This spring I completed a Doctor of Ministry program through Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, NY, one that I began in 2016 and have been working at, on and off, over the last four years. The topic of my dissertation was LGBTQ ministry, and in particular my research focused on how churches can become communities of hospitality for LGBTQ people.
One of the reasons this topic is so important to me is because I currently serve in a denomination that is not affirming of same-sex sexuality, and I have been trying for many years to get my denomination to grapple with the implications of its theology. In keeping with my denomination’s non-affirming position, I wrote my dissertation from this theological starting point. Essentially, I was asking: if this is where we are starting from as a denomination, then what does ministry for gay people really look like? And as a corollary question: what are best practices for churches in our denomination to do effective ministry for LGBTQ people, if we are unwilling or unable to reconsider our theology?
I hope it won’t take much work to convince you that this was an extremely challenging topic to work on, in a non-affirming context, and an extremely challenging approach to take. On the one hand, I personally have a vested interest in seeing the denomination I belong to do better when it comes to its response to LGBTQ people. On the other hand, many of the biases, assumptions, and prejudices that I encountered among otherwise well-meaning Christians made it difficult to engage in the kind of open-hearted, open-handed conversations that are so crucial if a denomination like mine is going to do better. At the same time, throughout my research the Lord was stretching me, challenging me, and pushing me continually to examine my own biases, assumptions, and prejudices. At the end of the day (and the end of my degree), the best I could say was simply the word “hospitality.” Churches that are unwilling or unable to reconsider their theology regarding same-sex sexuality can and should, in the meantime, strive to be communities of hospitality for LGBTQ people.
Hospitality is far easier said than done, however. In the modern world we have lost sight of the biblical vision for hospitality—xenophilia—which had more to do with welcoming in the stranger than it had to do with inviting over your family and friends. We have lost sight of how deeply moral and spiritual the practice of hospitality was in the ancient world, replacing it instead with Martha-Stewardesque images of well-set tables and tastefully decorated guestrooms, used especially for entertaining people who are "like us."
Biblically, however, hospitality is about making space for the person whom we have been taught to think of as “the other.” It’s about opening our communities to the person who is least like us, and in doing so, opening our hearts, our minds, our ears and our hands to them as well.
In concrete terms, I argued that a church can be hospitable to LGBTQ people only if it is willing to do things like: end the silence, nurture safe pathways for coming out, address the power imbalance, and listen to the stories of the gay experience. At the very least, as I tried to do those things in my own life, I came to understand the need for including and affirming gay people in the community of the church far more clearly and profoundly than I ever had before. I came to understand the unique challenges that gay people face, the unique questions that have to grapple with, and the unique gifts that they contribute to the community in ways I never would have otherwise.
I would like to share some of the things I’ve learned about how a church can do better when it comes to the gay people in its midst, here on my blog over the next few weeks. If nothing else, this will keep the conversation I started with my dissertation going, now that my actual degree is finished. But there is something else: because there are gay people in church, and gay people who want to be in church, and gay people who are not in church but the church should be reaching out to them; and unless the church can really learn to open its ears to understand their experience as gay people, it will, I think, do harm to them and dishonor Jesus, both at the same time.
Of course, one of the things I learned, studying this topic for four years in a non-affirming context, is that these issues themselves are fraught with tensions (see my preceding paragraphs where I mention the biases, prejudices, and assumptions). Tension makes us anxious and anxiety makes it difficult to hear well. As a way of trying to alleviate these tensions, then, what I would like to do for this series, instead of presenting one more stuffy theological treatise—you can read my dissertation for that—is to present it as a sort of theological conversation about one of the most fascinating children’s programs I’ve come across in recent years. I’m talking about the show: Steven Universe.
Steven Universe is an animated cartoon created by Rebecca Sugar that aired on the Cartoon Network for five seasons, from November 2013 to January 2019. I got into the show on the recommendation of one of my children, who identifies as queer and non-binary and is a major Steven Universe fan.
Steven Universe revolves around the adventures of a half-gem/half-human boy named Steven Universe.
Yes, I said “half-gem.” In the show, the gems are a species of alien life forms which are literally gems, but they can take on various anthropomorphic shapes, projecting these forms from their gem-like “bodies.”
But wait: it gets weirder…. and awesomer… because Steven Universe is the child of one of these aliens, a gem named Rose Quartz, who fell in love with a human named Greg Universe. Rose has since died, but her spirit lives on in Steven, her half-gem offspring. Steven himself is being raised by Rose’s band of rebel gems—Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl—who are the sworn protectors of earth and together make up a team of adventurers known as “the Crystal Gems.”
Yes, I said “rebel gems.” It turns out that long ago, planet earth was invaded by an army of evil gems from a planet called “Home World,” who wanted to convert it into a Home-World colony. Rose Quartz and her companions fell in love with the our little blue-and-green chunk of rock hurling through space, and rebelled against Home World, driving them off and saving the day. Rose herself is long since gone, but still the Crystal Gems continue the fight she started, defending earth from the on-going attacks of Home World.
If you’re wondering what all this has to do with a dissertation about hospitality for LGBTQ people, stay tuned. Because one of the things that Rebecca Sugar was attempting to do in creating the show was to imagine a cartoon that was not (in her words) “heteronormative.” That is to say, she was trying to create a show that worked as a children’s show in its own right, regardless one’s sexual orientation, but at the same time, it presented issues, characters and themes that young people who did not identify with the heterosexual mainstream could resonate with.As a result, watching Steven Universe as a Christian Pastor helps me to see the world through a unique set of eyes; and because it's in the genre of a children’s cartoon—and a good one at that, with real adventure and compelling characters and imaginative story lines—it allows me to really see with those eyes. The usual things that make seeing so hard (see again my paragraph about biases and prejudices) are bracketed out so that the story can get told. In this way, the show allows the viewer to “enter into” queer issues, themes, and questions, without all the usual anxieties and tensions.
As unlikely as it sounds for me to say it, having worked on this topic at a doctoral level for 4 years, watching Steven Universe has taught me some of the greatest lessons I’ve yet learned, about what hospitality for gay people really looks like, by asking me to bracket out my biases and assumptions so that the story can simply be told.
All that being said, I hope I’ve piqued your curiosity enough that you'll join me for the next few months as I start a theological conversation about some of the themes in Steven Universe, and more importantly, I hope that learning to appreciate these themes will help us all do better—becoming more inclusive and more affirming—when it comes to the gay people in our lives.
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