I’m about a year-and-a-half into my new job at the work church now, which is keeping me as busy as ever — resulting in my lack of posting here, despite my desire last fall to dig back into more long-form writing and commentary. Combined with my work at the home church and my various volunteer commitments, I’m finding my time increasingly eaten away. My fiancé probably wishes (no, I know he wishes) he had more of my time.
This spring, my work church, home church, and another in town partnered to launch a new ministry reaching out to those curious about the church or faith, those with past church hurt and trauma, or those who generally find that a traditional church experience just doesn’t work for them. Much of my busy-ness can be attributed to that new ministry, Common Table, but it has been a very good busy, indeed.
In my work with Common Table, I’m brushing off and honing up on some old expertise and leaning into the joyful discomfort of practicing new skills. It’s been quite the empowering and fulfilling experience.
It was through Common Table that one of our pastors at my home church, St. John’s Baptist, came to hear more about my own personal story coming to faith and dealing with the challenges of growing up gay as a Baptist in the South. After hearing that story, he asked me to share it at church as part of this summer’s worship series, “Woven Together in Love: The Kind of Church Our World Needs,” and I had the opportunity to do so during worship on Sunday, July 21, 2024.
Below is a recording of that personal testimony from the full worship livestream, followed by the text of the prepared remarks. Please note that the prepared remarks may differ somewhat from those actually delivered during the service.
Prepared remarks:
As many of you know, we recently began Common Tabe Charlotte, our new joint ministry with my work church St. Stephen United Methodist and St. Luke Missionary Baptist. Lee was present at our first event in April and heard me share a story as part of that event’s message and asked me to share it in the future. I’ve adapted that story a little bit to fit today’s theme, a church that encourages and lifts people up.
I want to start by painting a little bit of a picture for you…
Imagine yourself as a teenager or young adult, alone and in your room. For whatever reason, you’re feeling confused, frightened, lonely. Perhaps you’re feeling a bit ostracized or beaten down. You have no idea how you’ve gotten to this point, and you keep asking yourself why the world is so mean and so cruel. You’ve got questions, and lots of them. As they keep swirling around in your mind, you find that you don’t have the answers, and you aren’t sure you know anyone who can answer them. You’ve searched for answers for years, and you’ve stretched your mind and all the resources at your own disposal in attempts to find love and belonging.
I imagine this is a story that many of us can relate to, at least in some small way. We’ve each had a point in our lives when we’ve felt lost, forgotten, left behind and confused why the world is the way it is.
Maybe it happened when you were a teen or a young person. Maybe it is happening now.
The point is: You had or maybe still have questions. Deep, challenging questions. You might be feeling lonely, forgotten, and abandoned.
Of course, we know one of the solutions to these experiences is Community. But, it is a deceptively simple solution. For one thing, community can be hard to find. And, inasmuch as community can be a salve, it can also be a source of great hurt and pain, especially when community goes wrong — or if you grow up feeling like you’re different — or if you grow up standing on the outside, constantly looking but not invited into the rooms filled with the people who have all the power or all the money and make all the decisions.
This is why I’m grateful for St. John’s, and grateful for the worship series we’ve embarked on this summer, and for today’s message. St. John’s is a place where community is done right.
St. John’s stands in stark contrast to the church community of my childhood. I grew up as the grandson of an itinerant, country Baptist preacher. My family were members in an independent, fundamentalist Baptist church on the outskirts of Winston-Salem. This was the place where, for me, community went wrong in all the ways it possibly could.
In this church, the bible was taken literally — word for word in the King James Version. Their version of the gospel, if you could call it that, was rooted in coercion and fear, with a healthy dose of hate and vitriol reserved for those who were different. But, it was my community, the only community I’d ever known.
With firm pressure from the pulpit, I was baptized at a much too young age and became one of the church’s so-called “preacher boys,” kids and teens being mentored by the preacher and taught to win souls for Jesus. After my baptism, I had been expecting to be greeted as a brother in Christ, but, just a few years later, I was able to finally put words to those feelings of “being different.”
When I came out as gay, at 14 years old, the community that was supposed to embrace me with love, support, and care suddenly reared back with disgust and hate — the next year of my young life filled with ex-gay prayer sessions and public shaming at the altar.
With some strength I can only credit to God, I found my way out of that community, and I’m forever grateful for new and better communities I found along the way. Like the year I spent healing with the local Unitarian-Universalist congregation, and the final years of my high school days as a member of Wake Forest Baptist Church, one of the only LGBTQ-affirming Baptist churches in Winston-Salem at the time.
I moved to Charlotte in 2007, and spent a handful of years here bouncing around different churches until I found St. John’s in 2012. Here, I immediately wanted to feel at home.
But that didn’t happen overnight. I wanted to make sure that what I was seeing and experiencing was the real deal. I wasn’t going to have community pulled out from under me again.
It took five years of attending, joining in some small groups here and there, and meeting more of you before I finally met with Dennis and said I wanted to join. I told him this story, and asked him a question that had been tugging at my heart for a very long time. My first so-called baptism, coerced as it was, had been met with so much hurt and pain. Dennis, I asked, “Would you baptize me again?” His response was immediate, “It would be my privilege to plan your baptism with you,” he said. And, so it was, in January 2018, at the ripe old age of 32, that I was baptized, for the first true time, right here behind me.
Five years of your witness and love as members of St. John’s is what allowed me to feel comfortable here and to find, years after my time at Wake Forest Baptist, a church I could once-again call home and a community where I would be welcomed and discipled as a fellow believer. You greeted me with warmth and kindness. My sexual orientation didn’t matter, and was just one of myriad parts of my life.
The sermons from this pulpit were guided by a Gospel wholly unrecognizable from that of my childhood church. Borrowing from our covenant, I heard messages here that centered love and encouragement in the family of the church and sought to strengthen — not break — the bonds of Christian love. I found a community that took seriously the responsibility and privilege of being in community with each other, and I saw for myself the “joy of Christian living” each of you exude in your servant leadership here.
Moreover, despite the stereotypes foisted on churches like ours, we take Scripture seriously, taking our cues directly from the Gospels — like when Luke tells us about Jesus’ mission to proclaim good news to the poor and set the oppressed free, or when Matthew shares Jesus’ words: “Just as you did to one of the least of these, you did it to me.”
St. John’s, you are a church family — my church family — in every way a family could be. We see the best in each other, support each other, love each other, teach one another. We’re a church family that has committed itself to living out the Gospel that Jesus taught us, evidenced in the ways we build community here and support our neighbors all across Charlotte and the world.
The Gospel message of love preached here every Sunday, and lived out in our daily ministry in the world, is unique. You should be proud of the community we have built here — a church that lifts people up.
Postscript:
What you won’t see in the video, but I find consistently curious, is just how absolutely nervous I was! You’ll also not likely notice the sweat dripping off my head, except for that one time I wipe it away. In two decades of community work, I’ve participated in more than my fair share of public addresses, comments, and speaking gigs. The nervous butterflies before and during are something I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake!
