Saturday Symposium: Calling All Pastors, Priests, and Religious Leaders

Hello, Friends. Happy Saturday!

This week at A Queer Calling, we’ve had a number of thought-provoking discussions on a variety of topics. We have enjoyed reading all your comments on our posts and your responses to us on Twitter. Many thanks to those who have shared our posts on Facebook as well. We truly value all the positive feedback and constructive criticism. We would like to encourage all of you to participate in the discussion as you feel inspired, and to provide another opportunity for this, we have decided that as a wrap-up for each week of our blogging adventure we will feature a “Saturday Symposium” question.

How this works: It’s very simple. We ask a multi-part question related to a topic we’ve blogged about during the past week or are considering blogging about in the near future, and you, our readers, share your responses in the comments section. Feel free to be open, reflective, and vulnerable…and to challenge us. But as always, be mindful of the comment policy that ends each of our posts. Usually, we respond fairly quickly to each comment, but in order to give you time to think, come back, add more later if you want, and discuss with other readers, we will wait until the following Monday to respond to comments on Saturday Symposium questions.

Are you ready? Here goes…

This week’s Saturday Symposium question: On Tuesday, we released a post titled, “10 Things We Wish Our Church Family Knew,” and it generated a lot of discussion about church environments, how they can be welcoming or unwelcoming to LGBT individuals and couples, and what specifically it means for a church to be supportive in meeting the spiritual needs of a celibate, LGBT couple. This week we would like to ask, especially to our readers who are pastors, priests, and religious leaders of any kind: what would it look like for you to welcome a celibate, LGBT couple within the context of your church? How do you think such a couple would be received in your congregation? Do you feel well-equipped to advise celibate people in cultivating their vocations?

We look forward to reading your responses. If you’re concerned about having your comment publicly associated with your name, please consider using the Contact Us page to submit your comment. We can post it under a pseudonym (i.e. John says, “your comment”) or summarize your comment in our own words (i.e. One person observed…). Participating in this kind of public dialogue can be risky, and we want to do what we can to protect you even if that means we preserve your anonymity. Have a fantastic weekend!

Blessings,

Sarah and Lindsey

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.