Monday reflection: Queering church and sacrament

Today we talked about MCC being a queer church movement rather than merely welcoming or open and affirming (ONA).

This is a controversial topic and may rouse some suspicion within even some MCC congregations, who probably do see themselves as welcoming and not necessarily queer.

However, it seems to me that there are at least two key differentiators:

1. Individual local congregations (and in some denominations, conferences) may choose to become open and affirming. Which means of course that this is a choice that at some time in the future may be reversed. It is not an essential part of their church polity and is not universally recognized or supported at a denominational level.
   
2. Open and affirming congregations welcome, invite, accept or tolerate queer people in their midst and may even (in some polities) ordain them as clergy. This is not the same as understanding and practising church, doing theology and living Christian ministry from a distinctly queer perspective.
   

MCC is the only church movement that speaks consistently and always from and for the margins of heteronormative society. We are no more likely to fade away with the slow dawn of mainstream tolerance than are the black churches going to close any time soon.

There was also discussion about queering liturgy and preaching. As an exercise we broke into small groups to conceive of specifically queer rites of confirmation, laying on of hands and blessing. My group developed a laying on of hands liturgy specifically designed to invoke God's Spirit in the recongition of someone's coming out process.

With a minimum of time and resources, it was amazing to witness the liturgies that each group was able to devise. Each rite spoke powerfully to the experience of queer folk in their relationship with God and the community. This reinforced for me the power and importance of imagining and developing new transformative rites in and for the queer community.

The open communion practised in MCC is one such example of a transformative rite or sacrament. The occasional voluntary practice of rebaptism after coming out (as undergone by me at the age of 21) may be another. But we have only begun to touch the surface of how we might use liturgy in new transformative ways.