Our theme for the month of June is “snapshots.” Writers were asked to submit a piece with a cover photo that they took or created.
At the Pride parade, the Episcopalian contingent arrived in full force. Somewhere behind the Lutherans (ELCA, of course), Methodists (UMC, of course), and Presbyterians (PCUSA, naturally), we marched behind rainbow-bedecked church flags and handed out bubble gum and cards with our service hours.
“Come to church!” my friend Laura shouted cheerfully. “It’s every week! We have wine!”
The mood was joyful, if commercial (who keeps letting Lockheed Martin march in these things?) until we turned a corner toward the end and saw the small group of protestors waving signs that read “homosexuals will burn in Hell” and shouting muffled polemics through a megaphone.
We lifted our flag higher, chanting “God is love” until we couldn’t hear the other group anymore. How is it possible that two groups reading the same book could come away with such different interpretations?
***
You may leave a faith community, but it doesn’t fully leave you. It’s why this month I’ve read article after article about synod, the annual gathering of a denomination I haven’t been meaningfully connected with since 2015. Yet the Christian Reformed Church is the denomination that shaped my undergraduate experience at Calvin. And it’s still home for people I care about.
This is why it’s been so painstaking to read about the Christian Reformed Church’s entrenchment in a position against the full expression of gay identity. I’ve seen a favorite former professor fired from Calvin for holding different views and a fractured denomination vote to keep this position as confessional status.
Many members of the denomination, I hope, would be as disturbed as I was by the fringe protestors at Pride. They would say they should preach the love of Christ over the fear of Hell. They might say something about loving the sinner while hating the sin. But at least the protestors make no secret of their condemnation. How it must twist, how it must wound to have someone you trusted call you “sinner” just for loving who you love.
***
The first time I ever heard a woman preach was during my prospective student visit to Calvin. I was 16 years old, from a faith community where women weren’t allowed to lead in any capacity, not as pastors, preachers, or even mixed-gender Sunday school teachers.
When I heard Pastor Mary preach, something loosened in me that I hadn’t realized was clenched tight. In this community of faith, there was space for me—not only to listen or serve behind the scenes, but to lead. Two summers later I took a job that let me preach sermons on the rim of the Grand Canyon.
For that first year or two especially, I felt that I had moved from small, cramped quarters to a place where I could stretch and run. After a chapter on Neanderthals, I sought out office hours with a history professor and left recognizing that one could believe in evolution and the Bible at the same time. After a class on environmental science, I appreciated the way that care for the earth expressed stewardship of God’s gifts and not doubt in them.
With other students who were also figuring it out, I studied colonialism, racism, and injustice—maybe not enough, maybe incompletely, but more than I ever had before. I was encouraged to develop my Christian mind, to discern, and to understand my faith as something that concerned my community and the world around me.
But if this Calvin-formed Christian mind determined she wanted to worship and hear from LGBTQ Christians as much as she wanted to hear from women, the Christian Reformed Church held no space for that. No LGBTQ student could have the same experience of seeing themselves reflected in the pulpit, that melting relief of seeing there was space for them too.
***
I commented to my friend Hannah recently what a rare gift our church has—gay Christian elders. The church held its first “holy union” ceremony between two men in 1976 and has welcomed countless LGBTQ individuals since. I’m mostly struck by the ordinariness. Here are gay Christian parents. Gay young adults navigating relationships. Teenagers who are figuring out their faith and their sexuality at the same time.
The churches that speak out hatefully against gay people—as well as the churches who, smiling, offer the poisoned chalice of church community only at the cost of any possibility of lifelong romantic love—miss out incalculably.
They not only show one tenth of their children the door, along with many more who will walk out supporting them, but also condemn themselves to an incomplete image of God.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
I don’t dream that those who fall on the religious right and the religious left will resolve their differences. People will continue to debate inerrancy and infallibility, predestination and free will, which edition of the hymnal to slip in the pews or whether to sing out of hymnals at all.
But let this messy, schismatic work continue with the whole Church. Let your LGBTQ children, neighbors, prayer group partners, selves grapple with how to be Christian families, Christian communities, Christians in the world.
And if your church won’t let you do that, come somewhere where you can.
We meet at 10:30 a.m. on Sundays.
Every week.
We have wine.
Katerina Parsons lives in Washington, D.C. where she works on international humanitarian assistance (views not of her employer). A graduate of Calvin University (2015) and American University (2022), she lived in Honduras for four years before moving back to the U.S. to work on policy and advocacy. She enjoys reading, dancing, and experimenting in her community garden plot.
