Coming Home
Throughout Advent, Virginia Methodists for a New Thing is sharing stories exploring what it means to be able to come home for Christmas. The stories are anonymous because the United Methodist Church continues to be an unsafe space for the LGBTQ+ community. I found the latest story to be quite powerful.
I have never doubted who I am and even more so, whose I am. From a young age, I had always been taught that God loved me for my authentic self, for all my flaws and imperfections. In recent years, as I have grown more comfortable with every piece of myself, including my sexual orientation identifying as bi, I can’t help but dwell on this notion of coming home. It’s one thing to come out, but another to come home. Neither are easy. Neither do not involve some degree of anxiety or fear. For many, it can be a profoundly beautiful and reassuring moment, but for some of us, there will always be those in our lives who begin to distance themselves. I think of both coming out and coming home as dynamic and theological moments. I say this as someone who has not come out to everyone, but who also recognizes that I’m making my way home every day. For me, coming out has been an experience of holding precious the image God has imprinted on my life.
It’s the recognition that God has searched my heart and called me beloved. If I didn’t believe this, I probably would not have responded to a call in the life of the church in the first place. Which brings me to coming home… I find myself in a peculiar space because I believe I can come home to the Church, but I don’t feel I can be welcomed home…yet. The church is both a fragile and vulnerable place to be when you live in a narrative that will wax poetic for you to come home all the time because they don’t want to be called hateful, but once you walk through the door past a “sacred worth,” facade and under the harmful and sanitized arch of the failed and hypocritical “Open hearts…”, you soon discover that you are not welcome home because you are “incompatible.” Not to mention, our denomination has projected a narrative onto this space that a lot of times, feels debilitating. And while I can only speak as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, we collectively cannot remain ignorant to the intersectional effects that come with how this space to which we all belong has been defined for us.
We can’t come home to the Church, until the Church repents of what it has so long called “home” on its own terms. A home they like to cater to their own needs, wants, and people. I have been grateful to have come home to my parents and sister; they affirm me, they see me, and they love me for me. I knew it was time to come home to myself and to the Church when a movement of the Holy Spirit was present when our Conference stood in holy resistance to the events of February 2019. My tears that day were raw, but filled with hope. And I have that faith that one day I can feel welcomed home by the Church. This faith is rooted in the one who comes home.
We like to make Advent about us, tossing around language of journeying and approaching the manger; however, I would challenge us to shift away from this and toward an understanding that it is Christ who comes home to us. The incarnation, Christ’s in-breaking into chaos, welcomes me—welcomes us—home in a world, dare I say a Church, that is unwelcome. Might we challenge the Church—the United Methodist Church—to view the Advent narrative as one in which the loving and embracing welcome of Christ overwhelmed all that the world calls unwelcome. Christ comes home to a couple living in fear of being shamed, who are refused welcome. Christ comes home to a meager cattle trough and barn labeled dirty and insignificant. When I look at Advent, I experience a Christ who welcomes me home without shame, with a place to rest my head and heart, and tells me I matter. Christ will continue to come home, but will the Church welcome us home as they have welcomed Christ home?
Virginia Methodists for a New Thing is a grassroots movement of members in the Virginia Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. This group of laity, clergy, and retired clergy seek the next faithful step for United Methodists in Virginia as we live into being a church for all of God’s people.
The movement is a broad coalition of people from a variety of backgrounds all seeking to increase the representation of voices at God’s table. We view the issues facing the United Methodist Church as complex, intersectional, and multifaceted. We also know that despite the audacious goals and difficult road ahead, it is Christ that leads God’s church forward into a new future. We covet your participation, your prayers, and your feedback.
Ready to join this New Thing? You can become a part of the movement here.