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Tag: Pride

  • A Heart Transformed by Undeserved Grace

    by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early-retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource ssra.uk

    Last week, at Pride, my heart was transformed by undeserved grace. And on this occasion, it wasn’t from God, or fellow Christians, or the church. But it relieved the shame of decades and transformed my heart.

    Until last year, I hadn’t been to Pride since the 1990s. Back then, there were probably fewer than half a dozen in the entire country. I would be at London’s. It was mostly a protest march of angry men, with almost as many police as marchers. The march would be funnelled into a fenced-off field or park, where the stalls would all be campaign groups, and AIDS charities desperately trying to save men’s lives.

    Then last year, after a gap of a quarter century, I followed a small group down the hill after church to join the Lancaster Pride Parade, and I laughed with delight, as the contrast was almost unbelievable. There were all ages present, from babes in arms and pushchairs, to toddlers and children of all ages, to students and young adults, parents, and adults right across the age-range, and generally more women than men. Everything was joy: rainbow party and celebration. And the tallest presence in the parade was a fifteen-foot tall Big Jesus in a rainbow sash, surrounded by Christians at Pride with handmade placards announcing the names of Inclusive Churches and My God Loves Everyone in rainbow colours.

    The only police were managing traffic, to let the parade go past.

    The parade concluded in the historic town square, under Queen Victoria, where there were funfair rides, and food stalls, and musicians and poets and speeches – including a Christian minister – and three thousand people mingled through the afternoon. The small band of Christians at Pride seemed to have a gazebo and a few leaflets with Big Jesus parked outside.

    Another year takes us to last week. I had made contact with Lancaster Christians at Pride, which turns out to be a completely ad hoc group that has a couple of planning meetings and a bit of a scramble by email in the few weeks before Pride, to coordinate the superb work of some heroic individuals to produce what has become – over several years – an increasingly significant presence.

    As the parade concluded, and an afternoon’s duty on the stall lay ahead, I braced myself for an afternoon of well-deserved anti-Christian hostility from the LGBTQ+ crowd. I wasn’t expecting blatant abuse, but I was certainly expecting hostile stares, cold shoulders and dismissive looks – the hints of a well-earned low-level background contempt, after all that we know the churches have hurled at this community over the last forty years and more.

    What followed, across the next several hours, was a genuinely transformative experience of undeserved grace; not (on this occasion) from God, or fellow Christians, or the church, but from the LGBTQ+ community, gathered for Lancaster Pride. They approached Big Jesus and the Prayer Tree and our Christians at Pride gazebo with nothing but utterly undeserved warmth and grace. It was utterly disarming.

    They came for selfies with Big Jesus. They came to hang prayers for the world, and for loved ones. They came to hang heartfelt longings, which are the same as prayers; and wise hard-learned life-lessons, summarised in a few words, which are surely proverbs; and perhaps most movingly, in memoriams to loved ones, which held who-knows-what life-stories, in a moment of profound reflection, at this little holy shrine, on this big pounding party-day.

    I was braced for the shame of being Christian in the LGBTQ+ community – for the church absolutely deserves the hatred of that community for all that it has done, and continues to do. And all that I experienced yesterday from that community was undeserved grace. That undeserved grace relieved the shame of decades, and transformed my heart. That little holy shrine became a grace exchange. They brought in grace, and soon I had grace to share. I listened as people told their stories. I coaxed the cautious with gifts, which had seemed so pointless earlier in the day: “Everything is free! Free cake! Free prayers! The rainbow crosses were made here in Lancaster by the needleworkers at the Priory!” Suddenly everything made sense – in the light of grace received, grace upon grace. We had built a holy shrine in the city square, and the people brought in their gifts of holy grace to share.

    Some people only go to church once a year. This was our little holy shrine in the middle of Pride – their once-a-year church – and the prayers and the occasional conversations were profound. We’ll build it again next year. The rest of the church may still be squabbling, an unholy wreck, somewhere off-stage. But God is love and grace, active and fully alive amongst the ordinary people.

  • PRIDE: More than Sparkling Spandex

    by the Very Revd David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury

    In 2009 Barack Obama sealed June as ‘Pride Month’.  These events are now as common across the UK as apple fayres or carnivals of Olde. PRIDE is mainstream. The elements of protest and political rally have gone in favour of community celebration – perhaps still with a little more edginess and ostrich feathers than your average festival.

    The badge is still the rainbow PRIDE flag with its origins in the stories of San Francisco gay liberation. The flag provokes strong reactions. Some people of faith remind us that pride is a deadly sin as if LGBTQIA+ people have more monopoly on that than others.

    I grew up in N. Ireland in a flag culture. Flags united and divided communities. They added colour to life and made visible in the public arena the aspirations which people held privately. Working in cathedrals has taught me a lot about flags used in services as banners of identity. The ultimate intensity of these symbols is the Military Standard (not technically flags) which carry the weight of full regimental identity. Some call them sacramental. PRIDE and the PRIDE flag carry intense meanings which allow many to rally around and others to oppose.

    A colleague here displays a Progress Pride flag on their office window out onto our Precincts. We get periodic complaints about this suggesting it is discriminatory, inappropriate and that we are supporting the ‘gay agenda’. Often complaints are intemperate. We’ve had individuals storming into the office requiring us to remove the flag with diatribes of anti-LGBTQIA+ venom.

    Much has changed since I attended my first PRIDE in the 1980s.  LGBTQIA+ equality is no longer a minority concern. Laws, institutions and families are more inclusive. However, I also see that not far under the surface remain fears and hates which bubble up.

    My partner and I walked along a beach with the dog, holding hands, whilst a group sniggered, offered low-level abuse and the derogatory names. I sit on a train in civvies going up and down to London and I hear prejudicial hate-filled talk about LGBTQIA+ people. We’ve sat in curry houses with groups of tertiary level students being horrible. I’ve had reports of people who will not come to worship if I am preaching. I sit in meetings where LGBTQIA+ people are tolerated.  How often have I visited a parish having to explain I do not have a wife but a civil partner and then – stony silence.

    These experiences, whether verbal abuse or that chilly atmosphere or that silence, still provoke anxiety in me as to what hurt might happen next. Hate crime remains under-reported by LGBTQIA+ people yet it is still rising despite all the protections in a more inclusive society.

    We still need PRIDE even just as a community festival. It makes us visible. Despite footballers or celebrities, visibility is still an issue. PRIDE insists that it is possible to be an inclusive community where the needs and rights of everyone do not diminish the needs and rights of others. A PRIDE rainbow flag flown on town halls, hospitals and fire stations, schools and even some places of worship says ‘we are here’, ‘you are welcome’ and ‘there is still work to do’.

    Social media and politics remind us that lurking not far under the surface are views and emotions for harm rather than for good. No amount of training or education seems to really deal with this sea of dystopian sludgy sin. We now know from brain analysis that our ancient (sometimes described as monkey) brains have signals that travel much faster than other brain signals. These trigger flight, fight and fear responses long before more reasoned responses. This brain is much less malleable than the rest of the brain which is much more able to learn from experience.  This old brain is the hardest place for grace and redemption to reach. Many prejudices emanate from such visceral instincts. This does not justify such prejudices but it means that addressing them is a life’s work.

    As LGBTQIA+ people we too make this painful journey – we are still learning what ‘generous Christian inclusion’ fully means in us rather than listening to the prejudice that can rise in our own hearts and minds as well as with others. This is a spiritual and psychological locus which makes for shame that impacts negatively our self-esteem. Of course, for Christians our safe identity is in Jesus Christ as children of God. There is security from that belonging when ‘sticks and stones’ have sought to do us harm. However, if in church or family or community our sense of genuine inclusion is not reinforced but instead questioned, rejected or filtered through visceral prejudice, then our ability to live out the good news of our identity in Christ is hampered. PRIDE is a counter-balance to the undermining pressures we still too often experience.

    It’s great that many PRIDE celebrations include ‘Christians at PRIDE’ groups made up of LGBTQIA+ people and allies. However, can we imagine most local churches present at PRIDE, generously inviting people to the gospel and life amidst the rainbow people of God, protecting those still harmed by hateful words and actions?

    We’d need a church which is genuinely safe enough with the ability to nurture everyone and address the fears that rise from our prejudicial depths. Even as the glitter and the glamour of PRIDE cheers us to a smile, these celebrations remind the church that there is a very long road still to travel.

     

     

  • Wanting to be One: The Rural Church Today

    by Claire Lording, Vicar of the Benefice in Pershore in the Diocese of Worcester and member of General Synod. Along with fellow parish priest Jo Stobart, she is standing as a ‘pair’ for election to the Crown Nominations Commission

     

    “I don’t like the countryside. It’s a soggy sort of place full of birds and animals wandering around uncooked.” Not my words, but those of Lady Bradley, a completely fictitious Victorian detective who graced our screens at the end of the last century. The truth is though that many people don’t like the countryside. Rural communities are too often misunderstood and defined by what can make them challenging places to live in. Yes, they can be beautiful places, but realistically they can also be isolating, hard to reach, lacking local amenities, ageing, home to stressed-out farmers, places of a variety of views including some very conservative opinions, and full of churches struggling to be Kingdom People with never quite enough volunteers or congregation. But they are also, most importantly, places where things can and do really happen.

    I’ve always ministered in rural communities and rural market towns and have never ceased to be thankful for the ‘can do’ attitude that these communities have had. The rural community has a deep sense of the value of relationships and of being immersed in the place that it is, so there is often a sense of simply getting on with life, inside and outside the Church. The seasons come and go and the community, as place and people, is still there, having weathered whatever storm or challenge has come its way. Not without cost or a sense of loss, but with a great degree of resilience. Perhaps in a rural environment where we see creation and the land around us grow, flourish and die, year after year, we have come to live with the reality of death and the possibility of resurrection and new life in a more natural way than others may experience.

    Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why in the rural places I’ve been there has never been an issue with the ordination of women to the priesthood, and then to the episcopate. Relationships really do matter in small communities, and it is these which count more than anything else because people are hopefully not anonymous folks down the road, but individuals with names and stories to share. Whether consciously, or unconsciously, people in rural communities are working at being one, knowing that this is how their community will continue and have the best chance of thriving.

    With all this experience, it shouldn’t have surprised me that, when the Living in Love and Faith course was launched, the parishes I work with would appreciate the opportunity to get involved. Not in huge numbers, but certainly enough to feel that we could contribute to the conversation. And what was most beautiful was the conversations we shared. People came with open minds and a sense of trust because the people round the Zoom screen or round the table were not complete strangers. Here were people from the same communities who were committed to listening to each other because that’s how we can best live together.

    There were differences of opinion and thinking as views were shared and we were always mindful of those not present, whose thoughts might have been more challenging in their conservatism. But those who were present remembered, at all times, that there was diversity on the screen or in the room. It was a privilege to see how some people moved from a place of having a deeply-held traditional understanding of marriage, to being insistent that everyone should be able to get married in Church, and what could we do about it? There was also real understanding of those who wanted to hold on to their traditionally held views about marriage; a sense that we will respect and honour each other, even when we don’t agree.

    There was a depth of compassion and a real desire to do more – to do everything we possibly could – for everybody in our churches and community, however they choose to identify themselves. This was the coming together of a group of people who wanted to be one, because they knew that God sees us as one and that we are so much better when we can be who we are meant to be in God’s sight, without fear or uncertainty.

    This was all wonderful and gave me great encouragement that the Church, in rural places and beyond, might be ready to take the next step to being more actively inclusive. Then we went a step further. After successfully using our new coloured lighting to light up Pershore Abbey tower in red, white and blue for the Platinum Jubilee, we had a community request to light our tower in the Pride flag colours. Not a problem, said the church! And then our social media volunteer put together a Pride display outside our community centre. Fantastic, said the church!

    Sharing in the LLF process, lighting a tower, or displaying a Pride flag are small and simple actions, but ones that shout out how forward-looking and inclusive the rural church and rural communities can be. They show that the Church can gently get on with the task of being open and welcoming to all. The rural Church may often be underestimated, but for the time being we will just get on being the best version of Church we know how to be.