In Forefront's latest blog, Rev. Venida shares her journey of becoming an advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community. This piece was first published in The Academic Forum of New Jersey City University. Happy Pride Month!
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Without provocation, without my consent, and clearly without thinking, she actually placed her thumb, index, middle, ring and pinky fingers on my lower abdomen. She approached me by asking, “Is everything okay?” And then she made things not OK. I wasn’t bothering her. I was minding my own business with Todd, Mom and Dad, mindlessly meandering through the lovely lobby of my hotel.
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I went to a Fundamentalist Evangelical Bible College that provided an indoctrination instead of an education. I was taught what to think not how to think. However, when I was introduced to the Wesley Quadrilateral, it forever informed the way I approached my belief systems, ethics, and faith. John Wesley, the Founder of Methodism suggests that in order to come to a well-thought-out conviction, belief, or ethic we must draw from tradition, Scripture, reason, and experience.
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For me, enough people and inward voices poked at this tower, and eventually, it all came down! For some their tower never falls, it only has a few missing blocks that may be easy to ignore, and they persist forward. But for many of us, we had too many missing blocks, and our towers came crashing down. I promise you this isn’t the first generation to deconstruct or recover from church trauma…this has been a part of our human life cycle forever!
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Some come from traditions where babies are baptized, and others where they are dedicated. So which one is correct? My answer, either or, both and... They both in many ways aim to accomplish a similar purpose but by different means based on varying historical traditions within Christianity.
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As an Executive Council, this group is responsible for communicating with each other on a regular basis, sharing updates from their respective domains, and running all large decisions by each other. When it comes to large decisions, no one person on the Executive Council has overriding veto power, and any disagreements come to the Leadership Team.
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It is our bittersweet joy to announce that Jonathan Williams, teaching pastor and one of the founding staff members of Forefront Brooklyn, has decided to continue growing and pushing himself beyond Forefront’s walls. While he and his wonderful family will remain in Brooklyn and will always be a part of our church family, he has decided that it’s time to explore a new career and direction.
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It all came to a head when I was asked to sign a leadership contract, promising not to live with my partner before marriage . Oh, and I had to put pen to paper to say I affirmed church policy against gay marriage and sex before marriage.
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After James, I consciously made shared faith a non-negotiable. It would’ve been nice if my newfound self-awareness had produced a boyfriend who carried a gold-edged Bible in his backpack and had abs that caused Mary to weep all over again, but in reality, it drastically reduced the pool of eligible men.
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I’m glad you consider yourself progressive, congrats, but is your presence actually and actively moving the needle on important values and issues in your church, or is it mostly providing “progressive cover” for your church’s conservative policies, leading to an inadvertent “duping” and “misleading” of congregants?
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If we’re truly going to be an equitable church then we can no longer have one voice leading the way. If we’re going to make radical equity one of our values then we absolutely need to be radically equitable in our leadership.
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Forefront has changed us by helping us learn and unlearn, as well as reinvigorated our theological imagination. We found folks who shared with us a faith affinity that empowered us to take our faith to the streets to denounce power.
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I wasn’t ready to give up on the idea of church, but I wanted to find a place that was fully inclusive and more aligned with where I was at with my faith. I began to realize that maybe finding community was less about fitting myself into a space and more about building connections around the things I value and care about.
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That was in 2001. After 9/11 happened, I got really depressed, drank way too much, and out of sheer desperation I wandered into a coffee shop that was also a church and decided to try things one more time. I realized I needed a religion that was about love, not just about me.
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Our past experiences with other churches haven’t made our faith journeys easy, but Forefront has given us the freedom to live in the uncertainty of faith. We’ve been able to admit our anxieties and fears, to be okay with asking good questions rather than having all the answers, and to be welcomed into a community where wrestling with faith is not only accepted but encouraged.
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This genealogy was not a group of the righteous. This was a group of imperfect people who made some imperfect decisions. But here’s the beauty. Their imperfections are what made them heroes of an incredible reputation. They were tested, twisted, turned, suffered loneliness, estrangement, they knew confusion and conflict, and yet they endured. It was in their endurance that the Messiah comes.
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Seeing the way that everyone was welcomed to be their fullest selves in Christ really made Forefront feel like the church home I didn’t know I was looking for.
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Until that moment, I had never put together the pieces that my rejection of God and spirituality came at the same time that I was discovering my sexuality. And suddenly, it all made sense.
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Many scriptures are up for interpretation and many people sent me hard definitive “words from God”. I didn’t know what to think or feel. I cried up to God and I got one verse from Sunday school thrown at me. “All good things come from me.” God was always guiding me.
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