Travelling onwards - A minister's first Open Table experience
Prayer table at Open Table Liverpool - the pride flags and candles reminded Revd Chris of his previous experience as a minister in the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC)
AT OPEN TABLE LIVERPOOL last month, visitors from churches preparing to host an Open Table community came to hear OTN Patron John Bell. Revd Chris Dowd, who came with a group from Birmingham, reflects on his first Open Table experience:
I am sitting in a bus coming home to Birmingham from Liverpool after attending my first Open Table gathering. It’s dark and a little quiet as we sit in the minibus processing what we had all experienced.
For some of us, it is an introduction to an entirely new way of church, for some a familiar format, and others like myself, something else. For me that Liverpool trip felt like visiting another country after being away for a long time.
Let me explain - I joined Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) in 1994, had been ordained with them, planted two churches and then, after 19 years of membership, left disillusioned, resigned my clergy credentials, and moved to the United Reformed Church (URC) where I retrained as clergy.
In some ways Open Table felt familiar - the rainbow flags, the candles, the affirming language, even down to the choice of hymns. Some of these things felt enormously familiar and painful at the same time.
Familiar yet painful - Why?
I left MCC because I felt it had walled itself off from the rest of the Church. I was sick of being a castaway on a theological desert island. MCC’s heroism in the early days of Gay Liberation (and I use that phrase purposefully) and its inspirational work in the HIV/AIDS epidemic had given it a moral certainty that the church was always a bully.
On later reflection, I realised that much of the leadership had been formed in such a crucible of pain that they had simply given up on the Church and walked away. They remained unconvinced that the Church could ever change and were hostile to any suggestion to the contrary.
But when I was invited to join Churches Together without even expressing an interest, I found this hard to reconcile with what I believed. When I was employed as a university chaplain by a consortium of Free Churches, the illusion shattered. I could no longer sign up to that narrative of complete oppression. I tried to explain this, with little effect - I found that MCC itself became a place where my voice was not heard, and I felt the need to leave.
Not that I have found nirvana. the freedom from suffering to which Buddhists aspire. In my first post as a URC minister, I endured rudeness, malice and shunning, as the MCC Leadership had predicted. But I also found allies, friends and advocates who weren’t often LGBT+. I now belonged to a tradition that now would ordain me, marry me, and who actively challenged some of the unpleasantness I had experienced.
So why was I on that bus looking for something else?
I also know that not all the Church is a place where LGBT+ people can flourish, so we still need LGBT+ identified spaces to celebrate, affirm ourselves and sometimes to heal.
So I came to Open Table that October night wondering if it can be a liminal place - a bubble of the best I had experienced in MCC, within the universal church where I find my call.
It’s early days yet, but I am hopeful. We are exploring an Open Table offering in my suburban church with the enthusiastic affirmation of my congregation. We’re planning our first offering as an LGBT+ friendly carol service, and we will see where it goes from there.
