My Day with Kinship
by Loren Seibold | 6 February 2023 |
I’ve covered many Adventist meetings through the years—conference executive committees, union conferences events, General Conference executive committee meetings. A meeting I attended recently, though, gave me a greater feeling of accomplishment, because unlike denominational meetings, which are all focused entirely on promoting the institution, this one was about saving the lives of a set of people that my denomination has long felt uncomfortable with.
On Sabbath afternoon I attended my first session as a member of the SDA Kinship Advisory Committee, which met at the Glendale (CA) City Church. As I hope Adventist Today readers know by now, SDA Kinship International is an Adventist group dedicated to supporting and helping Seventh-day Adventist LGBTQ+ people.
You won’t be surprised to hear that some of the committee members I met there came to their thoughtful concern for LGBTQ+ people because these LGBTQ+ were their own children and grandchildren.
Now, all advisory committees are, almost by definition, a bit frustrating, because advisory committees aren’t ever quite sure whether or not anyone is listening to their advice. This committee has the same struggle. They want to know how they can help the Kinship leaders and board make a difference for LGBTQ+ people in a church that not only doesn’t want to listen, but whose official attitude toward LGBTQ+ people is that we’re really not very comfortable having them around.
Searching for an identity
It seemed to me that Kinship International is struggling to know what to do next to reach those who need what Kinship can offer. There was a time when coming out as a homosexual or a trans person—much less a homosexual or a trans person in a stubbornly fundamentalist church—was a heavy lift. Kinship was a lifesaver back then.
The world has changed a bit. While there still are “culture warriors” who oppose them (think Governor Ron DeSantis and numerous evangelical preachers), for the most part nowadays a young person can come out as LGBTQ+ and find a community. The world (unlike the church and sometimes their parents) is far more accepting than when people such as sociologist Dr. Ron Lawson (our denomination’s premiere scholar on LGBTQ+ issues) or Floyd Pönitz (the current Kinship president) were young.
Nowadays, some young queer Adventists have the courage to say, “What I am is what I am. If my church doesn’t accept me, then to hell with it. There are plenty of people who do.”
Yet there are still queer Adventists who come out and feel keenly their alienation from God and their spiritual community. There are still young Adventists who lose their life to suicide because they can’t accept who they are. How to reach them?
Kinship (leaders, members, advisors, friends) is frustrated by that. Most active Kinship participants, admitted Floyd, are gray-haired. Young Adventists don’t feel they have much in common with those older advocates, so they don’t see Kinship as the answer—if they even know it exists.
So how, asks Floyd, do we let the church know we exist? How do we engage the next generation? The institutional church stubbornly refuses to admit that there is such a thing as SDA Kinship, or that it’s even necessary. Our General Conference president, Ted Wilson, still calls on Coming Out Ministries, a gay change group, as his “experts” on homosexuality.
“I feel we are past the phase of trying to justify our existence,” says Floyd. “We now have plenty of wonderful resources. We have shown that we LGBTQ+ people exist in the church, that being LGBTQ+ is not sinful, and now it is time to fill the void that the church is having trouble filling, by offering resources for mind, body, and soul wellness. We will never get away from addressing the ‘clobber texts,’ but I want Kinship to move forward to provide tools for making us healthier and whole people regardless of gender or sexual orientation.”
Still, there’s a long way to go to educate people on the theology and humanity of gay acceptance. “We can’t expect to keep young people in our colleges anymore,” says one advisory committee member who works at an Adventist college, “if we make it clear that we won’t recognize LGBTQ+ young adults. Many, probably most, students now accept their gay friends completely, and they can’t figure out why we don’t.” La Sierra University, explained one committee member, received a Title 9 waiver so they could, for religious reasons, discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. Thus La Sierra ended up on Campus Pride’s list of “The Absolute Worst Campuses for LGBTQ Youth,” along with Andrews University.
“Kinship,” says Floyd “is, unfortunately, the church’s best-kept secret. We want the church’s members, all 20+ million of them, to know we exist. We want them to know there’s a resource, a safe place to go, and that suicide shouldn’t be an option.
But how, when a part of our church is hateful toward any open admission of queerness?
Ideas, anyone?
Lots of ideas emerged—too many to enumerate here—and I hope they get some traction.
Several years ago, Kinship funded the distribution of Colby Martin’s book Unclobber, and topped it off with a very successful Adventist Today Sabbath Seminar that was watched by thousands. Perhaps, suggested one member, Kinship could do the same with more books that explain LGBTQ+ people to the church. (I’ve been impressed with Alicia Johnston’s book, The Bible & LGBTQ Adventists, which proves that there is room in scripture for an LGBTQ+-affirming theology.)
In June, a group of us gathered at the NAD “Called” convention in Lexington, Kentucky. Kinship set up booths in the park outside the convention center because the convention’s organizers (the North American Division Ministerial Department) wouldn’t let Kinship have a booth inside. The pastors and families who attended would come by as they arrived or left the meetings and asked us, “Why are you out here?” “Because,” we’d explain, “they wouldn’t let us in the building, because we’re trying to provide support for LGBTQ+ people.”
Even out on the plaza, though, dozens stopped for Kinship books and literature, and a few admitted to us that they had LGBTQ+ children or relatives, or didn’t know how to handle the issue in their congregations, or had seen a suicide because no one in the church had supported a gay young person.
Though Kinship was on the outside in Lexington, we all agreed that the booth reached a lot of people. But how does Kinship get inside?
There are other things, it seems to me, that Kinship can do by simply sponsoring community services to the church. One idea: since suicide is a major problem for LGBTQ+ young people, set up teams to provide education in suicide prevention generally, sponsored by Kinship. (I have two pastoral colleagues who in the last year had children who took their own lives, and one fellow pastor who took his own life—none for LGBTQ+ reasons, but it argues nonetheless for more suicide prevention education, which I don’t think anyone is doing for Adventists.) Or sponsor education for pastors in workers’ meetings on handling the LGBTQ+ issue when it comes up in congregations.
What’s Kinship’s purpose?
Is the purpose of Kinship to keep people in the Adventist church? someone asked. It’s a hard question. The Adventist church is officially non-affirming of LGBTQ+ people. “Why,” a critic once asked Floyd, “would you try to keep people in a church that’s going to hurt them?” That’s why Kinship has had to define its mission more broadly: To try to help Adventist gay people who are trying to find their identity, no matter where they end up. We hope that they can find a home in an affirming congregation, but depending upon where you live, that’s not certain. A by-product of making the local congregation a safer place might just be keeping more members in the Adventist church.
There are such congregations, but they’re not everywhere. One of my favorite ideas came from a congregation in Europe that contacted Floyd and said, “Our congregation would like to be a partner congregation with Kinship in your ministry to LGBTQ+ people.” The Kinship advisory committee talked a bit about what it would mean to have partnerships with affirming congregations, and how to set them up and be sure they were safe spaces, and then helping LGBTQ+ folks to find those congregations. (If you feel your congregation would like to work towards being an affirming congregation, please contact SDA Kinship for more info: info@sdakinship.org.)
Related: who are the affirming Adventist pastors, those who will baptize and even perform marriages for LGBTQ+ people? We’re out here, but how will people know?
Campus struggles
It appears that the front line of the LGBTQ+ struggle is Adventist campuses. I was relieved to hear that there are campus groups on several campuses, such as GASP (Gay and Straight People) at Pacific Union College, and Prism at LaSierra, and on several other campuses as well—though to my knowledge none of these are so far accepted as official campus “clubs” as, say, the ski club would be. GASP, for example, thought they had finally achieved a booth at PUC’s annual Fall Festival (which coincides with College Days, when new recruits visit the campus), but after they had gathered together their set-up and decorations, candy they were going to sell, and stickers to give away, the campus life leaders pulled their booth at the last moment.
Courage
I know quite a few church leaders, and I also know that more than you might suppose are personally sympathetic to efforts to include LGBTQ+ people in the church. Some have queer children or grandchildren or friends. Those who have been pastors have seen the suffering when one half of a marriage realizes, too late, that he or she is queer, and can no longer stay in the marriage, and have seen the resulting heartbreak to spouse and children.
Here, you are seeing the clash between institutional self-preservation and pastoral need: church leaders are terrified of being criticized, terrified of conservative critics’ dropping their support. When I think of how many times the official denominational door has been slammed on Kinship in its effort to support—even to save the lives of—LGBTQ+ Adventists, I wish I could remind some of those church leaders of this famous quotation:
The greatest want of the world is the want of men–men who will not be bought or sold; men who in their inmost souls are true and honest; men who do not fear to call sin by its right name; men whose conscience is as true to duty as the needle to the pole; men who will stand for the right though the heavens fall.
Loren Seibold is the Executive Editor of Adventist Today, and a member of the Kinship Advisory Committee.
