With gratitude to Stan Mitchell —-

This morning, I spent a few hours with three very sincere, very caring…and very nervous…pastors. The three are currently helping lead their respective congregations through an embattled process of discernment on the matter of LGBTQ+ affirmation/inclusion. A few minutes ago, one of them reached out to me and asked, “If you could say anything to our churches, our people, what would it be?” With hardly any editing and even less hesitation, I was able to write and send this back to him almost immediately…

“At GracePointe, we finally came to realize our job wasn’t to invite LGBTQ+ people to the Table. For one, the Table didn’t belong to us; for another, the precious people that we thought we were inviting…well…they were already there…the One the Table actually belonged to had already invited them.”

“Oh what a mercifully humbling truth for us to face…it was we who were finally making our way to the Lord’s Table and not our wrongly judged siblings; they had been there all along while we were the ones lost and astray. Yes…that was the revelation…the salvation even…ours, not theirs.”

“You see, the fact was, these beautiful children of God had never needed us to do something wonderful for them, they had only deserved that we stop doing something awful to them…they had never needed our church’s ‘generosity’ nor its invitation…but oh how desperately we had unwittingly needed their grace and forgiveness.”

“If there is another way of reading Jesus’ story and understanding his life, I cannot find it.”