Self-Organizing Man

Why would a Queer person stay in a Christian church?  Particularly one like mine, which bans my ordination?  That question always elicits a deep sigh from me before an answer.  It’s not an easy decision when the Church (Capital C) as a whole does so much spiritual violence to LGBT persons.  And yet I stay for, what I believe, are good reasons.

Before I tell you mine, I want to quote reasons from one of my favorite authors, Carter Heyward.  She is a leading feminist and radical theologian who also happens to be a lesbian and Episcopalian priest.  She was a professor at Episcopal Divinity School in Boston until her retirement.  I want to quote to you a bit of her introduction to her book Touching Our Strength:  The Erotic as Power and the Love of God. (1989)  I highly recommend this book to everyone, Queer Christians especially, although I know the name alone will give some readers palpitations….wait till you read the entire book!

But back to the topic.  These are Carter Heyward’s thoughts on staying.

…I was asked by a student who has left the church why I stay in it, given my experience and perception of the pervasive extent to which misogyny (hatred of women) and erotophobia (fear of the erotic) traditionally have characterized Christianity.

My immediate, spontaneous response was that being "in" or "out" of the church doesn’t make much difference to me anymore–and that my primary interest, spiritually and intellectually, is in helping empower people, especially my sisters, to live their lives fully whether in or out of the church.  This was an honest but incomplete response, because I do care about what the church is–or is not– doing on behalf of justice for human and other earth creatures.

I am working on behalf of institutional transformation, planted in a willful and, I pray, intelligent and faithful refusal to accept the traditional church’s "no" to woman power as sacred and to sexual pleasure as a delightful relational  happening that needs no higher justification.  I am involved at the margins of the established ecclesium–but at the roots of the church’s doctrine, discipline and worship–attempting to do my part in recreating the whole inhabited earth.

Increasingly, I understand my vocational "part" to be that of a healer.  I write this book to heal the splits in my own, as well as our corporate, body.  I offer these words as a small contribution to the ongoing historical processes of our becoming a well people, inhabitants of a whole earth, in touch with an unbroken Spirit.

I have to agree with Dr. Hayward’s ideas.  I, too, stay in the church because I am working for institutional change.  I stay in this denomination because they are the ones who called me and trained me and hired me, then denied me ordination.  I hope to be a prophetic voice, calling them to accountability for their exclusive policies.  I stay in the Church (Capital C) because I follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and those teachings call me to be community with other believers, to work for radical inclusion and social justice.  That is why I stay, in a nut shell.  Anyone else have a reason they stay?

Ona