Standing Out

Bringing someone new to church has always required preparation. I have the ambivalence shared by many folks in my tradition toward extending the invitation. Outing myself as a churchgoer, let alone inviting someone into my sacred space, feels like a perilous adventure in a world where people sometimes hear "bigot" or "backward" or "bully" when I say "Christian."

I also have a particular reason to be nervous about bringing someone to church for the first time: the receiving line. You see, I am a ministers' kid. That's right -- ministers', plural. Mom and Dad were my pastors as early as they were my parents. So when I invite someone to join me at Mom's or Dad's church or in the churches I have served, I have learned to give the visitor a warning: "At the end of the service, don't stand next to me." They won't realize the significance, but I know, standing at the back of the church, I am in the receiving line. I am standing where just about every single person in the congregation will want to shake my hand and ask me (or tell me!) about the news of my life. That's a lot of small talk, especially for someone new to the community.

Being a ministers' kid follows this pattern in other ways. I have the joy of having communities of faith all over the country. I have stood in other churches' receiving lines and told the minister my name, only to have them say, "Chuck and Barbara's daughter? How are they?" Any congregation they have touched has grown in its theology and its sense of purpose, and so its members will show me love and gratitude I could not hope to earn.

That love also means that my beloved fellow churchgoers, even the ones to whom I have not spoken for years or decades, feel a sense of participation in my life. I am their goddaughter: they hug and they fuss and they worry about me. They pray with me, and when I am gone, they pray for me. And as my life enters the prayer chain, it becomes very public, and sometimes as overwhelming as the receiving line. Because even with the best of intentions, prayer for one too long distant can become gossip.

So I have been hesitant in sharing a piece of myself with this beloved community. I am bisexual.

This news will be startling to some because I have never felt the need to come out. My attraction to people across the gender spectrum has felt so fundamentally a part of me as to not need a separate declaration.

But there is a darker reason: I have benefited from appearing straight. In a world just now coming around to accepting gay ministers and marriage equality, bisexuality is still a bit weird for most people. I have mostly dated men, and so I haven't needed to open conversations about the news of my life with a discussion of my sexual orientation. I have avoided telling folks who might pass the news of my dating a woman down the prayer chain. Because I know that we bring our best selves to prayer, but also our worst, most desperate, most broken ways of seeing ourselves and the world.

Even deeply prayerful folks, people I love, harbor the deeply broken understanding that bisexual people are confused, or unable to settle down, or unwilling to choose a real orientation. In a close conversation, or an intimate prayer, I could clear that up. I am not confused: I am very clear about who I am called to be, and as clear as anyone about the part my sexuality plays in that call. I am not only able but overjoyed to settle down; commitment to someone, body and soul, is where I find the peace of God on earth. This is my real orientation: I delight in the possibility of love with someone, regardless of their gender.

But it is hard to have a close conversation or an intimate prayer with each of the people I'm privileged to have as godparents. So it is hard to know how they will hear this news. I am anxious about what my sharing it will mean for my relationships, and for my calling in the church and in the world.

And yet I have decided to share it. I can no longer show fidelity to my love while being silent about the ways that love has made me grow in joy and in humanity. I can no longer be true to the calling God has placed on my heart without being clear about this way God has shaped me. 

I seek to honor the godparents I have been given in my parents’ ministry, and I seek to honor my own call to ministry. What shape that calling will take is its own long conversation, but I know that it will be just as public and intimate and chaotic as the church receiving line.

My choice to be out is political, it is pastoral, and it is prayerful. So I invite you to church, and to pray with me.