Q Renewal Conference

My wife and I spent 4 days with about 600 queer Christians and Christian parents of queer kids. We heard story after story of agony and anguish from the abandonment, shaming, betrayal, despair, forced marriage and torture of their bodies, spirit and souls they experienced at the hands of their evangelical communities and families. These stories are rarely told in our churches. Other stories of queer agendas, grooming, pedophilia, degenerates, abominations, confusing pronouns and cheating at sports are told, believed and joked about.

We also marveled at the presence of God in worship with them, their creativity, resilience and love for God, each other and the world, even the families and the church that hurt them so much.

I can’t not speak against the lies and true evil of queer persecution the church allows itself perpetuate and present as God’s Truth.

And I know your hearts for God and I have to believe that if you met the people we met and heard the stories we heard, you would weep and lament as we did and become curious about which parts of our belief system are man-made rather than ordained by God.

Jesus modeled this at the temple in Jerusalem as a 12 year old after he became an adult member of the Jewish community at his bar mitzvah.

“After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.” Luke 2:46-47

Pre-teen Jesus, omniscient God, modeled curiosity and dialogue with spiritual teachers. His answers, based on his experience and understanding were considered, validated, valued and even celebrated according to the Jewish scholarly tradition of midrash.

A tradition we have since replaced with the hyper literal and narrow systems of interpretation of the past 200 years. Systems that force us to look at the our neighbors and the world as abstractions. We have allowed our emotional vocabulary shrink to disgust, anger and shame when our binaries are violated.

Our interpretive system is designed to eliminate ambiguity, nuance and trust in our own human experience.

We exclude or silence dissenting voices in the name of order and authority with clearly defined roles and acceptable ways of being. This is not the Way of Jesus.

We have become an either-or church with a both-and God. A God who is singular and plural, relational and communal, perfectly hidden and perfectly revealed in creation and each other. A God who invites us to dance, to be curious and grow by giving ourselves to them and each other.

A God who humbles god self to be with us. A God who creates at a scale, diversity and resilience unfathomable by the human mind. A God who teaches us that a little bit of divine love is stronger than any contamination that may exist in our hearts. A God who challenges us each time we get to comfortable with the truth we think we know.

Yet, in our actions and in our words we proclaim a different god:

One who is afraid of questions that don’t have a simple answer.

One who prefers uniformity over unity in diversity.

One who measures alignment with God by behavior not by its fruit.

One who prefers human justice over divine mercy.

One who is comfortable declaring who goes to heaven or hell based their faith expression.

One who would burn the planet rather than give up the right to exploit it.

One would rather erase cultures and individuals through colonization than learn more from them about God.

One would rather enslave whole races and communities than love them as siblings.

One who justifies and replicates past atrocities rather than learn from them.

One who declares that proximity to select groups of sinners has the power to irreparably pollute the purity of our faith communities and families while we claim eternal life for ourselves.

One who would rather turn over our queer kids to lifelong loneliness, homelessness and even the torture chambers of conversion therapy than become more curious about them and the God who made them.

One who would rather cast atheists as enemies of God than become curious about how we, with absolute confidence, reflect a God who is not worthy of worship.

One who would ascribe nefarious agendas where people simply assert their divine right to exist.

One who would divide their Church into ever smaller disjointed and polarized denominations rather than build the one body with many faces that only requires love of God and love of neighbor for membership.

The Jesus of the Gospels expresses a different God:

The God who asks questions, learns from and contributes in dialogue with the spiritual teachers.

The God who scolds the spiritual leaders over hyper literal interpretations of the Scriptures without love for neighbor.

The God who teaches in parables and stories that are designed to blow our binaries and require us to hold opposites in tension.

The God who proposes an inverted alternative power structure to human empires that is accessible now.

The God who died on the Cross for all the ways we are blind to their true nature says:

Love God with all your heart, mind, body and soul. Love your neighbor as yourself. Not as much as, not more than but as if “they” were “us” because they are us.

There is no “them”, there is only us.

Let us all become more curious about what we have to let God change in ourselves to be able to accommodate this uncomfortable truth and join our queer siblings in imagining the Kingdom of God into reality.

If you are willing to hear some of the stories we heard this weekend, read Amber Cantorna-Wylde's Out of Focus and Kathy Baldock's Walking the Bridgeless Canyon: Repairing the Breach Between the Church and the LGBT Community .

If you are a parent, family member or friend of a queer person and want to become more educated about the reality of queer lives, consider reaching out to your local PFLAG chapter, Q Christian Fellowship and The Reformation Project where you’ll find people and resources who are willing and able to join you in your learning journey without putting an additional burden on the queer person you are trying to love better.

I believe the only way we’ll get to a better place is if we all become curious about each other again and explore the stories that led us to accepting the methods we use to derive such divergent conclusions from many of the same inputs.