Noteworthy

CLGS Receives "Soaring Spirit Award"

These are Mary A. Tolbert's remarks upon accepting the New Spirit Community Church's Soaring Spirit Award presented to the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry "for visionary leadership in building bridges of hope and justice across chasms of misunderstanding." The award was presented at a Gala Dinner celebrating New Spirit's third anniversary on Saturday, August 16, 2003.

I am honored to receive this award on behalf of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at Pacific School of Religion.

I want to thank Karen Foster and the New Spirit community for this recognition, and while I have this opportunity, I also want to thank the administration, faculty, Board, staff and students of PSR for supporting innovative and risky ventures like the Center—and, indeed, like New Spirit Community Church itself. It is all too rare in the world of the church today to find any institutions, especially seminaries, acting boldly on what are deemed controversial issues. Fortunately for all of us, PSR is one of those rare institutions.

This September the Center will celebrate its third birthday, just as New Spirit is doing tonight. In these three years we have designed and launched a major informational website; begun, with PSR, a Certificate Program in Sexuality and Religion; held three national conferences, two of which were planned by our African American Roundtable and aimed at the Black Church's responses to its own gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered members. We have started a book series with Pilgrim Press, and we are in the last stages of producing a new encyclopedia on American Religion and LGBT Experience. We have distributed materials and made presentations at conferences across the country, both denominational conferences and ones sponsored by the LGBT advocacy community. We've brought speakers from around the world to Berkeley to talk about religion and spirituality; we have conducted workshops for seminarians and churches on LGBT issues. And the list goes on and on.

We have done all this out of a deep commitment both to the LGBT communities and to the church itself.

I believe that the way churches in this country treat lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered folks is the greatest ethical and theological challenge facing Christianity at this point in our history. It is not only the safety and dignity of LGBT folks that is at stake—an incredibly important and pressing issue—but it is also the integrity of the gospel message of Jesus Christ itself, which the churches are called upon to proclaim and embody. You cannot say "Jesus is the light of the world" but then say, "only if you share our particular sexual orientation or gender identity." You cannot say "Jesus loves all the little children—but not if they are gay or bi or trans." You cannot say "if you have faith in Jesus you will be saved—but not if you are gay."

When the church treats LGBT people as outcasts and sinners, it is the gospel itself that suffers most.

So, we at the Center go about our work not only as our mission statement says "to advance the well-being of lesbians, gay men, bisexual and transgendered people," but also to call the church back to the truth of its own transformative message.

Thank you for acknowledging the importance of this work.

Mary A. Tolbert, Executive Director
Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry
August 16, 2003