Towards a Welcoming and Inclusive Church
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Faith in Action
Good quotes in the Blade Freedom Federation story
....The leader of one LGBT group expressed skepticism about the impact of the new group.
Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, said the formation of the Freedom Federation shows social conservatives’ “desperation in a losing battle.”
Stonewall @ 40 years... Remembering & Becoming One Human Family
Stonewall Riots in NYC
June 28, 1969... June 28, 2009
It began at a bar. The Stonewall Bar in New York City, the West Village. It could have been at church. Finally, they had enough of being told they could not be who they were, love who they fell in love with, even be safe in public.
J.E. Freeman was 24 at the time. Of his experience at the Stonewall Bar riot, he said: "That night the world changed for me and for every other gay, lesbian, bi, cross-dressing and transgender person on the planet. That night we were all reborn in the baptism of that hose's 'holy' water."
Inclusive ENDA legislation introduced in Congress
This is a historic moment in the GLBT community. An inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act has been introduced in the House of Representatives by Barney Frank, Tammy Baldwin and Jared Polis.
United ENDA, a coalition of over 400 groups working to assure the enactment of workplace protection bill that would include gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons, has initiated a variety of actions aimed at generating support for this new legislation.
One project has been to develop a church bulletin insert (download a copy) and the group is hoping that as many religious settings as possible will make it available to their memberships.
The influence of supportive churches and religious settings will be an important element in the success of this legislation.
- Download a copy of the Sample Bulletin Insert (doc)
Recognizing outstanding transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals in the struggle for LGBT equality
In honor of the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, the International Court System, in collaboration with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, is recognizing 40 transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals for their contribution toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equality.
To mark this occasion, the International Court System is showcasing these “40 Trans Heroes” on its Web site at www.impcourt.org/Trans40/ to highlight the importance of the transgender and gender-nonconforming community as an equal and important part of the broader LGBT community. The “40 Trans Heroes” were solicited and selected from hundreds of nominations by a special committee of the International Court Council.
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force denounces attack at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Stands in strong solidarity with Jewish community
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force responded to the shooting yesterday at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in which security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns was shot and killed by a gunman authorities identified as an 88-year-old white supremacist named James von Brunn.
Gay bishop says faith groups key to N.H. gay marriage vote
New Hampshire became the sixth state to legalize gay marriage on Wednesday (June 3) in part because faith leaders testified that the measure would not impinge on religious rights, according to V. Gene Robinson, the state's openly gay Episcopal bishop.
When credible Christians, Muslims and Jews advocated for same-sex marriage, it "had a lot of sway with legislators in terms of giving them cover," said Robinson. "Our message was loud and clear: religious organizations have nothing to fear from civil marriage for same-gendered folks."
Two groundbreaking studies find religious voices critical to the advancement of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality
New studies from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s National Religious Leadership Roundtable and the Center for American Progress
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s National Religious Leadership Roundtable and the Center for American Progress released two groundbreaking reports today analyzing religious and secular advocacy of marriage equality ballot initiatives in California and Michigan.
Although examining different campaigns in different states in different years, the two reports draw remarkably similar conclusions about the need for partnerships between religious and secular supporters of equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.
New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch signs legislation granting the freedom to marry to same-sex couples
'Clearly this is a momentous day for New Hampshire — a state that holds individual liberty and fairness as core values.' — National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Executive Director Rea Carey
WASHINGTON, June 3 — The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force issued the following statement after New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch signed legislation today granting the freedom to marry to same-sex couples.
Prop. 8 Opponents take their Case to Fresno
SELMA, Fresno County -- On a dusty patch of ground near Super Dave's Car Wash here in California's raisin capital, the next phase of the same-sex marriage movement began Saturday with a morning march -- led by a Fresno lesbian mother carrying Harvey Milk's old bullhorn. "You have got to reach into those communities that struggle to understand us," organizer Robin McGehee exhorted the people gathered there shortly before 8 a.m. for the 14-1/2-mile march to Fresno City Hall for an event called Meet in the Middle for Equality.
Task Force responds to the killing of Dr. George Tiller: 'We cannot and must not yield to fear and intimidation'
WASHINGTON, June 1 — The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force responded to the killing of Dr. George Tiller, a physician who was gunned down in a Wichita, Kan., church yesterday. Tiller was one of the only doctors to perform late-term abortions in the United States. The suspect, Scott Roeder, has reportedly espoused a strong anti-government, anti-abortion philosophy over the years.
Statement by Rea Carey, Executive Director
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
"The cold and calculated killing of Dr. George Tiller, apparently because he was a provider of abortion services to women utilizing their protected rights to end pregnancies, accomplishes nothing except the harvesting of a bitter crop of fear and intimidation among our American people, and especially reproductive service providers and the women who need them. But we cannot and must not yield to fear and intimidation; instead, we must continue to stand strong with reproductive health service providers.
Pacific School of Religion faculty and staff arrested following Prop 8 decision
Four clergy members on the faculty and staff of Pacific School of Religion (PSR) were arrested near City Hall in San Francisco in acts of civil disobedience following the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a constitutional amendment that denies the full equality of same-sex couples under the law.
The four, along with other PSR faculty and staff and graduates, had marched behind a banner stating “Faith demands justice! Marriage Equality Now!” at a rally held in advance of the court ruling. Below is a press release from Pacific School of Religion that was sent out just after the court’s announcement was made.
California State Supreme Court Upholds Prop 8; State Continues To Recognize 18,000 Marriages
SAN FRANCISCO—Today, in a 6 to 1 decision, the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, the ballot measure that eliminated the right of same sex couples to marry. In the ruling authored by Chief Justice Ronald George, the Court stated “We emphasize only that among the various constitutional protections recognized in the Marriage Cases as available to same-sex couples, it is only the designation of marriage — albeit significant — that has been removed by this initiative measure.” At the same time, the court unanimously ruled that the more than 18,000 marriages that took place between June 16 and November 4, 2008 continue to be fully valid and recognized by the state of California. The decision reaffirmed the Court’s prior holding that sexual orientation is subject to the highest level of protection under the California Constitution.
In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Carlos Moreno stated, “The rule the majority crafts today not only allows same-sex couples to be stripped of the right to marry that this court recognized in the Marriage Cases, it places at risk the state constitutional rights of all disfavored minorities. It weakens the status of our state Constitution as a bulwark of fundamental rights for minorities protected from the will of the majority.”
Responses to the Decision
Task Force profoundly disappointed in California Supreme Court decision upholding Proposition 8
More than 18,000 marriages of same-sex couples that took place before ban remain intact
WASHINGTON, May 26 — The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is profoundly disappointed in today's California Supreme Court ruling upholding Proposition 8, a ballot measure approved by a slim majority in November 2008 that amends the California Constitution to eliminate the freedom to marry for same-sex couples. The court did allow the 18,000 marriages of same-sex couples that occurred prior to the enactment of Proposition 8 to remain intact.
Statement by Rea Carey, Executive Director National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
"This is a day of immensely conflicted feelings. We are profoundly disappointed the court has upheld Proposition 8. Banning the fundamental freedom to marry for same-sex couples is unfair, unjust and flies in the face of progress occurring throughout the country, from the Iowa heartland to the rocky shores of Maine. That California is taking a step backward at this moment in history is disconcertingly out of step with society's growing support for equality, and personally painful to committed couples who will be blocked from marrying in California. It is a travesty that the court has permitted a simple majority to use the initiative process to strip a fundamental right from a minority group.
"We are pleased, however, for the more than 18,000 same-sex couples who legally married before the ban took effect and will see those marriages remain intact. But there is no getting around the fact that stripping basic freedoms from people by majority vote is cruel and morally wrong. As long as Proposition 8 remains in effect, untold numbers of same-sex couples will be relegated to second-class status. We refuse to settle for this inequity, and are committed to working with our partners in California to eradicate this terrible injustice and achieve full equality."
Supreme Court Comments Regarding The Results Of Today's Decision
I am Bishop Yvette Flunder senior Pastor of City of Refuge UCC and I preside over an Independent group of Affirming churches throughout the US, Africa and Mexico. I am a proud UCC Pastor. I am also deeply rooted in the African American Pentecostal church.
If a people were allowed to withhold the civil and inalienable rights of a minority group, and re-enforce their privilege by a simple majority vote, then African Americans would still be under the “then popular” bondage of chattel slavery and indentured servitude. As an African American woman, who has not forgotten that less than 50 years ago in the Jim Crow South, African American citizens were denied most of their civil and human rights, I know unequivocally that equal rights guaranteed to every citizen by the Constitution of the United States, and given by God, must not be subject to the will of the majority.
How should the church respond to families that don’t fit the prescribed social norm of the majority? The Christian Church had a similar dilemma 200 years ago when it sought to determine how to justify the inclusion of slave families that did not fit the requirement set forth by the church or the law. The issue was how could the church receive them in good standing’ when some of the married slaves had both their current spouses and another spouse and often other children on another plantation. Underlying this issue was the fact that slave marriages were not considered valid and legal, as slaves were not truly ‘people’ but possessions. How could the church make their marriages sacred if the law of their masters could force them in and out of their marriages? How could they have legal expectations of them without granting them legal rights?
One church, the Welsh Neck Baptist Church of South Carolina decided that to grant membership to the slave couples and to validate their marriage was the role of the church.
How could this church help to honor families when the majority view of church and society was against them? This bold church may not have had the opportunity to be friends of the court but they were friends of the disadvantaged and friends of God.
This forward thinking group of Christians were able to see beyond the religious legalism of their time and find a way to help these families so different from their own. They welcomed them and solemnized their marriages.
All of the movements to secure equal rights for people of African decent are deeply rooted in faith. Our leaders…Martin Luther King, Shirley Chisolm, Desmond Tutu, Fannie Lou Hamer, Jesse Jackson, and President Barack Obama were and are part of the Black church and their political positions are informed by a ‘God inspired’ theology of Justice for All. This is the same theology that informs me as a same gender loving AA pastor and it must undergird the decision of the Supreme Court to overturn any decision that provides majority privilege and power for some instead of justice for all. In the words of the Mother of the African American Civil Rights movement, Coretta Scott King… "Gay and Lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection...banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages."
Make no mistake about it…we will fight until we overcome. None of us overcome until all of us overcome. None of us are free until all of us are free.
Upcoming Training Opportunities
- September 9-12, 2009
St. Louis, MO
After Anaheim: Integrity Leadership Conference
More Information and Registration - September 18-19, 2009
Washington, DC
Building an Inclusive Church - September 18-19, 2009
Ontario, Canada
- October 9-10, 2009
Lancaster, PA
Building an Inclusive Church - October 23-24, 2009
Seattle, WA
Building an Inclusive Church - November 6-7, 2009
Grinnell, IA
Building an Inclusive Church
Now Available!
A Time to Build Up
AVAILABLE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD!
- Click here to download A Time to Build Up (pdf)
- Click here to download A Time to Build Up formatted for print (pdf)
All in God's Family: Creating Allies for Our LGBT Families
Giving you opportunities to gather with other members of your congregation to pray, to learn, to share, and to work together to transform your lives, your congregation, and your world into a loving place in which God’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families can thrive.
AVAILABLE NOW!
Building an Inclusive Church: A Welcoming Toolkit
Drawing upon twenty five years of experience within a variety of Christian denominations, this Toolkit is a step-by-step guide to help facilitate a Welcoming Process in your local congregation. Biblically and theologically based, it uses tools of relational organizing, congregational assessment, conflict management and change theory.
AVAILABLE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD!
To Do Justice: A Study of Welcoming Congregations
In order to both highlight the vibrancy, faithfulness and power of the Welcoming Movement and to counter the “false witness” of those who seek to quash this movement of hospitality and justice, the Institute for Welcoming Resources surveyed pastors and leaders of 1,200 Welcoming congregations to ask them about their work and witness. Two areas emerged that warrant particular focus and celebration:
- Successfully completing a Welcoming Process makes a congregation more likely to work and witness on other justice issues.
- Congregations that directly engage the question of welcoming LGBT persons have low levels of conflict.
AVAILABLE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD!
transACTION
A Transgender Curriculum For Churches and Religious Institutions
AVAILABLE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD!
Making churches transgender inclusive
by Barbara Satin
IWR and faith work associate, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
As a transgender Christian who has visited numerous churches throughout the country, I know first hand the need to make religious institutions welcoming and affirming of transgender people but have seen time and time again that the congregational-based resources are not there yet. I have heard the anger and frustration from many of my transgender brothers and sisters as they relate how they have been met with hostility and fear upon entering a church to attend worship services.
This "exclusion" many times comes from faith institutions that have publicly identified themselves as "welcoming" to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) folks. However, when "push comes to shove," these congregations find themselves completely at a loss as to how to respond.
- Additional blogging about transACTION is available here.
Also just released
The Human Rights Campaign's Religion & Faith Program has just published online a new transgender resource for clergy:
Multi-Faith Work
NEW DOCUMENTARY!
"In Our Fullness: Faith and Activism Across Difference"
presents conversations with activists about faith-based work for radical social change around issues including sexuality, gender, race, class, and age. The video includes powerful testimonies from activists representing Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Native spiritualities, presenting challenges and successes in faith-based progressive-left coalition building.
Produced by the Institute for Welcoming Resources, a Project of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, in partnership with the Macalester College Chuck Green Civic Engagement Fellowship.
For more information: info@WelcomingResources.org
Additional Ecumenical & Multi-Faith Groups Convened by IWR
Liturgical Resource
A Place in God's Heart...
A Place at Christ's Table
Worship Resources for the
Welcoming Church Movement
New & Timely Resources
- In Good Conscience: Sister Jeanine Gramick's Journey of Faith - In Barbara Rick's acclaimed documentary, In Good Conscience, a most unlikely and very funny rebel - an American nun - finds herself at the center of a human rights storm with leaders of one of the world's most revered institutions, the Roman Catholic Church.
- Hate is the Sin: Putting Faces on the Debate over Human Sexuality - Arguments based in doctrine and scripture over the inclusion of homosexual people within Christian congregations and sacraments have done little to persuade the faithful on either side of this debate. Hate is the Sin: Putting Faces on the Debate over Human Sexuality approaches this divisive subject...
- Steeplejacking: How the Christian Right is Hijacking Mainstream Religion - An insider account by two ministers on the front lines of mainstream religion's longtime shadow war against the religious right...
- Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church, Revised and Expanded Edition - In this revised and expanded best seller, Rogers argues for equal rights in both the church and society for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people.
- Coming Out, Coming Home: Making Room for Gay Spirituality in Therapy - Many books have been written and many opinions aired about gay rights and pro-gay theology, but not many have focused upon providing people with an opportunity to enlarge their own belief systems to embrace gay spirituality while still being true advocates of Scripture.
- Homosexual Saints: The Community of Christ Experience - Twenty-four narratives that explain the experience of gay and lesbian members of Community of Christ, as well as the experiences of their family members and supporters.
- All God's Children: Teaching Children About Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity - An essential guide to open and caring conversations with young children about gender and sexual orientation.
- A Time to Every Purpose: The Language of Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing - A compendium of progressive theological statements on a range of sexuality issues that enable religious leaders and faith communities to preach, teach and advocate for sexual justice.
- When I Knew: A Different Beginning - Alternately candid, funny, poignant and heartbreaking, When I Knew documents a cross-section of men and women of all ages and lifestyles who invoke the exact moment in their lives – whether as toddlers, grade-schoolers, teens or young adults – when they knew, once and for all, that they were gay.
Blogs
- Are You Guys Brothers?
Reflections on a long-term relationship by Brian McNaught - The Christian Agnostic
Candace Chellew-Hodge, founder/editor of Whosoever: An Online Magazine for GLBT Christians - A Christian Voice For Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights
Rev. Dr. Jerry S. Maneker - Crossing the T
Life at the intersection of Church and Trans with Rev. Allyson Robinson - Early Childhood Psychological Development Growing up Gay
By Fr. Marty Kurylowicz - Faith Matters
Community of Welcoming Congregations (Oregon & Washington) - Father Geoff Farrow
- Gay and Transgender Issues in the Workplace
By Brian McNaught - Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters
Author Alvin A. McEwen - An Inch at a Time: Reflections on the Journey
Integrity President Rev. Susan Russell - A Jihad for Love
by filmmaker Parvez Sharma - MoSAIC
Methodist Students for an All-Inclusive Church - Network of Spiritual Progressives
A project of the Tikkun Community - OutSpoken
National Gay & Lesbian Task Force - PCUSA 08B overture information
Providing vote counts and analysis on ordination policy change in the Presbyterian Church - Peterson Toscano's A Musing
Musings of Peterson Toscano an ex-gay survivor. - Philocrites
Commentary by Chris Walton on Unitarian Universalism, liberal Christianity, American religion, and liberal culture - Religion, Faith, and Values
GLAAD Blog - Religion Is A Queer Thing
Rev. Tiffany Steinwert, pastor of Cambridge Welcoming Ministries - Sexuality and Religion: What's the Connection?
By minister and sexologist Rev. Debra Haffner - TransEpiscopal
A group of transgender Episcopalians and our significant others, families, friends and allies. - Two World Collision
Being Gay and Christian by Eric - Wake up and LIVE
Thoughts and musings of a lesbian Episcopalian, by Susan Gage - Walking With Integrity
The official blog of Integrity USA - The Wild Reed
Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.
