Chosen Family

Sunday, April 26, 2026

Kevin Marsh

LGBTQIA+ Person of Faith

Quote

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Acts 2:42-47 (NRSVUE)

Devotion

Community is a tricky thing when you grow up Queer in an un-affirming environment. Speaking for myself, for most of my life, I have lived my life as a perpetual wanderer. A nomadic friend to all, known by a few type As a Leo, I like to think it’s because I am charismatic yet mysterious; but in actuality, I know that it’s a distorted coping mechanism forced upon me by my need to survive. As a gay man who grew up in fundamentalist Christianity, I learned early that secrets are currency. What you know about others is traded and passed around, used as cannon fodder for who was and wasn’t a “real part” of our community. To be known, to be out, to live in authenticity for a kid like me, would have meant isolation. A physical casting out of the community that I had known, and so I stayed silent. I shrank myself small. I contorted myself to hide in a glass closet to try to maintain proximity to what I was so sure was what community was. I was surrounded by people yet so guarded and secretive in order to not out myself, I utterly alone.

But there’s something kismet about finding the right community. The kind of community where you feel at peace. One where you in all the fullness of who you are, fits like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Where your walls and guards that you hold up during the day can fall away like a raincoat when you reach the entry way of your home. That kind of community comes with a certain freedom that overwhelms the soul and brings a sacred feeling of exhale. A chosen family. It’s one of the double-edged swords of the Queer experience. RuPaul once said it best that “as gay people we get to choose our families.” And it was a feeling that for the longest time, I thought I wouldn’t find and frankly, didn’t know existed.

Oddly enough, it was when I was alone that I found my first instance of true community. In the summer of 2020, I had moved out of the Midwest for the first time, started my education at Yale Divinity School, and was away from everything that I had ever known. I was also finally reckoning with my own lived experience as a gay man and a Christian for the first time. It was there that I was scooped up by the beauties of community. I found myself in a small quarantine pod with a handful of my fellow Queer divinity school students. Those individuals would soon become much more than cohorts; they would become chosen family. The people who I shared everything with, for the very first time. The people I still go to when I need to remember why I fell in love with being a youth minister, when I need someone to hold me accountable in love, or when I just need to debrief a crazy first date. And its these people that I think of when I read about the community of the early church described in the book of Acts. The early church casts a vision of chosen family where all is shared in common, where members are seen and known and cared for, and where mutual aid and fidelity are the building blocks of a faith community. But what strikes me the most here is the salvific nature of this kind of community.

It's a crazy feeling when you let people into your world and heart and allow yourself to build a chosen family. I feel like I’m not alone in saying that our western individualistic culture primes us to isolate ourselves and to hide away. When things look bleak, our defenses are to retreat internally, to put up defenses and be skeptical of everything and everyone. But when we start to experience the goodness of community as its meant to be, you realize that the world, however scary it looks, isn’t devoid of all goodness. In a political and socioeconomic climate that often seeks to demonize LGBTQIA+ people, we need to find ways to infuse our souls with hope, and what I have found is that building up our communities, our networks of trusted people, our chosen families, might be the most effective tool we have for hope and resistance. The early church, as a small religious movement within second temple Judaism, this sort of community is what infused them with hope as well. Hope to face the regime of empire, hope to face the dawning of each day. And with the work that many of us are doing and will continue to do in the face of empire, fascism, and bigotry, I would argue that this ancient practice of fellowship could be the thing that fuels us with the strength to carry on.

Reflection

1.    Take a moment to reflect on the people in your life whose presence feels sacred. What relationships in your life make you feel a sense of holy community?

2.    One of the beautiful things about the early church was its willingness to constantly draw their circle wider, to open their chosen family to those who needed it. Are there any people in your life who you feel drawn to build that sacred friendship with?

Action

The chosen family of the early church, all people held up one another through the bonds of mutual aid and love. Consider finding a way to support those in your chosen family through mutual aid this week. If you have someone in your community in need, is there a way you can rally around them? If your inner circle has enough to spare, find ways that you can come together to support those most vulnerable in your midst.