confessingqueer

homos & the evangelical church

This weekend i spent mostly in a booth with headphones on, talking to and taking direction from people in other booths who i couldn't see, but could hear.  Its an interesting social experience, but one that i always enjoy with the band...i won't go into the layers of thought that stem from the experience of us all being isolated in booths so that we can produce something cohesive, collective, and intimate.  Needless to say though, we did walk away from the weekend with all the tracks to a new full-length album recorded.  I took a small break from recording though to talk at an event at Highlands Church in Denver entitled "The Evangelical Church & Homosexuality". That's right folks - they both exist and they got some things to work out.  So i gathered with about 100 folks on a saturday afternoon to talk about that. 

A couple of things to start out:

- "unsure" is an understatement of the way i feel about the "evangelical" church: being raised in a conservative, evangelical household i know evangelical xtianity pretty well - and while i still know and love people who practice in the evangelical church and who haven't hurt me, i don't quite trust the whole or even the paradigm of evangelicalism...i've just had too many experiences of hurt and alienation with it and watched it hurt a lot of folks i love

- i am currently having quite the dissonant experience with the evangelical church: some of the people who i am in relationship with who seem to be the most invested, honest, vulnerable, and embodied about what living a message of the gospel might look like are in the evangelical church - and i CAN NOT reconcile that with the fact that the philosophy, institution, and structure of the evangelical church seems to be everything that is not gospel (violence, colonization, empire building, exclusion, isolation, and misogyny)

- few words can get my hairs bristling like 'homosexuality': it comes from a medical, psychological model that needed a word to diagnose folks with same-gender attraction as mentally ill and has nothing to do with people describing to the world what relationship, intimacy, or identity means to them

And with all that i walked into Highlands Church at 1pm on Saturday.  And i sure appreciate the folks who showed up that day.  

The thing is that here's where i wish that power models of relationship actually work and/or that i believed in using power models as an acceptable, ongoing approach to the world. 

This is why:

- in a power model of relationship, i could walk into a space and tell everyone there what's wrong with them

- in a power model of relationship, i could feel free to give a whole bunch of statements about what i need to feel in control, validated, and secure again within the church

- in a power model of relationship, i'm not obligated to respond to other people's fears, frustrations, process, or the multitude of ways they are also walking into a space wounded

- in a power model of relationship, i can feel free to cut anyone off who hurts me or hurts others that i love

And that is why i'm so annoyed with the gospel.  because i believe in increasingly intimate ways that it calls me to something different.  To not play the power game with others just because they have played it with me - to have a different economy of relationship.  Its all about "the body" stuff again...within the paradigm of the gospel, i am part of a body.  with all of those folks who have hurt me, say fucked up stuff about me and my identity and those that i love, and have told me where and when and how i get to participate.  the thing about body is that its not just about acknowledging someone else exists - it means that they effect me and that i need them.  no matter what my experience with them has been up til now, i need them and they need me and without each other we are a dismembered, smeared-all-over-the-road-like-road-kill set of limbs and organs and brains and skin.  bodies don't work well that way.  its worse than death - to not have your body communicating with itself but to still be alive. 

So my pursuit of justice and of body-ness and life and of reconciliation calls me to something else:

- to fight for relationship with my more "conservative" and my more "liberal" and all my in-between brothers and sisters as if my life depended on it

- to engage with people in a way that allows us to breathe into each other and inform each other and bring each other back to life

- to let the rest of my body know about the wounds that i have and then to ask them to help me heal them because the strength of their body depends on it

So i started to figure out at Highlands Church that day what practicing this new way, this gospel might look like within the context of the homos & the evangelical church...and i hate it when practicing something new that i internally resist goes well, cause then the excuse to not practice it is taken away...and for that i am thankful.

I headed back to the studio after that and resumed working on tracks for a song that dan has written, and found myself held by these words:

"And so my friends, it seems like the truth is

All these rivers of justice, flow to uncertain seas"

~ "Holy Moses" (yet un-named album) Dan Craig

"confession" (thoughts from #c21)

so i thought i'd put up here some of the main thoughts that i talked about at Christianity 21 since some folks have been asking for the transcript (which i don't have) and since the thoughts from that talk inspired the title of this blog. 

first, i'd like to say that my talk at #c21 was the reflection of a 9 month process for myself on the topic of Confession...it began when i asked myself in thinking about the conference what the greatest value of the church to me in the 21st century would be.  Generally, i'm a person with a lot of privilege and have most of my needs met - as well as having a lot of my 21st century, post-modern wants met (books, masturbatory intellectual debate space with friends, cultural validation for doing things like biking everywhere and drinking fair-trade coffee, infinite venues to feel self-righteous for working for justice in the world, etc).  So what does the church bring to me?  what space could the church offer that i don't get anywhere else in the world?  the answer to that for me was a place for confession.

Two images of confession: kneeling & standing (this imagery was a gift to me from my friend malcolm)

Kneeling: a place to be wrong, to be uncertain, to not have everything figured out, to query, to play and experiment, to be forgiven.  And how can the church be that space for me?  Only by being a space where i know i am loved before i know that i have to be right.  Everywhere else in the world, there is so much pressure to be right and to have things figured out (and i would argue also most places in the church) because the consequences of not being right are ostracization, shame, guilt, risk of losing friends & community, ridicule, and confusion.  In a space where i am loved first and unconditionally, i am free to be wrong.  and it is a relief.  I said in my talk, "i need to know that because my relationship with g-d is non-negotiable, my relationship with the church is non-negotiable, and can't be taken away because of something i don't have figured out."

from my notes:

      you see, I walk through the world constantly defending or proclaiming: I defend my right to be in the world & in the church at all because of my marginalized identities; and I proclaim and struggle for justice daily in my life: justice around race, justice around oppression, justice around glbtq rights, labor justice – and the relief for me when I walk into House every Sunday at 5pm is that I get to be wrong – that I get to not have all the answers – that I get to talk about how I am complicit in those injustices hourly – that I get to be called to a different standard: one that is not about how right or just I can be, but one that is about how much I am loved

Standing: a place where i can confess my faith - which means that i have to be able to show up with all of my identities.  i need a place to de-compartmentalize.

from my notes:

·        I also walk through the world as a compartmentalized person: I am queer, I am gender-queer, I am a community organizer, I am a partner, I am a friend, I am white, I am middle-class, I am able-bodied, I am a Christian – I have a thousand identities and as a person in the 21^st century am skilled in accessing and repressing those identities as I need to in order to be safe and to be loved and to get what I need.  The other aspect of confession – the aspect of being able to confess my faith and confess myself as a whole person is vital to me in participating in the church…that when I walk into the church my theology has everything to do with me and all of my identities have everything to do with my faith – that there is no shame to be carried in with certain parts of myself…that my whole self can be confessed.  That my faith and theology can be about my body and my gender and my relationships and all of the parts of myself that I am sent consistent messages should be things that I keep in compartments

The implications of what type of work the church needs to do to become a place where this dual approach to confession can happen are vast:

- it means the church (we) have to be a place where someone is held tightly enough that it is safe to be wrong...that relationship with the other is non-negotiable

- it means we have to be less concerned with being right, and more concerned with being grace-full

- it means we (the church) have to be humble enough to allow ourselves to be shaped and formed by each other

- it means the church as a body needs to learn how to confess to our wider community and world

What would the church in the 21st century look like, if it had a spirit of confession?

relationship with the church (part 1 of 156,879)

i was speaking at Edina Lutheran Community Church on Sunday as part of the #c21 conference weekend and we were talking about the relationship of more traditional, denominational congregations to congregations on the more emergent end of the spectrum.  I started talking about how i could not stop thinking the night before (as i lay in my hotel bed totally exhausted and totally unable to make my brain stop) about how i have all these issues with the church as an institution, but the thing is that the church is a body too.  That reality makes my usual clear-headed power analysis, cut-like-a-knife insight into systems effect on individuals messy.  very very messy. 

i've been on a month-long trip around the US for my paid work holding conversations with folks in communities about how to start thinking about social justice and their role in change in this society.  one big point that comes up in every place is how to hold a tension between naming & imagining...between resisting and creating.  i think this has something to do with this mess i'm in with the church.

The Institution - naming & resisting: *the church has harmed me and many that i love - like real harm that effects mental health, inspires suicide, and destroys relationships *the church has been complicit with power - with the state, with oppressive ideology such as racism, classism, homophobia, and xenophobia *the church continues to primarily view its role in the world as being right and announcing morality *the church continues to perceive itself as persecuted, while holding enormous privilege in US culture

The Body - imagining & creating: *the church is james dobson and nadia bolz-weber and sara rosenau and lloyd gestoso and brian donovan many many other people who are broken and wounded and beautiful and loved *the church is a venue for god's word to me - flesh and blood - the body *the church i need - to be called out on my shit, to learn what it means to be loved and held, to confess, to be affirmed, to be served bread & wine, to eat with, to make art with, to practice anything that has more to do with anything besides myself *the church, because it is a body of people, is going to feel just as complicated as any other human relationship in my life - turns out that's how i end up being transformed - when i have to rub up against other people and they rub up against me all uncomfortably and rudely like in an overpacked elevator

"The church is a whore, and she is my mother" ~Augustine

"Love in reality is a harsh and difficult thing...it's complicated to be in relationship with flesh" ~Debbie Blue #c21

starting from a new place

I've held a blog account for over 6 months and haven't blogged once.  not sure what i was waiting for, but have always had a hard time writing consistently in any sort of journal/daily writing way.  i think my perspective changed over last weekend though in ways that i'm not sure i can even articulate.

I attended and spoke at the Christianity21 conference - my heart and mind was shaped - here is an attempt to list things about that conference that were transformative to me:

* the process leading up to the conference was one of six months of me holding and meditating on the topic of "confession: a relief from righteousness"...enough said about that.

* i've been in a pretty reactionary place with "the church" and church communities for the last 10 years or so of my life...being invited to participate in this event shifted that - i no longer had the luxury or role of reacting, but was asked instead to create.

* i encountered incredibly kind people

* folks showed up to the conference to participate - not to be entertained, or directed, or to have information dumped into them - but to participate.  with each other, with ideas, with food, with art, with themselves.  i can't imagine what the church would look like if we all started showing up more like this.  i can't imagine what the church would look like if we were more intentional about building our spaces to invite that.

* i watched two straight, white, men spend (and disrupt) their privilege.  they had access to venues, connections to people, support from sponsors, budgets to watch, and reputations to maintain, and they organized an event that supported the leadership and voices of folks who have been asked to take the backseat in the church.  and asked other folks who have similar privilege to show up for it.  and we were transformed.  and that laid a foundation of courage for each of us to turn to the people in our midst who we take for granted are in the backseat of the church and start figuring out how we disrupt our own privilege in order to bring more voices into informing the church in its process.  it turns out, we can only be transformed by inviting more participation.

* i got some glimpses of what it means for us to confess our selves and our faith to each other

* i was reminded, once again, why christianity is not a faith that can be practiced in isolation