When I walked into Overlake Christian Church, I half expected the walls to come crashing in. OCC is what you would call a modern day “mega church.” In a building that more resembles Costco from the outside than any other kind of structure, it is a teeming city within, just as any of the more ornate ancient Gothic mega churches such as Notre Dame de Paris or Chartres Cathedral were in their day. There are legions of volunteers, several varieties of youth spaces including a youth chapel and a fully staffed nursery, a full gymnasium, meeting rooms, offices and a cafe with (this being the suburbs of Seattle) what seemed like endless gallons of coffee.
But also like the ancient cathedrals, Overlake is serious about the business of faith. The sanctuary put me in mind of the largest theaters I’ve performed in with capacity for some 5000+ people. I imagined that when full, as I was informed that the space gets for the later service, this place was off the chain. This church sits in the heart of the evangelical nouvelle vague where young families in increasing numbers are flocking to a message about Christ that doesn’t judge them because they are struggling to make ends meet or because maybe they didn’t finish school or because they believe in traditional conservative values. This is a place where these particular young people find community that offers them unconditional support and love in a language they can readily understand. Yes, there were surely gun owners; yes, plenty of McCain/Palin supporters; probably a lot of anti Obamacare people as well…and me.
If you have read any of my other posts, you know immediately that I did not support McCain/Palin, I don’t believe in any kind of gun ownership (private or otherwise) and I am a rabid supporter of the Affordable Care act. I am also black and very, very gay. Walking into Overlake or any conservative community, I know that by the simple appearance of my skin, most people will assume my political positions, but the one thing they can’t and usually don’t assume is my sexuality. This is a squirmy discomfort that I’ve lived with my entire life, whether it was as a teen meeting people who would ask me if I had a girlfriend yet or in a locker room where guys talk incessantly and rather defensively about sex with women (hmm, there’s a blog post in there) or as a cruise director where the singularly most frequent question I was asked was if I was married. For some 35 years, I have had to “come out” to every single new person I meet. One of the reasons I am pro marriage equality, outside of personal interest, is because maybe by “normalizing” same sex relationships it will chip away at the assumptions that force someone like myself to have to repeatedly go through this public explanation process that more than being embarrassing is just plain exhausting. This kind of daily “coming out” is heightened even more in a church setting…let alone an evangelical one. But, as I said, I’ve been doing this dance for many years so when I was invited by my dear friends to attend their church, it was easy to put my own disquietude aside and let myself feel deeply flattered that they wanted to include me in their spiritual experience.
After dropping off the kids, we made our way through the throngs of beaming faces to the sanctuary where the house band was already in gear. The music was youthful guitar heavy rock. The voices were clear and again…the beaming faces. In the house, many people swayed and sang along (the words were projected on the largest of the flat screen monitors…a 20×30 foot jumbotron at the back of the stage) and many stood with their eyes closed and palms turned upward to receive the spirit…with beaming faces. The music built a certain frenzy so that when the pastor, Mike Howerton arrived on stage you wouldn’t expect anything less than being inspired. His message, “Hope Restored” was clear and hip (he wore jeans and converse sneakers) with no “thou shalts” and “wherefores” other than what might appear in specific scripture. The service ended with a tricked out version of “Oh Come Emmanuel” that was just plain fun to sing. The experience was, in a word, thrilling and I left feeling inspired and elated. I thought to myself, why can’t Unitarian Universalists do this? Wanting to stay focused on my time with my friends, I didn’t stay to socialize or chat. But on my way out, I made note of what seemed like a whole lot of nice people enjoying church the way they wanted to enjoy it, giving their families the grounding that they felt was important to being successful and balanced people. I should have been content with that.
But after I got home the next day, I did my usual skeptical due diligence to see where this community stood politically. It was not enough for me to see them first hand and accept them in their natural habitat. I had to see if they would have strung me up had they known I was a card carrying ‘homosexualist!’ A simple Google search (“Overlake Christian Church LGBT”) turned up the following article from the Christian Telegraph:
Overlake Christian Church Provides Aids Test to “Remove Stigma”
The article is very definitely anti-Gay (a clue should have been seeing AIDS not capitalized.) But looking past the article at the actual act of an evangelical church asking members to take an HIV test, I was blown away. Again, I found myself asking, why can’t Unitarian Universalists do this? At the center of this article were Linda and Rob Robertson who lost their gay son in 2009. I did a bit more research and came across, or rather was reminded of Linda’s blog, Just Because He Breathes. Their family story of transformation through their faith to embrace their son in all of his beauty as a gay Christian before his death is extremely powerful. I had read her article in the Huff Post in July and suddenly felt ashamed that I was in her church and didn’t know…or feel comfortable to seek her, or someone like her out. I immediately reached out to Linda through her blog and to my amazement, she wrote back. I am hopeful that I will be able to continue a dialogue with her, not only to support her work, but also to learn from her. I see a lesson for progressives and liberal church goers as well as Atheists and non believers here. Linda is a Christian. She lives what she believes. From the most painful experience that any parent can undergo regardless of their faith, she learned that she cannot judge. As a Christian, I imagine that she knows that judgment is in God’s hands. But that is not to say that for those who are not Christian that they must play by those same rules; judgement, peace, balance are what we come to in our own experiences and we cannot require that others accept something just because it works for us…and ultimately, it is out of all of our hands. Just as someone who is LGBT cannot be judged by the rules of heteronormativity and just as Christian evangelicals should not all be judged by the same rules of liberal intolerance.
Personally, I am tired of religious irony. My own snarky, judgmental attitude about a Christian mega church, no matter how much in check I was able to keep it in the moment, almost kept me from making a beautiful discovery about the depth and capacity of the human heart. Every religious leader or aspiring religious leader should be so lucky as to be able to float in the warmth of what I witnessed at Overlake, and every religious or faith community should be able to provide that warmth to whoever comes into their midst, whether it is a liberal black gay guy in an evangelical church or if it is an evangelical in a community of Pagans. We are in the business of creating community and those communities are built on “common unities”…shared experiences of our worlds. There is no possible way that everyone is going to have the same common unities…and we shouldn’t really want to have the same ones. But it is the impulse to gather and share those common unities that is the same among all of us and that is something in which we can all share; that impulse is love. I am a Unitarian Universalist and I will celebrate your joy at commemorating the birth of Christ. You are straight and I hope you can celebrate my thriving in a relationship with the man I share my life with. We are Jew, Gentile, Muslim, Atheist, Lesbian, Transgender, Cisgender, HIV+, black, Latino and white and we can celebrate one another and be much better for it.
Blessed be…he said with a beaming face.
Several years ago, I published a blog, “Rev. Prep” as my personal, public statement affirming that one can be religious and gay and sexual and engaged in promoting safer sex. Although I use a different medication now (Descovy), I am still on and committed to PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis i.e. anti-HIV medication) as a non-gendered, non-political, non-sexual orientation based strategy to reduce HIV in the world. I’ve included a link to the earlier blog HERE as a counter narrative to what feels like the opening salvo in a return to the trenches of the war on sex, sexuality, embodiment and health care that we fought in the first wave of HIV in the 1980s and 1990s.
