Happy New Year readers! We’re eagerly counting down to the Gay Christian Network conference in Portland. This marks Lindsey’s 6th conference and Sarah’s 3rd. With the conference on track to nearly double in size from last year’s Chicago conference, we expect a lot of newcomers. If you’re going to be in Portland, we’d love a chance to meet you. If you can’t make it to Portland, consider checking out the live stream of the main sessions.

Now it’s time for our weekly 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 after Monday to respond to comments on Saturday Symposium questions.

This week’s Saturday Symposium question: This year, we’re presenting a workshop on Celibacy and the Church at the conference. We’re interested in helping celibate Christians, people who are exploring the possibility of celibacy for themselves, and churches who want to support people in celibate vocations. We’d love to get your input for our workshop itself: Are there particular questions you’d like us to address? Is there anything you would want to make sure we talk about? Do you have stories (positive or negative) of the way you’ve been supported in your celibate vocation? Unfortunately, the live stream only applies for main sessions. We’re tossing around different ideas about how to let our more distant readers benefit this workshop. We’ve had mixed success with audio recordings because it’s a 90 minute workshop. Do you have other ideas about what we might do to help readers attend from afar? 

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 wonderful 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.