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Core Value: Spiritual Transformation
It can be as difficult to talk about spiritual transformation as it is to discuss why jazz is moving or why Frida Kahlo’s self-portraiture is powerful. These are deeply individual and personal experiences, and we are affected and driven by them often in very personal, unique ways. But their beauty and their effect on us is very real.
The impact of our faith, too, though personal and individual, is real; it must be. The author of Hebrews defines faith as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. The author of James writes that faith isn’t complete without action. And Paul often sculps in his letters the shape of a faith that must be a verb, a faith that must be lived out and not only thought of. These writers echo and underscore the words of the gospel writers and the aphorisms of the historical Jesus, where discipleship and faith are illustrated as a litany of decisions all day each day (like sobriety) to bring people into community: figuratively and literally by feeding the hungry, healing the sick, freeing the prisoner.
As queer and genderqueer people, finding faith communities that included our selves and relationships, our sexualities and our families, was for many or most of us a profound shift in what we had imagined to be possible. For many of us it changed what we thought we deserved and what we dreamed for our futures. As churches and Churches, extending that invitation to others who have been taught to doubt their worth and humanity (and whose humanity and worth we have been taught to doubt) is the substance and the change-making catalyst of our faith.
Justice and compassion can seem abstract and esoteric, but they are in fact a person in front of us, and spirituality transformed engages with people in need. Transformative faith resists the apathy and justification of Satan (get behind me!) that insists: There is no accountability, it's just a parable. You don't have to change anything, just say you believe in change. You don't have to risk anything meaningful, just give a little bit here and there around the edges to make it look good, but not enough to matter. Our faith changes us and makes change with and through us in the world around us.
Whether to trans school kids, or Jesus’s Syro-Phoenician woman, or gay sex workers, or Marcella Althaus-Reid’s lemon vendors, we are about more than welcome. We offer more than shared rite and sacrament. Change-making faith offers namaste: we bow to one another with reverence. Life-altering righteousness knows that we inter-are, that there is no place where I stop and you begin. And transformative spirituality makes of all people the church: we are no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, but one.
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