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GLAD Sunday School at General Assembly: Welcoming All Our Families, Especially LGBTQI

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GLAD Sunday School at General Assembly: Welcoming All Our Families, Especially LGBTQI

This year at General Assembly GLAD offered a Sunday School as part of the GA’s regularly offered Sunday School options. Led by Alliance Council Moderator Karen Barr, the morning’s activities were planned to give people an opportunity to expand their thinking about who is or is not included as we learn to welcome.

The class was listed in the Assembly DockWelcoming All Our Families, Especially LGBTQI. The 35 people who attended ranged in age from 16 to 90! The morning focused on families that include members who are LGBTQI – (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, and intersexed).

Karen gathered attendees into small groups and guided them to share stories of the many diverse families that already make up their church families and stories of the things we can all do to make sure all families experience welcome in our churches.

The book Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay in America is a good source of stories for discussions like this. Many pastors have also described it as a great source for sermon illustrations. Attendees then discussed who might feel excluded when we don’t make our welcome of LGBTQI persons explicit. The groups were given a variety of short personal stories of welcome and exclusion, ranging from the heart warming to the heart breaking.

The groups considered what new understandings of welcome the stories held for them and were asked to focus on how the persons in the story might have felt in their church. Attendees were explicitly asked to consider how the person in the story might have felt welcome – or not – in the attendees’ home churches, not how discussion participants would have wanted the people in the stories to feel. to feel.

GLAD’s Easter Writing Project can be found here.

For the stories Karen drew heavily from the GLAD Easter Writing project as well as other sources. It was clear that the discussion was making a difference as comments of “I never thought of that before” were heard over and over.

Sharing the stories of real people and real families is a proven way to connect people to the realities of LGBTQI people and their families. You may find this discussion model useful in your congregation.