What is " Welcoming Congregation?" --sermon
What is "Welcoming Congregation"?
It's a workshop series. We will be examining ourselves, our church, our denomination, and society. Hopefully the workshops will culminate in our taking a series of actions to make our congregation a more comfortable place for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons to be themselves.
The natural question that comes up is something like: Why are making this special effort to welcome homosexuals? Don't we want to welcome everybody?
Consider this:
Churches are the most anti-homosexual institution in America, and much of the justification used to promote anti-homosexual feelings, legislation, and violence is couched in "religious" language. One researcher discovered, for instance, that 95 percent of convicted gay-bashers interviewed in prison cited "religious" motivations for their crimes. --The Welcoming Congregation Handbook: Resources for affirming bisexual, gay, lesbian, and/or transgender people. 2nd ed., Unitarian Universalist Association.
"But our church is dilfferent!" I hear you cry. "We accept everybody!" And so we do. But acceptance is essentially passive. It does not go out of its way to look for problems to solve; for instance, the problem that it's particularly hard for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people to feel safe bring their whole selves into churches.
Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are very often "invisible" minorities within congregations. The reason for this is that they are not encouraged to be visible. They have been taught to keep parts of their lives to themselves, because it make people uncomfortable. Transgendered people are technically more visible, but just because you can see somebody doesn't mean that you see them. Some of us remember when G------- started coming to services and programs in a wig and a dress. Talk about the elephant in the parlor! It wasn't until our then-minister, N.A., preached a sermon on gender, including a renaming ceremony for G-------, that we were willing to look at her and see her. We are all capable of selective awareness, most particularly about things that don't want to know. For transgendered people to come to a service in the first place is them taking a huge risk. They don't know it's safe to do so.
The not-so-hidden message of passive acceptance is, "I won't bother you if you don't bother me," and people hear that message. The understand that acceptance comes with conditions. It does not encourage people to be open about themselves: on the contrary, it encourages them to remain invisible.
Now the UUA is not the Ku Klux Klan. Most of the exclusion of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons in Unitarian Universalist churches is polite, subtle, and unintentional. Wow, does that sound like us? But exclusion is still exclusion: merely harder to root up. Therefore we have programs like Welcoming Congregation, to help us find it, so we can get rid of it.
Our goal is to move from being accepting to being affirming--from passive to active. We want our congregation to be a safe place for people to be visible.
You should all have a handout summarizing the goals of these workshops. They will eventually be posted on the Welcoming Congregation Process bulletin board and on the Society's website at www.uunewhaven.org.
There are certain assumptions built into the program. In the spirit of intellectual honesty, I'm telling you up front what those assumptions are:
Number One is that homophobia and transphobia are part of our cultural baggage, and we have all been acculturated--in other words, we didn't escape a certain amount of brainwashing just because we're so enlightened. Stereotypes, fears, misinformation, and hatred are normal. I defy anybody who even went to primary school to deny this.
Our culture encourages us to believe that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality and bisexuality.
Rarely do we get the chance to talk openly about sexual orientation and gender identity, and mainly, to ask questions and explore our feelings about it. Repression (the avoidance of awareness) is part of our culture.
It's really important to understand the difference between placing blame, whether on ourselves or someone else, and taking responsibility. Blame is useless and actually harmful.
What's actually useful is taking responsibility, by which I mean taking responsibility for your own education. I was going to say, "your own learning experience," but I like the word education better since it literally means, "what you pull out of yourself." Has everybody seen the bumper sticker that says, "They can send me to college, but they can't make me think"?
We can all help each other. We're all reasonably intelligent, but nobody here is an expert. Even if we were, an expert by definition is a specialist: somebody who knows a lot about one thing. Nobody is an expert on everything.
Unless you're actually sleeping with somebody, you just don't know what their sexual orientation is; and often, not even then!
All societies are organized to tell the boys and the girls apart.
BTW, you don't have to agree with these assumptions; they weren't handed down from Mount Sinai. They're the assumptions made by the editors of the Welcoming Congregation Handbook and the Office of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Concerns at the UUA.
As for the process itself: basically, we intend to explore our own internal thoughts, feelings, and knowledge about sexual orientation and gender identity, and the attitudes in the UUA churches and in society at large. We'll explore how we learned the things we know, and then we'll match up what we know against reality and see how accurate it is. We want to see how our attitudes about sexual orientation and gender identity are connected to things like racism and sexism and AIDS.
We want to understand the lives of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people, as best we can, from their perspective; which means listening and asking questions. As I said before, society as a whole is not set up to encourage people to ask questions; so enjoy it while you can.
We want to find out how homophobia, subtle or blatant as it may be, ultimately hurts and controls everybody, gay or straight. And we want to do all these things in a religious way, because dismantling homophobia and heterosexism is religious work.
BTW, anybody who wants to join the planning team, please do. This is a standing invitation: the more people involved, the better. We hope to have fun with the process. Because workshops, services, and special events, various people will be standing up in services and identifying themselves as willing to talk about Welcoming Congregation during coffee hour.
Along the way, we will be deciding what steps we want to take to improve things around here, and then taking those steps. Then we sit down together and decide if we feel like we're done, process-wise. We evaluate ourselves: are we ready to call ourselves a Welcoming Congregation?
Yes? Okay!
We write it all up and mail it off to the UUA, and that's the process.
These workshops have some ground rules:
1. Respect anonymity. Ask for confidentiality. What does that mean. It means it's okay to talk about the workshops with somebody outside, as long as you don't name names. UNLESS somebody has something to say that they don't want to leave the room. If that's what they want, they should ask for it, and we will all respect that.
2. Set your own boundaries for personal sharing. This is not an Encounter Group, where somebody gets put "on point" and everybody attacks them. If you don't want to answer a question or take part in an exercise, you don't have to.
3. Speak from your own experience, please. Try, try, try not to generalize. This one is really hard. It's so easy to start pontificating.
4. We are all different. Please respect differences between people. Even you, yourself are probably eleven different people on the inside; try to respect them all.
5. There are certain ways to be in a group that make it easier to communicate. Try to use "I" statements, as opposed to "they." If somebody's speaking, let them finish the thought. Make opportunities for everybody to speak. Even shy people sometimes want to say something if people will listen. Listen.
I know these rules are just basic courtesy, but it bears repeating.
It's a workshop series. We will be examining ourselves, our church, our denomination, and society. Hopefully the workshops will culminate in our taking a series of actions to make our congregation a more comfortable place for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons to be themselves.
The natural question that comes up is something like: Why are making this special effort to welcome homosexuals? Don't we want to welcome everybody?
Consider this:
Churches are the most anti-homosexual institution in America, and much of the justification used to promote anti-homosexual feelings, legislation, and violence is couched in "religious" language. One researcher discovered, for instance, that 95 percent of convicted gay-bashers interviewed in prison cited "religious" motivations for their crimes. --The Welcoming Congregation Handbook: Resources for affirming bisexual, gay, lesbian, and/or transgender people. 2nd ed., Unitarian Universalist Association.
"But our church is dilfferent!" I hear you cry. "We accept everybody!" And so we do. But acceptance is essentially passive. It does not go out of its way to look for problems to solve; for instance, the problem that it's particularly hard for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people to feel safe bring their whole selves into churches.
Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are very often "invisible" minorities within congregations. The reason for this is that they are not encouraged to be visible. They have been taught to keep parts of their lives to themselves, because it make people uncomfortable. Transgendered people are technically more visible, but just because you can see somebody doesn't mean that you see them. Some of us remember when G------- started coming to services and programs in a wig and a dress. Talk about the elephant in the parlor! It wasn't until our then-minister, N.A., preached a sermon on gender, including a renaming ceremony for G-------, that we were willing to look at her and see her. We are all capable of selective awareness, most particularly about things that don't want to know. For transgendered people to come to a service in the first place is them taking a huge risk. They don't know it's safe to do so.
The not-so-hidden message of passive acceptance is, "I won't bother you if you don't bother me," and people hear that message. The understand that acceptance comes with conditions. It does not encourage people to be open about themselves: on the contrary, it encourages them to remain invisible.
Now the UUA is not the Ku Klux Klan. Most of the exclusion of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons in Unitarian Universalist churches is polite, subtle, and unintentional. Wow, does that sound like us? But exclusion is still exclusion: merely harder to root up. Therefore we have programs like Welcoming Congregation, to help us find it, so we can get rid of it.
Our goal is to move from being accepting to being affirming--from passive to active. We want our congregation to be a safe place for people to be visible.
You should all have a handout summarizing the goals of these workshops. They will eventually be posted on the Welcoming Congregation Process bulletin board and on the Society's website at www.uunewhaven.org.
There are certain assumptions built into the program. In the spirit of intellectual honesty, I'm telling you up front what those assumptions are:
Number One is that homophobia and transphobia are part of our cultural baggage, and we have all been acculturated--in other words, we didn't escape a certain amount of brainwashing just because we're so enlightened. Stereotypes, fears, misinformation, and hatred are normal. I defy anybody who even went to primary school to deny this.
Our culture encourages us to believe that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality and bisexuality.
Rarely do we get the chance to talk openly about sexual orientation and gender identity, and mainly, to ask questions and explore our feelings about it. Repression (the avoidance of awareness) is part of our culture.
It's really important to understand the difference between placing blame, whether on ourselves or someone else, and taking responsibility. Blame is useless and actually harmful.
What's actually useful is taking responsibility, by which I mean taking responsibility for your own education. I was going to say, "your own learning experience," but I like the word education better since it literally means, "what you pull out of yourself." Has everybody seen the bumper sticker that says, "They can send me to college, but they can't make me think"?
We can all help each other. We're all reasonably intelligent, but nobody here is an expert. Even if we were, an expert by definition is a specialist: somebody who knows a lot about one thing. Nobody is an expert on everything.
Unless you're actually sleeping with somebody, you just don't know what their sexual orientation is; and often, not even then!
All societies are organized to tell the boys and the girls apart.
BTW, you don't have to agree with these assumptions; they weren't handed down from Mount Sinai. They're the assumptions made by the editors of the Welcoming Congregation Handbook and the Office of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Concerns at the UUA.
As for the process itself: basically, we intend to explore our own internal thoughts, feelings, and knowledge about sexual orientation and gender identity, and the attitudes in the UUA churches and in society at large. We'll explore how we learned the things we know, and then we'll match up what we know against reality and see how accurate it is. We want to see how our attitudes about sexual orientation and gender identity are connected to things like racism and sexism and AIDS.
We want to understand the lives of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people, as best we can, from their perspective; which means listening and asking questions. As I said before, society as a whole is not set up to encourage people to ask questions; so enjoy it while you can.
We want to find out how homophobia, subtle or blatant as it may be, ultimately hurts and controls everybody, gay or straight. And we want to do all these things in a religious way, because dismantling homophobia and heterosexism is religious work.
BTW, anybody who wants to join the planning team, please do. This is a standing invitation: the more people involved, the better. We hope to have fun with the process. Because workshops, services, and special events, various people will be standing up in services and identifying themselves as willing to talk about Welcoming Congregation during coffee hour.
Along the way, we will be deciding what steps we want to take to improve things around here, and then taking those steps. Then we sit down together and decide if we feel like we're done, process-wise. We evaluate ourselves: are we ready to call ourselves a Welcoming Congregation?
Yes? Okay!
We write it all up and mail it off to the UUA, and that's the process.
These workshops have some ground rules:
1. Respect anonymity. Ask for confidentiality. What does that mean. It means it's okay to talk about the workshops with somebody outside, as long as you don't name names. UNLESS somebody has something to say that they don't want to leave the room. If that's what they want, they should ask for it, and we will all respect that.
2. Set your own boundaries for personal sharing. This is not an Encounter Group, where somebody gets put "on point" and everybody attacks them. If you don't want to answer a question or take part in an exercise, you don't have to.
3. Speak from your own experience, please. Try, try, try not to generalize. This one is really hard. It's so easy to start pontificating.
4. We are all different. Please respect differences between people. Even you, yourself are probably eleven different people on the inside; try to respect them all.
5. There are certain ways to be in a group that make it easier to communicate. Try to use "I" statements, as opposed to "they." If somebody's speaking, let them finish the thought. Make opportunities for everybody to speak. Even shy people sometimes want to say something if people will listen. Listen.
I know these rules are just basic courtesy, but it bears repeating.