Celebrating New Board Members

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Westerville, OH - At its March and April meetings, respectively, the LOVEboldly Board of Directors voted to appoint two new board members: Mr. Eli Shiltz and the Rev. Br. Ian Boden, OLF.

Eli Shiltz (he/him)

Passionate about helping others and with a faith that has always been central to his life, Eli is an epidemiologist with the Ohio Department of Health. He moved to Ohio in 2018 and began his gender transition in 2020. In his spare time, Eli volunteers with Meals on Wheels and fosters animals. He is an active member of Blue Ocean Faith Columbus.

The Rev. Br. Ian Boden, OLF (he/him)

Born in London, Ontario, and raised in St. Clair, MI, Ian moved to Ohio to attend Capital University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Religion in 2019. He then earned a Master of Divinity at Trinity Lutheran Seminary (part of Capital University) in 2025. Ian is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and currently serves as the Associate Pastor of Emanuel Lutheran Church in Marion, OH, where he lives with his cat, Saint Julien of Norwich.

Ian is also a life professed sibling in the Order of Lutheran Franciscans (OLF) where he has the privilege of serving as the Sacristan, on the formation team, and as an ecumenical representative. His overarching philosophy on ministry is that all people deserve to be seen, heard, known and loved.

The LOVEboldly Staff and Board Team

(First row) Rev. Dr. Ben Huelskamp, Executive Director; Siobhan Boyd-Nelson, Esq., Board Chair; Rev. Brian Steele, Board Secretary; (Second row) Cass Helm, Interim Board Treasurer; NV Gay; Rev. Iva Joyce-Miesse; (Third row) Eli Shiltz; Rev. Br. Ian Boden, OLF

LOVEboldly is an Ohio, faith-based nonprofit working to create spaces where LGBTQIA+ people can flourish in Christianity.

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Blessed are the Doubters

Sunday, April 12, 2026

The Rev. Dr. Caleb Lines

Allied Person of Faith

LOVEboldly Advisory Board

Quote

“Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand into my side. No more disbelief. Believe!’”

John 20:27 (NRSV)

Devotion

I love Thomas’ story! “Doubting Thomas” gets a bad rap for questioning, though. Maybe it’s because I’m originally from the “Show Me State,” but I’ve always felt an affinity for Thomas. I, too, need to see it to believe it. While the other Disciples witnessed Jesus’ resurrection, Thomas wasn’t there and says, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25).

I’m with you, Thomas! What he wants is fair. The other disciples have encountered Jesus, and Thomas wants to experience the same thing. It’s not really doubt, it’s questioning and seeking proof. Thomas refuses to accept what the other disciples have told him unquestioningly. If I’m being honest, the Church could use a lot more of that. The Church treats questioning as weakness or failure. But Thomas shows us it is in a place of uncertainty where we often encounter the divine presence. I think Thomas’ questioning makes him the patron saint of Progressive Christianity.

The Church should do much more showing rather than insisting on naive belief. One of the most significant reasons why people leave the Church is because they have found religious institutions to be poor mediators of God’s presence: churches don’t practice what they preach! Preachers in pulpits talk a good game about love, but do a terrible job of living it out, especially regarding the Queer community.

As a straight, cisgender pastor and ally, I can’t pretend to know what it feels like to wrestle with faith and sexuality or gender identity from the inside. To question or even doubt God’s love for me simply because of who I am. Yet, I have walked alongside Queer friends, colleagues, and congregants who have shared their stories with me. What I’ve witnessed in those journeys is that doubt—especially when faith communities send the message that your very being is incompatible with God’s love—can feel overwhelming.

I see this doubt manifested all the time. People come to me and ask if they can really be Christian and LGBTQIA+ identifying, wondering if they’re really God’s beloved children. These questions echo Thomas’ longing: Unless I see it for myself, I cannot believe. And, like Thomas, they deserve to see it.

What I love most about Jesus’ response to Thomas is that he doesn’t dismiss Thomas or shame him for needing assurance. Instead, he invites Thomas to draw close to see and touch his wounds. Jesus' invitation is a reminder that God doesn’t turn away from our questions or doubts, especially the ones that come from pain and exclusion. Instead, God meets us right there and invites us to seek truth.

The same is true for LGBTQIA+ people who doubt their worth because of what the Church has said or done. God doesn’t condemn that questioning. God says, “Come close, for you are beloved.”  Churches need to show, not just tell.

As an ally, I’ve had my own doubts—not about God’s love for LGBTQIA+ people, but about whether the Church would ever fully live into that truth. I still wonder. But over and over, I’ve witnessed resurrection: in congregations that choose affirmation over exclusion, in voices once silenced who now lead, in the joy of Queer Christians claiming their identity as God’s beloved children. These resurrection moments prove God is still breaking through walls of fear and shame with an unstoppable love.

Thomas wanted to see, and Jesus showed him. In the same way, the Church must do more than speak—it must show Queer people they are beloved children of God with inherent worth and dignity. If you are questioning or wrestling with doubt today, take heart: doubt is not the enemy of faith. It is often the soil where faith grows strongest. Thomas’ doubt led to his bold proclamation, “My Lord and my God!”

In the same way, your questions, your searching, your longing to know you are loved—these, too, can open you to encounter God in more profound, truer ways. May your questions and doubts not be burdens you carry alone, but doorways through which you encounter God’s unstoppable love. May it be so.

Reflection

1.    What questions about God, identity, or belonging have you carried in your own journey?

2.    How might questions be an invitation to draw closer to God rather than a reason to pull away?

3.    Who has helped you see or experience “resurrection moments” when you questioned?

Action

This week, write down one doubt or question you carry. Instead of pushing it away, place it in prayer. Imagine God speaking directly to you, saying, “Come closer. See for yourself.” If you are an ally, reach out to an LGBTQIA+ friend and remind them that they are beloved, proof that resurrection love is alive through our relationships.

The Liberating Power of Easter

Sunday, April 5, 2026 - Easter Sunday

The Rev. Charles Graves, IV

LGBTQIA+ Person of Faith

Quote

“We are an Easter people, moving through a Good Friday world.”

~Bishop Barbara Harris, Hallelujah, Anyhow! 

Devotion

As a preacher, I’ll let you in on a little secret—for a long time I’ve been less than enthusiastic about Easter. After all, what more could I add from any pulpit to the joy of Christ’s Resurrection? Jesus is alive, our salvation is restored, and we again see the joy of new life in Jesus. What else is there to say year after year?

On that first Easter day, it was obvious to no one that Jesus was about to rise up from death and show up alive to those who loved him most. It was as shocking and unbelievable as someone you love rising miraculously from the dead today. But in our modern world we know exactly on what date Easter is coming, what it will look like year after year. After all, every store has been selling Easter merch since mid-February! So where is the surprise? Isn’t it just another holiday?

We forget so easily that the Christian celebration of Easter (whose name comes from the German word for “dawn” or “sunrise”) shares its root and heritage in the Jewish celebration of Passover. We forget that our celebration of Christ’s resurrection is deeply and inextricably rooted in liberation from slavery and oppression of all kinds. All four of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) explicitly describe the events of that first Easter as happening at the time of the Jewish Passover feast—the remembrance of God liberating God’s people from the death of slavery across the Red Sea to freedom.

For those of us in the United States, one of the gravest mistakes in American Christianity is that we so often make faith spiritual and individual, divorcing our own liberation from that of one another and from the community. But for Christians and for people of many global faiths, our origins are profoundly collective, communal, and human.

So many of us have been taught as children that Easter means we can go to heaven if we’ve done just what we were told – you’ve all heard it – that at the cross Christ paid the price – the debt, of forgiveness for our sins. We have heard that what matters most is your “personal salvation,” or whether you individually are “saved,” or where you individually will spend eternity when you die. The theological word for that is “penal substitutionary atonement.” For many of us who are LGBTQIA+, we’ve been taught the heinous lie that we are excluded from God’s love embodied at Easter, or that to inherit God’s love or avoid condemnation we must leave behind what is so intrinsic to us that to do so is death in itself. Perhaps you yourself know this all too well.

Beloved, what I want us to realize is that when we believe this lie, we forget the true meaning of Easter and its roots in the liberation story of Passover. And worse than that, we ignore God’s call to be liberated ourselves and to liberate others. Easter isn’t a spiritual boarding pass to Heaven Airways! Easter is our mandate to be liberated and to liberate others. Easter is our mandate to roll away the stones from the tombs that keep ourselves and our communities locked in death, and watch as God makes those whom our society has killed walk free.

Last year I had the incredible honor to preach at Washington National Cathedral for Pride Sunday, a celebration that just a few years ago would have been unimaginable. As I stood in that hallowed pulpit, I remembered that my parents were children in the first years of school desegregation in America. My grandmother was born on the plantation in South Carolina where her parents had been sharecroppers and lived with her grandmother who had been born enslaved. On the same land. My great-grandmother moved to the North with her family and founded an Episcopal church in 1927, just a century ago, because even there the churches were segregated.

It is easy to forget today that we are not as far removed from slavery in America as we think, and by the same token how far our world has come in just a few generations. I come from Black folks who even while being brutalized by a weaponized “Christianity” that was nothing more than hatred, violence, segregation, and slavery wrapping itself in religion, they knew in their sanctified souls that God is the force of Liberation, and never oppression. They never ceased to call on the name of their Liberator, and they sang and prayed and walked and worked so that we could inherit freedoms they would never see.

You and I come here standing here in a long line of Queer folk, not just over the last 10 or 20 or 50 years, but who, for centuries and millennia, of every generation, Trans folk and LGBTQIA+ folk written out of history books and treated with all manner of hostility. They were never acknowledged as God’s beloved, were excluded from marriage rejected by family, derided and called unspeakable names, but we've never failed to show up and keep fighting and keep singing the songs of liberation. I remember as a closeted college student just 15 years ago, going to bed in tears on so many nights, and especially in those days when one state after another began to legalize same-sex marriage, because I knew that mine would be the last generation in this country know what it’s like to be banned from marrying the one I love in the church and under the law. I am now part of the first generation of Americans and people around the world to be legally married to a person of the same sex, and I was able to marry my amazing husband at our church in Texas, officiated by our local bishop. Think of just how recently even that thought would have been completely unimaginable, and now it is reality.

Even now we must never rest on our laurels, as the rights of so many of us seem perpetually under attack. Instead, we continue to sing, pray, fight and labor as our ancestors did, not only to protect rights already won, but for the freedom of everyone in our communities under the yoke of oppression.

And yet they prayed and sang and worked and fought by the power of the Holy Spirit so that we could all live in a world they couldn't dream to see. So, keep praying, my friends, keep singing. Keep working and walking. Don't ever lose heart, because our Holy Spirit hasn't given up on journeying with us every step of the way. The Holy Spirit is still in the business of unity. The Holy Spirit is still in the business of overcoming fear and hatred and division by the unbeatable, uncrushable, unextinguishable power of love. That is the power of Easter.

Reflection

1.    Are there times when liberation feels far away or impossible? How do you tap into sources of new hope in those times?

2.    Think of those who came before you and the obstacles they navigated. What obstacles do we face in our time, and how does your faith help you through them?

3.    Imagine someone in your family 50 or 100 years from now looking back on you and on our time. What do you hope will be better about their world because of you and your generation?

Action

Research some of the stories and leading figures of LGBTQIA+ history and share them with others. Reflect on how your faith motivates the work of liberation for you, and write down ways you can act on your faith to liberate yourself and others.