It Gets Better VI

I can't believe I have neglected to update this story, which left off when one of my parishioners left a copy of the It Gets Better Project book outside my office and I set it out in our reading nook. See also the earlier   posts in this series to hear how I came to receive the book and the support of Lutheran Church of the Savior in this work.

Not a week after setting the book out, we were hosting a luncheon after a funeral. After eating and visiting with folks, I had gone to my office. When I returned to the luncheon, I found a grandson of the deceased standing in the reading nook, reading the It Gets Better book. When I approached, he quickly returned the book to the shelf, but I picked it up and told him how great and powerful I thought the book was, and asked him what he thought of it. He said he had no idea IGBP had a book version, and that he was surprised to find it on display in a church building.

He had been removed from his youth leadership position in his former Baptist church when he had come out, he said, and had not found a church that wanted a 17-year-old gay kid around. I told him such churches exist; this is one, and there are many others. I told him about my dream of having the IGBP book in churches to parallel the drive to have it in school libraries, as church is another frequent setting for the bullying of gay teens. He told me he wanted to go to college for design, or something similarly awesome, hopefully in New York City. It was a great conversation, one of the most meaningful (for me, at least) I have had as a pastor.

I have not seen him again, and I don't even remember his name, but the joy I find in this memory is not about hoping to make him a member of my church. As great as that would be, I am content knowing that we were able to make this gay teen feel welcome in his time of grief. After his previous experience with church, all too common for LGBT folks of every age, he had every reason to be apprehensive about coming into a Christian church building, even for his grandmother's funeral. I am deeply glad we were able to make him feel as welcome as the rest of his family on that significant day.


This story reminds me that public, visible symbols of support and welcome can make all the difference. Almost every church claims to be welcoming. But how do we communicate our welcome, and to whom? This book is a public declaration to everyone who recognizes it that we stand against bullying, and for the right of gay teens to be their whole, honest selves. It's one small way to live out the welcome that Jesus calls us to extend to all of God's children. It has been successful, as shown in the story above, but I think we as a congregation (and as a wider church) can do a better job of publicizing our welcome, and of living up to the welcoming words we offer.

We want to be welcoming, but it's easier to be insular, to maintain the "good enough" status quo. I want to find ways we can challenge ourselves to follow Jesus into the kind of radical hospitality that so frustrated the religious establishment of his day. To make a public statement is to ask for accountability, and accountability is vital if we are to build new, healthier patterns of welcome. I want us to make public statements about who we are and who we need to be, in our building and on our website and wherever we can, and then I want us to live up to those statements. We can take responsibility for our identity, for living out our call, and in those inevitable moments when we fail we can hold ourselves accountable. To use more churchly language, when we fail we can confess our sin and hear God's forgiveness, then look to our public identity and goals and try again.

The story of the teen and the book reminds me that we can live out our call to follow Jesus, that we can make a difference in more lives than we had expected. In order to do so we must be willing to challenge ourselves, publicly, to leave our comfort zone.  By making public our faith and our work, we make ourselves vulnerable to the scorn of public failure. I'm not saying this is easy, but I am saying the reward of becoming ever more the people God wants us to be is always worth it.