By jmb
The following message was shared at Joy Mennonite Church of Oklahoma City on Sudnay, June 7, 2026. Please note that it was written for a very specific context (a progressive Mennonite church). My own personal theology is Humanistic and Pantheistic. You can listen to the talk here or below is a machine-generated written transcript, with a few links and notes added (marked with italics).
We got a lot of good food, and I figure we can continue our conversation anyway. It’ll be a shorter message, but thank you. Some few good things to share.
So I am going to start with one Bible verse, or a short little passage, and then after that we’re going to have – we’ll move into some other stuff. So this is out of Genesis chapter one, and this is in verse… we’re going to read verse 27
“God created humanity in God’s own image, in the divine image. God created them, male and female. God created them.” (Reading from the Common English Bible)
This passage I chose today because it speaks of divine diversity that God created all of human beings, and when we read here, actually, I recently heard a teaching that talked about this passage (which I heard recently at the Oklahoma City Community Pride service)Â that said that we tend to think, in fact, some conservatives latch on this and say, see, there’s only two genders, male and female, but in Hebrew, what really the way this is framed, and it’s this grammatical structure where you say basically you’re comparing two things, you’re saying “I searched from high to low,” obviously you search in the middle too, high to low is showing these, so in this verse it’s really speaking of the wholeness of diversity, and what I especially like about it, was the line, the part that said “in God’s image, in the divine image, God created them, male and female, God created them,” which means, of course, maleness, femaleness, and everything in between. Again, using that grammatical structure of the extremes, all of that is in God’s image, and which means also, if we miss part of that, we miss part of God’s image.
Now, I wanted to preface today’s remarks with that little verse, because I think it speaks to something important, and that is this month, of course, is Pride Month, and so I wonder, and I feel a lot of pride about Pride here at Joy, because we’ve been – we were through a struggle to come to the place of being an open and affirming church, and so I’m going to, since I initially was going to go into some history, I won’t, because y’all are all y’all are old timers, so I’m not going to do that. What I am going to say, though, was it was a struggle. It took time, it took a lot of conversation, it took a lot of challenges, and one of the challenges that came up through that, was the issue of: what will we lose if we open the doors more fully, and especially what will we lose if we come out of the closet about being welcoming to LGBT plus people? What will we lose?
And I hate to admit it, but there were that there was some things that we lost, not so much our little congregation, but the broader Mennonite Church USA did lose many people. Many people have chosen with their feet to go elsewhere. Many congregations have left affirming conferences, many, and if you look at the numbers denominationally, MC USA numbers are much lower, and that’s a real issue, and I know I’ve not talked to Ralph, the pain that he’s felt about that. I remember talking to Moses back in the day about this, that was a very real thing. On the other hand, today I’d like to challenge us to say that if we only focus on the cost, we’re going to miss seeing some incredible benefits and incredible gains that the church gained by welcoming and accepting LGBT plus people, and so today I want to share about three things, three incredible benefits that I think that this congregation, the broader Mennonite Church, and of course people of faith everywhere have gained by welcoming queer people into the community. By the way, I should mention one bit of terminology today. I’m going to use two terms interchangeably: LGBT plus, which means lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and plus is meaning all of the other people who have some kind of different sexual identity, gender identity, all of that is within that plus, and so it’s intended as a, as an inclusive term. The problem, of course, is it still leaves people out. A lot of people are just there with the plus, and so that’s that’s kind of challenging.
So another word we use today is the word “queer,” that is a complicated word, because once one time it was a very pejorative word. Today many LGBT plus people have reclaimed that word, and I’m going to use the word today because I think there is some real power in that word, and we’ll get to in just a little bit about why I think that word is important, and why it is important, especially for cisgender heterosexual people.
So, what are the three benefits?
First of all, we gained tremendously from the people that are now with us, the people that previously were cast aside. In fact, I was thinking this morning, well, actually yesterday, getting ready for this about Randy Spaulding. He was a Mennonite church minister and was also deeply involved in the process of the hymnals, many of the hymnals that we have today. In fact, I believe maybe the purple and green ones, I think he may have been involved with, but he also was involved in hymn writing. I looked into the new song book, one of his hymns was translated by him from German, but I know in some of the other song books he did several of them, and he was someone who was really a dynamic and important person in the church, but about a dozen or so years back, he came out of the closet. He came out to his congregation, and in the end, his congregation —- and I may have the details wrong — but my recollection was the congregation was in the end said, “Okay, we’re okay with that. The conference was not, the denomination was not, and so Randy ended up leaving the Mennonite Church, getting his credentials elsewhere, continuing in ministry, but then the world changed. The Mennonite Church changed, and eventually he came back to the Mennonite Church, and is today credentialed through the Mennonite Church, and we have been so richly blessed by him.
But think about so many other people that the church has been benefited by having these voices, and also some of the people that we lost in the days of exclusion. I remember one friend that I had over the years, who she was for a brief while student at AMBS, but then she dropped out, and she told me the reason I dropped down is I knew it was going to be hard to make it as a female minister, but then I realized if I ever came out of the closet, it was over. There’s no way to ever get hired anywhere. And so today that person’s doing good things, but they’re not in a ministry role, and they’re not in the Mennonite Church, because they were excluded. And so I would argue today the first great benefit of being opening, of being welcoming, affirming to queer people is we are going to gain the talents, the gifts, the creativity that those people bring to the church, and we have, we have been missing them for a long time, and having them back is a really good thing. That’s number one.
Number two, we gain, I think the church as a whole gains something from a queer perspective, and what I mean by queer perspective is a queer perspective is a way of turning things on its head, of questioning norms, of taking of turning everything on its head, and in fact, I’ve heard this word used in the Judaism Unbound podcast, which, by the way, is one of my favorite podcasts, I highly recommend it, whether you don’t have to be Jewish to love this podcast, there’s so much good stuff in it, but they have, in several episodes, have talked about this idea of queering Torah, the idea of taking Torah, Jewish teachings, and then turning it on its head, and the some of the commentators they’ve had on the podcast have talked about that this is not just something that people who have a queer identity related to sexual identity or gender identity was really what all of us can do when we turn things over, and we look at it from a different way. When we say, where am I in this text? Where are the people I care about in this text? In other words, you’re changing it, you’re grappling with it, you’re playing with it in revolutionary ways.
We have, by having relationships with LGBT plus people, by them being a part of the church, by being a part of our lives, we gain from their example, what they have done, of questioning the most sacred norms of our society. You just see the anxiety people have about gender roles and whatnot. LGBT plus people have taught us, so what, so what. People freak out, so what? What would come if I looked at things differently? What would come if I embraced what feels to be true at the deepest level, even if people disagree with me? I would argue that that this queer perspective is a very critically important thing.
I would go a step further to say, in a way, it goes back to our Mennonite DNA. At the earliest days of the Anabaptist movement, what were they doing? They were turning everything upside down.
They were saying the state says we have to be part of the church . . . he state says.
What did the Anabaptists say? Nope, we’ll do something different.
They said you have to have your babies baptized in the state church. to be part of, to be citizens of this state, and the Anabaptists said, “No, we’re going to baptize adults because it’s free choice, and we’re going to do this knowing it’s being seen as treason against the state. We’re going to do it anyway.”
That is a queer perspective on theology that is taking things on its head, and they’re saying, yes, we know the standard wisdom is this, this, and this, but we’ve read the Bible for ourselves, we’ve heard from the Spirit, we know we’re in a different place, and we’re going to follow that path wherever it takes us. And so I would argue, in many ways, when the Mennonite church started to evolve in these issues, we were actually in some ways tapping into that old DNA, that old bit of our identity that said we are the people that question. We are the people that look at things from another perspective. And so we, I think, gain greatly by looking at the example of our queer brothers and sisters and letting them teach us, and for us to learn from their examples.
Finally, I think the third thing that we have gained from being an open and affirming church, which is, we have gained from the struggle itself.
What I mean by that is, if you look at the again, going back to the history, looking back to the early days of the Mennonite Anabaptist tradition, in many ways this tradition, they often talk about it being being watered by the seed of (of the blood of the) martyrs, that the church was, and it grew things that transformational things happened, but it was in part because they were being persecuted, because they are getting pushed back, and that’s often when that happens, when we get that push back, and we have to reach down deep and find the courage to do the right thing, anyway, good things happen. And I would argue the Mennonite Church USA is a much, is might be a smaller denomination, but in many ways it is a more just denomination. It is a community that is rooted in better values because of the struggle. In other words, we, by going through the struggle, by going through the persecution, and again, in our case, it’s minor stuff, but I would.. it’s not intangible, it’s not nonexistent. When we look at in Oklahoma, how many other Mennonite churches do we have to connect with? We have Pilgrimage up in Tulsa, and that’s about it. We don’t have a lot of connections,. That was a cost we had to pay. On the other hand, through that struggle, through having to face that, I think it helped us to find out better who we are. It helped us as a community to be more ourselves.
And so those three things I want to leave us with, as, as to not only focus on the cost paid, but this Pride month to also think about what we have gained and where we are going, and how that this congregation is a better church because we have evolved in these ways, and that there will be other challenges ahead of us. There’ll be other times we’ll have to look at new things, things all over again. The good news is we can follow the example of the Queer community. We can keep queering our tradition, we can keep looking at things in other perspectives. So I’ll leave that and we’ll move into discussion time