JUNE is celebrated around the world as Pride Month, remembering the long struggle of LGBTQIA+ people to live openly and safely, free from fear, shame, and discrimination.
Last Sunday, as part of my training as a Methodist minister, I shared this reflection on the theme of Pride with Wesley Church Centre in Chester, which has hosted an LGBTQIA+ led Open Table community since 2018. The readings were Romans 5:1-5 and Mark 5:1–20.
For many people, Pride is both celebration and protest: a celebration of dignity and visibility, and a continuing call for justice, safety, and belonging.
Part of what Pride means for many LGBTQIA+ people is the refusal to live only in fear, silence, or shame. Not pride as arrogance or superiority, but pride as the discovery that we are loved by God and called to live truthfully and openly before God and one another.
In St Paul’s letter to the early Christians in Rome, he writes:
‘We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.’
But what does that have to say to us here today as we look ahead to Pride Month?
The word ‘Pride’ can make some Christians uncomfortable. Scripture warns about pride which becomes arrogance or self-importance. Proverbs 16:18 says:
‘Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.’
And yet Pride, for LGBTQIA+ people, means something very different.
For us, Pride is not about believing we are better than others. It is not excessive love of self above others and above God.
Pride, for many LGBTQIA+ people, is the opposite of shame.
Pride began as protest before it became celebration. Emerging in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969, it grew from a refusal to keep living in fear, secrecy, and shame.
Pride also remains a protest against prejudice and violence which still shape too many lives. Around the world, LGBTQIA+ people still risk imprisonment or violence simply for living openly. Here in the UK, many trans, non-binary, and intersex people are feeling anxious or exhausted because of recent public debates and proposed changes in policy and guidance.
The beginnings of the first Open Table community in Liverpool were shaped by some of those realities. Within weeks of the community’s first meeting, an 18-year-old gay man died following a brutal homophobic attack. The city’s LGBTQIA+ community was shaken deeply. Out of grief and anger came vigils, marches, and conversations about what kind of city we wanted Liverpool to become.
Some of the first Open Table members were among those asking church leaders to help build communities where people could belong, live openly without shame, and be safe.
So Pride remains both celebration and protest:
- a celebration of dignity, courage and visibility, and
- a protest against the shame and violence which still shape too many lives.
Many LGBTQIA+ people grow up learning to hide parts of themselves. Some experience rejection within families, schools, workplaces, churches, and communities. Some internalise the belief that they are somehow less worthy of love, dignity, or holiness.
But St Paul writes:
‘hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.’
God is not the source of shame, and nor should the Church be.
Paul writes that:
‘affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.’
I believe many LGBTQIA+ Christians recognise something of that journey: the endurance required to survive rejection, and the character formed through honesty and self-discovery.
And then, sometimes, the hope that emerges when someone finally realises they are loved by God, not despite who they are, but as they are.
John Wesley taught that grace is God’s free gift, offered to all people before we even know how to respond. Nobody is beyond God’s grace. Everyone, without exception, is invited into fullness of life with Christ.
That is good news for LGBTQIA+ people who often hear from churches that we are somehow ‘less than God’s best’, regardless of how we live, love, or serve.
But the Gospel consistently shows Jesus moving towards those pushed to the margins, as we see in Mark’s Gospel, in one of the strangest and most unsettling stories in the New Testament.
Jesus meets someone isolated from his community, living among the tombs, treated as less than human, and tormented internally and externally. People have bound him, excluded him, and distanced themselves from him.
Yet Jesus approaches him – the one everyone else avoids. He asks the man to name what troubles him. Healing begins with truthfulness – when what is hidden is brought into the light.
For many LGBTQIA+ Christians, the process of ‘coming out’ can feel like that movement towards truth – painful, risky, but also liberating. It can mean naming fears, shame, rejection, or internalised self-hatred after years of silence.
This story has spoken to me personally for many years.
After I left training for Catholic priesthood in my twenties, I recognised something of myself in the one dwelling among the tombs – struggling with shame, fear, and a negative image of God and myself.
I realised that many of my wounds that needed healing came not from having a different sexuality, but from fear, rejection, and loss of dignity.
But Jesus does not leave the demoniac among the tombs.
He is restored.
And so was I.
My restoration gradually came through communities like Open Table.
As I stepped out in faith to support the growth of Open Table beyond Liverpool, I returned to this story.
What struck me most strongly was what happens next.
The restored person begs to go with Jesus, but Jesus refuses, saying:
‘Go home to your own people and tell them
how much the Lord has done for you
and what mercy he has shown you.’
Jesus restores the demoniac to his own people, and his people to him.
The one who had been silenced becomes a witness.
The one pushed to the margins is entrusted with proclaiming mercy.
This is one of the ways Mark’s Gospel challenges us most deeply: those whom society dismisses, fears, or excludes become central to Mark’s story of the Kingdom of God – the very people through whom God’s grace is revealed.
The Kingdom of God refuses to play by society’s rules. It resists our human capacity to create categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
That is why stories from the margins matter so much within the life of the Church.
Communities like Open Table can become places where shame begins to lose its power.
The gay Irish theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama describes the demoniac in Mark’s Gospel as:
‘a prophet with the audacity to be the possibility of life
where people told you there couldn’t be.’
I think many LGBTQIA+ Christians recognise that experience, as I do: being told that there is no future for you in the Church, no vocation, no holiness, no place to belong fully.
And yet, somehow, grace continues to appear.
Communities like Open Table form.
People discover that they are loved by God.
The Spirit continues to move in ways many of us could never have predicted.
The first Open Table community began in Liverpool in 2008, with just a handful of people seeking sacred space where they could pray honestly and live authentically before God. None of us imagined how widely that ministry would spread, with nearly 40 communities now meeting across England and Wales.
I take hope and pride in being part of this movement – and I do not believe that growth is simply human achievement.
It is grace. There for us before we knew it.
It is the Spirit continuing to move freely, abundantly, and often unexpectedly.
So as we approach Pride Month, I wonder,
- Are we willing to hear stories from the margins, and what they might teach us about grace, dignity, healing, and belonging?
- Are we willing to build community where fewer people feel condemned to dwell among the tombs?
- Are we willing to believe that God’s love really is poured out more freely and abundantly than we often imagine?
And might we too have, in Pádraig Ó Tuama’s words,
‘the audacity to be the possibility of life
where people told you there couldn’t be.’
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