80 Tips to make your church a safe and inclusive place!
Posture Shift Pre-Conference
BUILD SAFETY
Safe Church Tips
We collaborated with pastors, parents, and LGBT+ Christians to develop 80 tips for building safer churches. These are raw ideas, fresh from our conference, so we will be editing and cleaning up over time. We did not want to delay making these available immediately!
LBGT+ PANEL
- Offer kindness, identity recognition, respect, encouragement, support, and advocacy for people at risk
- Healthy communication, inviting children to be known by their hearts
- Leadership team is supportive, has a listener/learner mentality
- Pastoral staff is supportive and protective when other congregants are not accepting
- Pastoral team is training the members to be the Church, to see and include everyone in the church
- Being able to show up completely as oneself without fearing condemnation – a place where people don’t assume that we don’t know Christ just because of our sexuality/gender identity
- Privacy – safe people and environments to learn and journey without fear of being outed to a larger community at any step
- The same privacy and safe environments offered to the family of an LGBT+ person
- Parents & families may need to seek wisdom from other sources first, before engaging in conversations with their LGBT+ children
- Be willing to be uncomfortable
- Be willing to listen without correcting or making assumptions
- Don’t pretend it isn’t a big deal or that it doesn’t exist
- Normalize asking about friendships (instead of only asking about marriage prospects)
- Recognize the potential diversity of relationships, living conditions, and paths open to queer people who choose not to pursue traditional marriage
- Don’t treat people like projects; LGBT+ people don’t need to be “fixed,” we need to be understood
- Be willing to die to self for your child
- Lead with love
- Nurture faith identity
- Remember always that “becoming straight” is not the intended outcome of care for LGBT+ people
- Be consistent – recognize that many other people in your congregation are not necessarily living out a biblical sexual ethic (divorce/remarriage, porn addiction, etc) and don’t pretend that possible queer relationships are a different problem
- Instead of asking an LGBT+ person invasive personal questions about their own journey, ask them for resources they recommend for you to understand them better – and then follow through on reading/listening to those resources
- Make a space for minority people that is visible in your church – e.g. gender neutral bathrooms in your building
- Remove a culture of marriage idolatry from your church – if a spouse is the only relationship that matters or the only relationship in which one is allowed to be vulnerable or needy, you are creating a place where unmarried people (including but not limited to celibate LGBT+ people) are isolated with no hope of finding thick community
- Let go of the elevation of “romance” as the only way to connect intimately with another person in your community
- Acknowledge and don’t gloss over the Church’s failures of the past and present
- When an LGBT+ person states that they have experienced harm in their church, believe them and do not leap to the defense of the church
- Recognize that your silence when LGBT+ people are attacked feels like rejection to us
- Speak out from the pulpit on behalf of the lives, safety, and dignity of LGBT+ people when current events negatively impact their rights or acceptance in mainstream society
- Silence kills people who are denied acceptance
- Don’t assume that the Holy Spirit’s top priority is to confront someone in their sexuality or gender identity.
- Be curious without a time limit. Be curious to ask about all of one’s life and experiences and needs.
PARENTS PANEL
- Don’t attempt to coerce a change in a child’s understanding of their experience. To “reset” the relationship can be very difficult after trust has been lost.
- Communicate unconditional love when a child comes out – even when parents do not fully understand, it is important to demonstrate acceptance and commit to walk together and love another along the journey.
- As a parent, ask permission in getting help for ourselves – in other words, it is our child’s story to share until they feel comfortable trusting us to share with others in seeking to get support and guidance.
- Every parent will make many mistakes – a high family commitment to unconditional love can help prevent mistakes or help parents recover from any mistakes.
- As a parent, we did not realize how damaging it was for our child to see our grief – we want to aim to not inflict grief on our children.
- As a parent, it can be tough living in two worlds simultaneously – hoping for a near-term miracle while facing the potential reality of a life-long story. (short-term story versus long-term or life-long) Parents still live in this “tension” (how could they not), but it can be very wounding to an LGBT+ child to live with parents who are constantly hoping their identity or story will go away or change.
- Having conversations, humanizing our LGBT+ child, engaging their stories, honoring their stories, believing them.
- Parents fear that they might be “removed from service” if church leaders find out their child has come out. (One parent reported having to go to PFLAG for support instead of their church leaders due to fear of rejection of their family and concern about harm to their child)
- Move away from fear and towards engagement (radical love) of our LGBT+ children.
- Spend time with parents allowing them to have space to share their story, and of equal importance equip parents with helpful resources.
- Trust that God can lead and teach all members of the family as we “let go and let God” do His work in each family member’s life.
- Understand ethnic contextual or nuance differences (such as shame and honor in certain cultures) and how that can impact how parents are enabled to or prevented from authentic thoughtful care. These cultural distinctions cannot just be told to go away – we must engage parents with respect for their culture (it is a real thing).
- Pray to God and dive deep into relationship with Him – as we as parents journey with our children. Stop trying to fix, and start talking to God (Our Father, Our Creator, Our Lord). He created our children. He has a plan for our children. He will not forget our children. We need to deeply trust the Lord with everything – including our LGBT+ children, their futures, their walk with God, etc.
- Parents could potentially be viewing “their family” in a way that is idolatrous (status, impression, what people think).
- Move from shame to celebration and seeing our child as a whole person and noting when they cling to faith in Christ – that is to be honored and nourished, not criticized and shamed and condemned.
- Let us love our children like Jesus loves us.”Perfect love casts out fear” – that is a supernatural promise from Jesus (the Word) – we need to lean into that promise as parents of LGBT+ children.
- Will we allow God to simply BE WITH US, COMFORT US, EXPERIENCE HIS LOVE, LET GO OF CONTROL, SURRENDER FULLY, and TRUST that God has “got me and got our family.”
- We need to take notice of how God delights in our LGBT+ child! They are made in His image, a beloved child of God, also one who will be in need of grace ONLY AS MUCH AS we are in need of grace.
- I wish faith leaders understood what it is like to be LGBT+ so that they would not just repeat things they’ve heard others say – and to understand what it is like for parents when kids come out (that they could be gentle and curious and caring).
- I wish faith leaders will know that parents of LGBT+ kids go thru suffering – the experience is a suffering – due to actual mistreatment and/or the risk of mistreatment. (Being misunderstood, being given poor guidance, etc).
- Much guidance is focused on “a solution” – what parents most need is compassion and grace and a promise to walk with me no matter what. “I am walking with my child, who will walk with me.”
- I wish faith leaders knew that “we did all the things” (raising a child in the way they should go) and were left with guilt when that plan did not work out – we need you to JOIN US in loving our children – and protecting them in the face of many harms they experience.
- Don’t forget that LGBT+ people are STILL OUR CHILDREN – they are NOT “others” to us….they are US. Moving from dignity and value of “my child” to a theoretical clinical conversation about a hypothetical person. My child is MY child and pastors need to honor that.
- I want church leaders to be “teachable” but to not expect LGBT+ people and parents to constantly be the ones to teach you. Take significant efforts to educate yourself on best-practice engagement and care of LGBT+ people.
- I encourage ALL churches to offer a support or community group for parents and families of LGBT+ people (and maybe even includes LGBT+ people themselves). Make such a group safe but also visible so that families in need can access this kind of community and care. This is a “family thing” – not a shameful thing, so local connection should be made available.
- Marriages can be strained by the extra distress that comes when thoughtful care does not originate from church leaders – effective leadership can foster an atmosphere where entire families walk with one another rather than against one another.
- I would like church leaders to understand how lonely it can be when kids come out – all parents make mistakes, often quite aware of their own mistakes, and they don’t need any extra blame.
- Where does a parent’s pain come from: disappointment from expectations, failure as a parent, knowledge of mistakes, fear of our child having a painful life (a life that could be at risk to harm in this world), worry about their faith, implied assumptions about who our children are and who they will be, toxic beliefs around expectations or status or degree of success, concern about what others will think, feeling helpless at being able to make things ok (fix it).
PASTORS PANEL
- Create space for safety and exploration in what honoring Jesus looks like
- LGBT+ people need as much grace as we freely accept for ourselves
- Make sure that we understand there is not just one group that needs safe spaces – the culture needs to be a place where safe space is assumed, guaranteed and taught.
- Recognize and remember that LGBT+ people are just as precious to God as everyone else.
- A safe church is a place where everyone is named and taught to follow Jesus, and everyone is fully known.
- A safe church is biblical in its position on sexuality and gender, and ALSO biblical in its posture.
- You learn what makes people feel safe by learning their stories. BUILD RELATIONSHIP.
- You have to acknowledge that we’ve gotten it wrong. Own what we’ve done, and repent loudly.
- There is never going to be a time where everybody in your church can be trained for safety, but the worst thing is to not start somewhere.
- Make training for safety a MANDATORY component of leadership eligibility in your church.
- Be ready to honor the identity language preferred by anyone, even if it is surprising or doesn’t make sense without knowing their whole story.
- Recognize that not every person is able to separate political/social issues from personal acceptance.
- You can either be a culture warrior or a cultural missionary, but you cannot be both at the same time. You have to choose.
- Don’t allow the fear of a few (or many) individuals in your church to transfer to you
- Do not make POLICY choices based in fear when the person in front of you needs your care.
- Prioritize life and relationship over “being right”. You cannot share the gospel where you have no relationship.
- Recognize that LGBT+ people are often “the least of these” and be ready to bring them physical and spiritual food/water/shelter.
- Be loud when you express the reasons you are proud of your LGBT+ loved ones.
- Affirm the value of the whole person, regardless of agreement or disagreement on specific issues.
- Celebrate anything you can find that is good, and have a posture of service towards things that are challenging.
- Recognize that LGBT+ people may be bringing a prophetic message to the Church to call us to change the way we do church – are we willing to leave the 99 to go after the one if the one is LGBT+?
- Train your staff (from nursery through college ministry) NOT to talk about people’s futures as if marriage and nuclear family is an inevitable outcome.
