Storytelling
Since LGBTQ+ history month is an opportunity for storytelling, I thought I’d tell ours!
Recently I’ve been thinking back to 2018 when our community at 57 West were first thinking / talking about becoming an affirming church. We didn’t have the conversation that year and the reason, quite honestly, is that I was scared. Scared because I’d been warned so many times that it would ‘split the church’ which came with the accompanying guilt that it would be entirely my fault. Scared because I was a year into ministry, about to take on sole pastorate and had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and that was without facilitating conversations that would have pastoral consequences beyond what I could possibly imagine. Last but not least, I was scared because I knew I had a decision to make when the final vote came in. I never said a word to anyone when we finally got round to the conversation because I didn’t want to influence the outcome, but I knew deep down that if our church voted that we wouldn’t be an open, affirming, loving community that, in all good conscience, I wouldn’t be able to stay and pastor it.
Because of all these fears (which, spoiler alert, turned out to be unfounded) we didn’t get to have the conversation about inclusion until the summer of 2019, a whole year later. Summer Pride was approaching and I hoped that we’d have an outcome by then. We made a decision to allocate 12 weeks to exploring different themes around inclusion and, during that time, heard some personal stories, shared some personal stories and listened to the many different interpretations of scripture that exist. By far, our community found the experiences that they heard to be the most powerful part of the whole dialogue. I suspect that this experience isn’t unique to us.
If you’d asked me if I thought I knew our community before we started this process, without hesitation I would have said ‘yes!’ After all, we spent most days together, whether in our community café, in a small group session or at the Winter Night Shelter. Once we started being open to discussing what were potentially difficult themes I realised just how wrong I’d been. People started to share, really share, for the first time and I was left with two powerful, conflicting emotions. Firstly, there was the overwhelming sense of privilege at how vulnerable and brave our community had been, but this was also balanced with a real sense of regret that because of our silence, there were people in our city who had been scared to speak to me because they didn’t know that that they could.
When it came to the vote, the result was obvious: we were an affirming church. It wasn’t our 12 weeks of ‘inclusion’ talks that made us affirming, it wasn’t the vote that made us affirming, it was who were already were as a community, we just needed an opportunity to say it.
Since the vote, we’ve been involved in local Pride services, usually with a couple of placard painting workshops a fortnight beforehand, and we’ve signed up to the Inclusive Church Charter. Nowadays, the conversation about being affirming doesn’t really come up, it’s not that anyone has forgotten about it, it’s just such an established part of our culture that I have to remind myself that this isn’t always what church looks like. It means when I do encounter church settings that aren’t affirming, it’s painfully noticeable.
Here’s a link to the charter that we signed, which One Body One Faith have recently committed to signposting as part of our work together (you can read more about that here: https://www.onebodyonefaith.org.uk/news/working-together/). If you’re a minister or member of a church thinking about exploring similar conversations, I can’t recommend this approach enough!
“We believe in inclusive church – a church which celebrates and affirms every person and does not discriminate.
We will continue to challenge the church where it continues to discriminate against people on grounds of disability, economic power, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, learning disability, mental health, neurodiversity, or sexuality.
We believe in a Church which welcomes and serves all people in the name of Jesus Christ; which is scripturally faithful; which seeks to proclaim the Gospel afresh for each generation; and which, in the power of the Holy Spirit, allows all people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Jesus Christ.”
https://www.inclusive-church.org/the-ic-statement/
Pam Davies, Trustee
