CLGS Responds

CLGS responds to "Coming Home"—a letter addressed to the black gay and lesbian community which states that being homosexual is not in God's will, and which invites black gays and lesbians "come home", out of the "wilderness" of homosexuality.

I Got a Home in that Rock!: An Open Letter of Response to Reverend DL Foster of "Powerful Change Ministries"

by Johari Jabir, CLGS

I got a home in that rock
Don't you see
I got a home in that rock,
Devil in hell can't bother me
Don't you see
I got a home in that rock!

Recently, I had the most unfortunate experience of reading an open letter addressed to the black gay and lesbian community entitled "Coming Home" and signed by several "ex-gay" groups, including Witness for the World, Shattering - Illusions, Original Intentions, New Creation Ministries, and others (see open letter at www.witnessfortheworld.org).

I would like to respond to those who have so graciously extended this invitation to black gays and lesbians to be "liberated" from their "sexual confusion" and return to the church that loves them.

For black gays and lesbians, this invitation to come home presents some rather presumptuous and perplexing ideas. Offering an incomplete interpretation of Andre Crouch's gospel song, "Take Me Back", the authors of the letter assume that both time and physical place are synonymous with the notion of home. Evoking feelings of nostalgia in what they describe as "a song many of us heard growing up," they interpret the following phrase to mean a specific and exclusive location: Take me back, take me back dear Lord, to the place, where I first received you.

While the song may indeed imply location, I want to suggest a deeper meaning than a physical institution. "The place where I first received you" can more importantly imply the moment of vulnerability that first led to our surrender to God's will by accepting God into our lives. For many of us, this moment produced a new and fresh desire to live our faith. (With great zeal and fervor I might add.) The elders called this place "The Old Landmark". For the authors of the letter, "place", as mentioned in the song may be the mourner's bench or tarrying room at a specific church. For some of us, however that place references our place in God. Ultimately, it cannot be up to those who wrote the letter to interpret the song on anyone's behalf other than their own.

While it may be somewhat accurate to say that the black church is home for many black gays and lesbians, the reasons run deeper than those suggested in the letter. The historical role of the black church has traditionally been one that allowed generations of families to worship together, to celebrate spirituality and culture, and to create extended family and community. I would not want to downplay the role of the church as a place or location associated with what it means to be home, but black gays and lesbians expecting to return to the churches of their youth will be in for quite a surprise. The home they left is no longer there.

The black churches of today have exchanged their devotional hymns and deacons' prayers for praise teams and soundtracks. Worship has become a full-scale multi-media production void of the fiery testimonies of the elderly saints. Indeed, despite what the authors of the letter would have us think, the day when black church choirs sang a simple gospel ballad such as Andre Crouch's "Take Me Back" are no more. The home they speak of is a memory—a very fond memory.

Perhaps then, home is an experience that transcends place and location. This does not negate the importance of location, but it reminds us that a house, its memories, its furniture, its fixtures don't make it a home. Hammond B-3's and tambourines, pleated robes and matching stoles, lifted hands and mortuary fans, fiery preachers and praying deacons, old church mothers and gays and lesbians become the gifted other.

It is one thing for the black church to feel itself incomplete without the presence of black gays and lesbians. It is another, quite shameful thing, to think that the absence of black gays and lesbians should teach the black church nothing about the religion they practice and their refusal to interrogate their own understandings of sexuality. And I fear that black churches are so embedded in the same white supremacist practices of body and sexuality found more generally in American Christianity that these oppressive practices have now become the norm in the black community as well, making it impossible to offer positive theologies of our bodies and sexuality.

I do indeed agree with those who authored the letter that black gays and lesbians should come home - but not to the home they speak of. I am speaking of their right to the tree of life. I am speaking to the home in which the Negro spiritual proclaimed when it said, "I got a home in that rock." The "I" aspect of this spiritual allows the individual to posses the assurance and experience of home despite location and even dislocation. More so, the spiritual locates home in "that rock" because the rock is Jesus Christ and Jesus, for the slave, became their rock, their home, and their church. Now, the majority of black churches that practice discrimination against their own people in the name of homophobia have forgotten this deeper meaning of home as well as they have perhaps forgotten whose church it is.

In this, they have no real reason to remember it, except for the slight chance that we might all come home to the old landmark in order to rethink who we say we are and what it is we say we believe. I think, quite sadly, that to do so is too much to ask. Some of us have far too much to lose if we were to become equals in God's army. Yet, it is essential that black gays and lesbians reclaim their home in that rock because God promised it, and the faith of those colonized and converted Christian slaves suffered it to be so. It is our inheritance as the offspring of those slaves who believed in the radical understanding of what it means to include All God's Children. We have to find our home in that rock if we are to have any home at all.

The authors rightfully assert that Andre Crouch's "Take Me Back" is one of the many songs black gays and lesbians hold in the memory of their hearts. And memory is not something to be dismissed. But as we remember the song, we should also remember the meaning. The music of our tradition allows meaning to last even when memory fails us. For black gays and lesbians of this great tradition, now is the time to ask us what and moreover Who we believe in. We sang, this joy I have, the world didn't give it to me and the world can't take it away. We made promises to never turn back, no more. We vowed that if the Lord wants somebody, here am I, send me I'll go. We are now being asked to show some sign.

If my memory serves me correctly, along before we sang "Take Me Back", we sang (Done) made my vow to the Lord and I never will turn back. These vows were not made to preachers, denominations, nor the church edifice itself. As black gays and lesbians, let our commitment be to the Lord Jesus Christ—he is the rock that is ultimately our home. Nothing would be more wonderful than if African American churches were able to embrace African American gays and lesbians as we are. Currently, this is not the case. Therefore, I must decline to attend the homecoming invitation from the "Open Letter"; I got a home in that rock!

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