Last weekend, I went on a long walk with a friend I haven’t seen in many months. Down by Cherry Creek, pushing past tall grasses and duck footprints, I caught her up on the ongoing transformations in my life. It’s not too much to say I was nervous about her reaction. I hedged more than a steeplechase.
Rejection was on my mind, but an understandable rejection. My friend has been deeply, materially harmed by the church. In fact, many of my friends have. And so have I. We have all been harmed, and we have all left. We are still being harmed, even in our absence.
We have been told again and again how uniquely unworthy we are to participate in spiritual life–unworthy in ways that are never applied to other people. A faction of my wider church community seeks even now to oust queer people from their midst. They have been working for longer than I have been alive to amass the wealth and power necessary to bring charges against queer clergy and get them defrocked, cast out, stripped of authority. As if being queer were a crime against God. Which, I suppose, they believe it is.
Can you imagine if they brought that same energy to getting ICE shut down? Private prisons abolished? Housing the unhoused? Paying off medical bills?
But I digress. I’m sure many of my queer friends wonder how I can feel called to participate in the life of an institution that is actively maltreating me. It’s a good question. After all, I can walk away. There’s nothing mandatory about going to church at all, much less joining an organization currently engaged in a war over whether I am fully human.
I don’t have a good answer for them. Perhaps I should leave. I walked away from church once, after I came out at fifteen. I have no investment in the administrative structure of the church. Schism is a valid choice, whether at the institution level or the individual one.
After the general conference vote in February, my home congregation held a vigil. Queer members showed up, but so did many straight families. The room overflowed. Chairs had to be brought in from other classrooms. It was affirming in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I was frankly a little overwhelmed.
Afterward, I remarked on my timing: I had only begun attending this church on Christmas Eve. I didn’t have to put up with abuse from the general conference.
“I could just walk away,” I said to my friend A. “Not get involved.”
“Yeah, but that’s not your style,” A said.
And it’s not. I remember being fifteen and not getting a clear rejection so much as a silent, but potent, lack of acceptance. I remember a church that carefully failed to embrace me in my full humanity. It angers me to think kids now, twenty-five years later, are getting that same message and worse from the highest echelons of our clerical structure. Perhaps I am called to witness.
But just as pressing to me as witnessing to the church that queer is good? Not traumatizing my queer friends whose experience tells them church is bad. They’re not wrong. Church was bad to them. I don’t give up my queerness when I walk into the narthex, but I tacitly ally myself with forces that have done them, and me, spiritual injury.
I feel deeply, sometimes nauseatingly ambivalent about responding to a call to do spiritual work within this institutional context. Do I solve that dilemma by working outside that context? I don’t know yet. But I don’t think being in fact-finding mode excuses me from acknowledging my potential to exact suffering on my own community.
Called 