"We Are Family"

Monday, July 14, 2025

Happy Monday, my friends! As most of you know I recently returned from a week in Atlanta, GA, for Holy Convocation with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM). The experience was exhausting, enlightening, challenging, powerful, and loving. I now understand what people have said about TFAM embracing and loving on perfect strangers until they become family. That’s precisely what I experienced. I left convocation with so many new friends and connections, people who in most cases I had never met only several days earlier.

Family can be a challenging reality for LGBTQIA+ people. Far too often Queer people have been rejected by their families and denied the opportunity to create their own families. Though not limited to Queer people, you will often hear us talk about chosen families or those people who have become our family because of experience, circumstance, and the fact that love is neither exclusively biological nor tribal. We can also find ourselves in families whether or not we consciously chose those families. A truth among introverts is that we were often discovered by extroverts and pulled into groups. Some people, including many introverts, conclude that this is one of the ways, maybe the only way, that we find friends.[1] 

I’m immensely blessed and privileged to have been born into a family which has always supported me. Though my aunt once remarked that my parents, sister, and I naturally operate at a higher decibel level, they have embraced all that makes me who I am from being a nerd to being a church geek and pastor to being the Queer person I continue to live into. There will never be any family which will be more important or profound to me than my parents, sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, unless I build one myself with a partner and/or children. That said, I’m blessed to be a member of many other families including, in no particular order, my LOVEboldly family; my Blue Ocean Columbus family; my Phi Mu Delta family; my Sewanee, UVM, and MTSO families; my Middle Church family; my New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio families; my Cambridge, OH, family; my Queer family, particularly in Ohio; and now my TFAM family. Each of these families means something special to me with people who have shaped who I am and have continued to support and love me even across distance and time.

The impact of family, of having people who love us, who ally themselves with us, who allow themselves to be vulnerable with us, cannot be underestimated. The Trevor Project’s national surveys of LGBTQIA+ youth and young adult mental health consistently demonstrate that youth who are supported and affirmed in their identities experience a lower incidence of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts.[2] The Bible, too, speaks to our need for family and is ripe with all kinds and configurations of families. Yes, the Bible demonstrates that family can be more than any simplistic “natural” or “traditional” idea of what a family “should” be.

What families are in your life? Where have you found and built families?

Let us pray: God, whose family includes every person who is alive and every person who has ever lived, we thank you for our families. Thank you for parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, piblings[3], children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, niblings[4], cousins, friends, partners, spouses, and the many people who are members of our families regardless of their biological, adoptive, or familiar connections to us. Bless the people who love us and grant, we ask you, safety and peace to each person we love. Help us build and grow our families as we reflect your love to the people we meet. May our world know more love and less destruction, more connection and less division. We ask this all in the name of Jesus, our liberator. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends. Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +

[1] While Myers Briggs places me right on the cusp between “introvert” and “extrovert,” I strongly lean into the introvert camp. I maintain, however, that I’m an introvert who loves people.

[2] The Trevor Project. 2024 U. S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People. Retrieved from https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2024/#intro on July 9, 2025.

[3] One of several gender inclusive options for aunts and uncles (a combination of the words “parent” and “sibling”).

[4] One of several gender inclusive options for nieces and nephews (like “pibling,” modeled on the word “sibling” and the “n” from “niece” and “nephew”).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxV8H9DKs8E

How To Love What Has Hurt You

Sunday, July 13, 2025

The Rev. Benjamin Perry (he/they)

Editorial Director, Garrett Seminary

Author, Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter

Queer Christian

“If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.” (Luke 6:29)

There are days when I wake up and wonder why I still serve the church. I write these words after a graduate degree in theology, a decade of ministry, a lifetime of following Jesus. On the days I’m most fearful, I worry the reason is simply inertia; I have invested too much in Christianity to turn back now. Those days aside, however, I don’t think that’s the real answer. I suspect what truly draws me back has nothing to do with professional accolades or employment history. Rather, it is the still, small voice that whispers just as strongly to the person who sneaks in late to worship in the back pew as it does to those of us who stand in pulpits. It is that beckoning summons: “You are called to more than mere existence.”

There is power in ritual: In sanctuaries where centuries of hymns haunt in lingering echoes, in silence that can fill a room or community that can fill an aching heart, in

saying the prayers that blessed our ancestors’ lips, in eating the bread and wine that tether us not only to each other but to Jesus and every Christian in that eternal eucharistic moment—suspended outside time. When I left my full-time call as a pastor last December, I promised myself I would take a break from church—that I would learn different patterns for my Sunday morning. I made it a couple weeks before I wandered into my local parish, headed for that back row. God, it seems, will not relinquish their grip upon my heart, and so the question becomes: How can I love something that has hurt me?

I am not the only Queer Christian with a painfully ambivalent relationship to church. So many of us have been told—explicitly or implicitly—that we are not full parts of Christ’s body. Sometimes, it takes the form of someone telling you to repent for your “lifestyle,” as if who I am is something I could shed like a jacket. More often now, it’s the discomfort of nesting in places who proudly proclaim “All Are Welcome,” but resist changing communal practices to reflect those professed values.

Even all these years later, I still squirm in my pew and wonder: Is there room for all of me?

It's also why Jesus’ words in Luke always sit uneasy in my spirit. Too often, the admonition to turn the other cheek is offered as an admonition to endure abuse so we can maintain relationships. Surely, this is not what Jesus means. This proverb does not endorse passive acceptance of suffering. It is, instead, an invitation to transform relationship to eliminate violence through a countercultural understanding of what it means to resist harm.

Love is never silent. When Queer folks are harmed by churches, turning the other cheek cannot and must not look like ignoring the harm committed. Turning the other cheek is an active choice to highlight the underlying violence. It is however, a refusal to terminate the relationship when there is something worth saving. I stay in church because I know Jesus has set a place for me at his table. There are no words or action that can contradict this theological certainty. Particularly for places that have professed welcome for LGBTQIA+ people, I feel a profound responsibility to call congregations to live into those words. This is not easy work, regardless of whether one pursues it as a pastor or a parishioner. Conviction in our fundamental belovedness and belonging provides the necessary strength.

When Jesus counsels to “turn the other cheek,” it is grounded in unshakeable conviction that the first cheek should never have been struck. When he offers his shirt after someone has taken his coat, this courage is grounded in the belief that God will continue to provide what we need—even in a world that seems hell-bent on denying it from us. I am loved by the God who names and calls Queer people into the fullness of our being. I follow the God who has made a way in the wilderness for generations of Queer ancestors who came before me, who continues to anoint the blessed Queer young people who follow. Hear and know this: there is a place for you in God’s Kingdom, so there is a place for you in God’s church.

"The Indelible Mark of the Priesthood"

Monday, July 7, 2025

Happy Monday, my friends! This is one of the Monday Moments in which I’m writing, in part, about something which is still in the future as I write but will be in the past when you read about it. I’m preparing for my trip to Atlanta, GA, for the 2025 Holy Convocation of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM). Not only is this my first time attending Convocation, but during Convocation this year I will be ordained in TFAM with nearly 50 other Queer and allied leaders from around the world. Some of these folks have never been ordained, commissioned, rostered, etc. in any church or denomination. Some, like me, hold ordination in our respective local congregations, but not in any regional, national, or international organizations. And some hold ordination in well-established denominations which are either not affirming of LGBTQIA+ people or in which they struggle to find the resources and community with TFAM offers particularly to our Queer Siblings of Color. Many TFAM clergy hold ordination and privilege of call of in more than one denomination, organization, or congregation.

I’ve written on my journey to ordination beginning in the Roman Catholic Church previously. Catholics often talk about the “indelible mark of the priesthood” which is the idea that when a man is ordained a priest something about him changes and remains changed forever. Even if he leaves the priesthood, gets married, and has children, he remains forever marked as a priest. While perhaps not embracing this “mark” as a theological or ontological construct, my clergy friends in other traditions and denominations talk about how ordination or joining the official clerical class of their tradition does change something about them in ways that they have trouble identifying.

While being ordained by Blue Ocean Faith Columbus last year was a special and powerful moment, nothing about it seemed to change who I was. Yes, it confirmed my role as pastor and my public ministry, but my work and the tangible quality of my ministry didn’t change. A year later I still don’t feel like anything has changed which makes it difficult for me to understand the change my clergy friends sense in themselves at ordination. A possible explanation is that my theology of ministry strongly embraces the pastoral and ministerial call that every Christian has as a child of God and an integral member of the beloved community. Yet, as soon as I name that theology I hear several of my Episcopal priest friends in my head shouting that they too would understand their theologies of ministry in very similar terms (to say nothing of my clergy friends in other traditions more typically associated with the priesthood of all believers).

How do you understand ordination? Does something change when a person is ordained?

Let us pray: God, bless all those you have called to serve your church as ordained clergy. Grant us the grace to serve your people with humility and empower us to speak kindly to our congregations and prophetically to the powers and principalities of our world. Enable us to have positive impacts on the people you put into our paths. We ask this in the name of our model in ministry, our only advocate, and our liberator, Jesus. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOPN5Zuqzz0