SEATTLE (AP) — A United Methodist minister, a lesbian now serving in central Washington, will likely face a church trial that could lead to her removal from the pulpit.

“I take this over one minute in the closet,” said the Rev. Karen Dammann of the First United Methodist Church in Ellensburg.

The United Methodist Judicial Council, meeting in San Diego, announced that the church’s Book of Discipline must be upheld in such cases. That book bars “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals” from being ordained or serving as pastors.

The ruling reverses decisions by two regional investigative panels not to pursue a complaint against Dammann. The council said “it is an egregious error” not to bring charges when church law is being violated, and sent the case back to the regional committees for a new hearing.

Dammann said she and the congregation she was recently appointed to lead had been treating her assignment as interim, and that said she remains optimistic, though she’s aware that a trial could result in her credentials being revoked.

“I don’t think it’s a given that it will happen, but it could happen,” Dammann said. “It’s one of the possibilities, certainly, that we’ve known from the beginning.... The future is a big question mark.”

Her Ellensburg congregation has been very supportive, she said.

“The church has been magnificent. The community’s been like, ‘Well, no big deal.’ It’s a lovely town.”

In February 2001, Dammann wrote to Bishop Elias Galvan, head of the Methodist Pacific Northwest Conference in Seattle, that she was in a “partnered, covenanted, homosexual relationship.” She and her partner, Meredith Savage, have a son.

Galvan then filed a complaint, setting in motion the discipline process that has so far stretched over two years.