National church shares LGBT+ History Month prayer
Suggestions for ‘Our prayer for LGBT+ History Month’ on a flipchart at the Open Table Chester community in January 2025.
FEBRUARY is LGBT+ History Month, an annual celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and non-binary history. The ‘plus’ sign after LGBT indicates that our identities are more diverse than labels can represent, so all are included.
In the UK it is celebrated in February each year, to coincide with the 2003 abolition of Section 28, a law passed in 1988 by the UK government that stopped councils and schools: ‘promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.’ It was first celebrated in February 2005 - 2025 marks its 20th year.
The Methodist Church in Britain has published prayers for LGBT+ History Month since 2022. This year they asked the Director of the Open Table Network, Kieran Bohan, to write a prayer which will be shared with churches for the month.
Kieran is also training part-time to be ordained as a Methodist minister, and working with Wesley Church Centre in Chester as part of his training. He invited contributions from the members of the Open Table Chester community, and the Friends of Dignity and Worth Facebook group.
The crowdsourced prayer intentions were:
‘For people to learn LGBT+ History and learn from it’.
‘Pray for kindness, for people to open their hearts, let go of pain and move forward’.
‘I pray that I will live to see the day that people will only see each other, not their differences’.
‘For an end to ‘othering’ and for people to feel safe to be who they are without judgment, condemnation or hate - and to give thanks for safe places where this is already possible’.
‘For the church to be strengthened in standing up for those who are crushed by culture wars’.
‘For attitudes to shift to allow people to rejoice in their true identities in love, peace and safety’.
‘That we may be the change we want to see’.
‘For healing the divide between Church and LGBT+ people’.
‘For the world to see and accept the rich array of identities and expressions that God has made’.
Inspired by these, Kieran explained his intention in writing his prayer:
My hope is to offer a prayer that everyone could use, even individuals or churches who struggle to accept LGBT+ people and that way of speaking about our identities. One suggestion was a call for an end to ‘othering’ - so I tried to write a prayer that any Methodist might pray, even those with ‘contradictory convictions’ about same-sex marriage and LGBT+ people.
