04/29/2026
A repost from Pastor Curtis.
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The Table — our post-church lunch for LGBTQ+ folks — happened on April 19.
Seventeen people showed up… and my heart nearly burst!
There were many beautiful moments, but one has especially stayed with me. Through tears, someone shared: “My 14-year-old self didn’t feel safe at church… but I know without a doubt that she would be safe here.”
Moments like that keep me going.
Then this week, I had coffee with a new friend who was there — someone who joked at the lunch that she has “lapped most of us in age.” She’s in her late sixties, and what she has lived gives weight to everything she says.
With deep conviction, she told me that now more than ever, the church needs the LGBTQ community.
Why?
Because the LGBTQ community knows something about courage. About how to truly belong to one another. About how to embrace a God who is love — and reject every image of God shaped by exclusion.
And those are things the church is at risk of forgetting. Things it desperately needs to remember.
She also shared something I’d never heard before.
In a time when it was genuinely dangerous to be out, q***r people sometimes used a quiet shorthand to recognize one another. Rather than risk saying too much, they would simply say:
“I’m family.”
I love that — I’m family.
