Our new website is days away from being live – so exciting! As we prepared to migrate videos to the site, I looked at all the panels that we have captured (knowing that we didn’t even get footage of them all). We wanted to elevate the voices of those who found themselves a minority – even among the other LGBTQ+ folks in the GS community. We wanted their stories to transform us as a community.
One of the first panels featured our trans siblings. Looking at and listening to the participants and recognizing how much they have changed and grown and continued in their journey – as Dolly Parton says in Steel Magnolias, “Laughter through tears – that’s my favourite emotion.”
We held a panel on mental health at a one-day conference we co-hosted. It still takes my breath away to hear the wisdom through vulnerability and badass courage of our panelists as they challenged a room full of Christian therapists to do their homework to understand the unique traumas that many LGBTQ+ people experience.
Since Jamie has been on staff, so many bi-pan folks have connected with him, an online affinity group has formed, and there have been workshops at retreats. But before all that, there was a panel conversation that raised the concern of bi-erasure and many of the assumptions that bi-pan folks encounter all the time.
We’ve had panels on retreat themes including friendship and intersectionality. And a couple of years ago, we had our first non-binary panel. I’ll always remember the four panelists coming together in a group hug at the end – many tearing up as I heard them talk about the sense of solidarity they felt in that moment that surpassed most of what they’d experienced up to that point. This past year at the Ontario retreat the enby chosen family cohort stormed the retreat with an energy and joy that was contagious. I don’t know if any of us dreamed things would evolve so amazingly.
In 2017 we had our first People of Colour panel and in 2018 we had our first Indigenous Two-Spirit panel. I’m so grateful for the folks who participated – and I realize how much I’ve been learning about the emotional labour that is required of panelists in such contexts.
In a few short years so many beautiful opportunities to learn from and with one another. God has given the GS community a special grace to make space for each other, to love across difference, and to keep leaning into our values and postures of humility, hospitality, mutuality, and justice. We’ve been given special grace to embody teachable-ness and to recognize that the learning keeps bringing us back to the beginning.
In 2020, we want to step even more deeply into our desire to decolonize our community practices and open ourselves to deeper transformation in our anti-racism commitments. I don’t fully know what this will look like yet. I know that we will be strengthened as a staff team with the addition of Nadia and Michiko. I know that the hopes for GS to cultivate a BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of colour) queer space in Toronto could bear much good fruit. And I trust that God will continue to lead us step-by-step-by-step.
Because we can’t compartmentalize justice. We can’t work for liberation of one group while ignoring the struggles of another. It is all interconnected.
If you are diminished, I am diminished.
If you are restricted in experiencing the fullness of liberation, I am restricted with you.
My life is bound up with yours.
But together, we will keep moving forward. We will keep passing the microphone. And we will keep pressing into the fullness of freedom and wholeness that is God’s heart for their beloved ones.