Pride

While working the Portland Pride booth for the United Church of Christ Central Pacific Conference yesterday there were quite a few surprised people to see so many churches there, not in protest but in support of the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered & queer) community. The most often question we got was, “How does that work?” Something tells me we should’ve prepared for this.

I guess that the difficult part for people to understand is that our church is not a gay church, we simply hold the belief that all people are welcome to come as they are, who they are, and wherever they are on life’s journey. Trying to explain that the church we belong to is mostly gray haired grandparents and that they are the most welcoming, friendly people you could ever ask to meet also seems to surprise people. But the biggest part is that so many of these individuals are where we were before finding this church… skeptical of the agenda. Of course, once we finally went to a Sunday worship service we instantly knew there was no hidden agenda, just a friendly congregation of a diverse group of people.

Getting back to the question, “How does that work?” I find that it is best to address the roots of most churches bigotry about the unknown and unfamiliar, which is that we are all human and humans make mistakes. If that doesn’t work I always go back to the original arguments I’ve held for years is that people tend to pick and choose which parts of the bible they want to believe. For the old argument that homosexuality is a sin because it says so in the bible, first I explain the translational errors that easily occur and if that doesn’t work ask them if they eat lobster, play football or wear cotton/polyester blends because some of those are punishable by death in that same book (Leviticus.) For those who urge legislators to vote against equal rights for marriage because it will lead to incest and polygamy, I again refer them to the same bible, which quite plainly encourages both. After all, if it wasn’t for incest how else would the human population have grown? I mean, Adam and Eve were the first humans and Cain had to have kids with somebody and while the bible doesn’t supply the answer it is arguably his sister he procreated with because that’s all that would’ve been available… or his mother. I usually let them decide which they’d prefer.

So, how does that work? Jesus. The gospels show that Jesus didn’t turn anyone away, and as a Christian church wouldn’t it make sense to follow the teachings and examples of Christ? Yes, this stance makes us an outcast in the wider church world, but we have a saying in the UCC that God is still speaking. It doesn’t make sense to us that God just stopped talking two thousand years ago because that is when the last books to the bible were written. We also don’t claim to know all the answers. We welcome opportunities for inter-faith discussions. We celebrate diversity in all its forms because in doing so we celebrate God’s creation and evolution of those creations. We are a place where anyone can feel like they’ve come home.