More than welcome?

The Oxford English Dictionary gives a simple definition of welcome:

“the word used as a greeting to tell someone you are pleased they are there’.”

And it’s a word that people use a lot, often without thinking…

There are lots of things we say which mention welcome: Phrases like ‘they gave us a real welcome’.

Or ‘this sunny weather makes a welcome change’. Or ‘honestly, you’re more than welcome’. They’re simple phrases about good outcomes.

“When you come to Open Table and somebody says welcome, they mean welcome.”

— Open Table community member

On the outside of churches, signs often proclaim ‘All Are Welcome’; a simple phrase that promises a good outcome. It should mean that everyone, anyone, could walk in and be welcomed. But often, for us as LGBTQIA+ people, it isn’t simple at all. Church welcomes, for us, may turn out to be chilly, or awkward, or conditional, or complex, or provisional - or just missing.

That’s the reason why, until things change, the Open Table Network will continue to exist and grow; to build communities where we can feel God’s love in safety, affirmation and belonging.

All the way through history, right back into early Biblical times, thousands of years before the birth of Jesus, it has been a holy thing to ‘welcome the stranger’, however ‘strange’ that stranger might seem.

Abraham hosted and fed strangers who turned out to be angels! The symbolism of that story is stunning: if we welcome people we know nothing about, they may well turn out to be visitors from God. Well, at a very basic level, that is what all humans are to one another, except that life, fear and nonsense get in the way of our knowing it.

The belief that we cannot get a welcome in church goes very deep with some LGBTQIA+ people. We’ve have had experiences which make memory of church profoundly painful. Some of us were baptised into the family of a church which turned away from us in our teens. Some of us went to church and were given the cold shoulder when we were ‘discovered’. Others have been ‘under cover’ for years in our churches; knowing that the ethos is un-accepting or hostile.

And yet Jesus spread out His arms to love the whole world. God loves us as an equal part of His wonderful creation. And the Spirit is always with us, our loving friend and guide. There is a terrible and hurtful contradiction here. Churches, where love should rule, so often will not see that we all belong to God.