What is in Kelvin's Head?

Coming Out, Coming In, Coming Home

01/02/2013

There’s a new online magazine launched today. It is called Mosaic Scotland, it looks gorgeous and it has an article from me in the first issue. It is classy, sassy and has articles by lots of people I know.

This is what I wrote for it:

There are not that many months that go by without someone asking me why, as a gay man, I choose to work in the church. Now, leaving aside the question of whether any vocation (nurse? teacher? dancer? fool?) is a really a choice, I do know what they mean.

After all, how can a gay man want to work in an institution which, though proclaiming itself to be going heavenward, seems hell-bent on making gay lives a misery?

Of course, life isnâ€™t quite as simple as simple questions seem to suggest. The churches are each themselves a mosaic, a tapestry or a tartan of different colours, moods and temperaments.

Just as you can be fairly sure that not all gay men like Madonna so you can be sure that not all Christians are gay hating protagonists in the culture wars. And then there are those who just love both that Madonna and the Madonna.

Iâ€™m certain about some of the things that I believe about religion but Iâ€™m positively agnostic about others. What about the claim, often made, that gay people are intrinsically spiritual people? I find myself not knowing the answer to that. And yet, the number of LGBT people whom I encounter in faith communities seems to suggest that there might be something in it.

Step by step over the last decades Iâ€™ve seen such people coming together to challenge the status quo from the inside of the religious institutions that they belong to. And in recent months the equal marriage campaign is seeing straight allies from within the churches add their signatures and raise their voices.

They are dearer to me than gold and it is they who convince me that change in the churches is on its way. Some of our straight allies are going through their own coming out process with the pain and worry that coming out seems so often to be associated with. And guess what â€“ congregations are coming out too.

Individual Christians weigh up whether it is worth being out at church and worry they will be badly treated. Similarly, individual congregations are going through agony trying to work out whether to come out to mummy and daddy â€“ the congregational structures whom they want to please but which seem locked into a sexual morality from a generation ago.

Like it or not, religion is not going to disappear overnight. Whilst the dominant discourse of the denominations is against gay rights, all of us are at risk. Whilst churches throw their considerable influence in society against the human rights of LGBT people none of us are safe.

You ask me why I stay? I stay because some things are worth fighting for. Some things are worth changing.

And yet it is more than that. I stay because Iâ€™m nourished in a community of faith which includes people who donâ€™t think as I do. They help me recognise what I think is important. They help to make me whole. They make me who I am.

And I stay because Iâ€™m in the joy business. Once youâ€™ve got used to being paid to peddle joy it is hard to lay it aside. Never mind the privilege of being involved in the intimacies of being with people when their lives are falling apart. I never feel greater faith than when I stand at a grave and I marvel daily at the complex, wonderful stories that I hear from people who are working out how to be completely themselves in a world that is weird, odd and wonderful.

I recently went on a sabbatical trip away from the congregation which I lead in Glasgow.

I travelled in Canada and the USA for three months. I discovered three wonderful truths. Firstly that when I tried to discover the most interesting religious congregations to visit I kept getting referred again and again to places which were led by women and gay men. Secondly, I learnt that though church is the most dreadful thing at an institutional level it is also the most incredible network of kindness and goodwill on the planet. And thirdly I discovered the joy of coming home.

I came out in the church. My coming-out-from-the-pulpit story beats most coming out stories at gay dinner parties hands down though it is a story that Iâ€™ll leave for another day. Having come out in the church I also find it is also the place I come home to.
You ask me why I stay?

It is the place which convinces me to the core of my being that I am utterly, passionately, gloriously loved.

Now, head on over and read the rest of the magazine.

clergy, coming out, LGBT, Mosaic Scotland, priest, St Mary’s Cathedral

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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