nobody at New Hope Ministries could comment on the funeral because, “We had nothing to do with it,” the representative said.

When asked about her contradicting narratives — that the church had nothing to do with the funeral and that the family chose to leave — she hung up the phone.

The conflict started when Chavez ordered an associate minister to tell the family to remove a video from the ceremony, Silva says. The video celebrated Vanessa and her wife’s relationship, documenting their engagement. Chavez refused to show the video because it acknowledged Silva’s marriage to a woman and her “alternative lifestyle,” as he told the family.

“He had the associate pastor tell the family,” Silva says. “He didn’t come talk to family — he had somebody else do it. He hid behind his religious veil, which is a shame.”

 The church had approved of the video ahead of time, but Pastor Chavez pulled it, Maes says.

“He said, ‘You can take your funeral elsewhere.’ He still hasn’t returned the community’s money,” which was $400 in total, according to Silva. “They had to experience her death once and the trauma of that loss a second time with their daughter, wife, and mother of children not being recognized as a human being in God’s hall, in the sanctuary of the Lord, where we’re all considered God’s children.”

 While antidiscrimination laws do not apply to religious organizations, New Hope Ministries is connected to a charter school that accepts public money. Antidiscrimination law should trump Chavez’s personal beliefs, Silva says. “It would be different if he ran a church without public funding. Because he receives funding for the charter school, his ideas go out the window.”

Silva and others are considering taking New Hope Ministries to court to retrieve the money that the church has not returned to the family. Vanessa’s community is also considering pursuing anti-discrimination charges. Organizers plan to pressure Douglas County to revoke New Hope Ministries’ K-12 school’s charter.

“As a tax payer, I don’t pay taxes for you to go in and treat people like that,” Silva says.

 On January 13, approximately 100 friends, family, and community members gathered in front of New Hope Ministries to protest Chavez’s decision.

 Silva led chants including: “What would Jesus do?” and “We want an apology.”

Protestors raised their hands in prayer. Silva asked God to forgive Chavez.

“There was no dignity in death,” Silva says. “This is about is creating dignity in death.”

 Story and photos by Kyle Harris