Penerimaan LGBT oleh Tempat Ibadah

LGBT is a sexuality issue that is still being debated in Indonesian society, especially in the religious scope. The church,as a place of worship which is a community with the same belief to worship, has teachings with an interpretation that considers LGBT a sin. Gereja Komunitas Anugerahand the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto are churches that openly accept LGBT congregations. The two churches are trying to support LGBT congregations by holding activities that discuss the rights of LGBT congregations. This research wants to know how the acceptance of LGBT congregations by churches as a place of worship in Indonesia. Researchers review from the communication side, communication functions and goals. The method used in this research is a phenomenological method with a qualitative descriptive approach. The research data were obtained from in-depth interviews, direct observation, document study and literature study. The conclusion of this research is that the church as a place of worship accepts LGBT because it has a meaning of the holy book verse. Acceptance is carried out by communicating with LGBT people, supporting, instilling religious values, and inviting them to be involved in activities at places of worship.LGBT merupakan isu seksualitasyang masih menjadi perdebatan di masyarakat Indonesia, khususnyapada lingkup keagamaan. Gereja sebagai tempat ibadah yang merupakan suatu komunitas dengan kepercayaan yang sama untuk beribadah pada umumnya memiliki ajaran dengan tafsiran yang menganggap bahwa LGBT merupakan suatu dosa. Gereja Komunitas Anugerah dan Metropolitan Community Church of Torontoadalah gereja yang secara terbuka menerima jemaat LGBT.Kedua gereja tersebutberupaya mendukung jemaat LGBT dengan mengadakan kegiatan yang membahas hak jemaat LGBT. Penelitian ini ingin mengetahui bagaimanapenerimaan jemaat LGBT yang dilakukan olehgereja sebagai tempat ibadah di Indonesia. Peneliti meninjau dari sisikomunikasi, fungsi dan tujuan komunikasi. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode fenomenologi dengan pendekatan deskriptif kualitatif. Data penelitian diperoleh dari wawancara mendalam,pengamatan langsung, studi dokumen dan studi kepustakaan. Kesimpulan penelitian ini adalahgereja sebagai tempat ibadah menerima LGBT karena memiliki pemaknaan terhadap ayat kitab suci. Penerimaan dilakukan dengan berkomunikasi dengan para LGBT, mendukung, menanamkan nilai-nilai agama, dan mengajak ikut terlibat dalam kegiatan di tempat ibadah.

Whosoever Will May Come

Intersectional queer activists and scholars have critiqued mainstream gay and lesbian social movements for losing their radical edge and promoting homonormative political agendas. Homonormativity concentrates power in the hands of LGBTIQ2S+ activists with race, gender, and class privilege. The Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) of Toronto is Canada’s largest LGBTIQ2S+ religious community and a significant player in global LGBTIQ2S+ human rights movements. This paper explored the perceptions of inclusion and representation of members of MCC across embodied social identities including sexual identity, gender identity, race, age, socioeconomic status, and ability. Three dimensions of inclusion were examined: personal feelings and experiences, alignment of personal social justice priorities with those of the church, and representation in church leadership. In the fall of 2015, BSW student researchers collected survey data from 146 respondents attending MCC Sunday services. The study found that most respondents, across identity categories, felt personally included most of the time and nearly all felt that their social justice priorities were aligned with the priorities of the church. Respondents who reported exclusion across all three dimensions identified as pansexual, trans male, gender non-binary, intersex, and Asian. Others who generally felt included but not represented in leadership identified as Indigenous, Black, heterosexual, bisexual, gay, and cisgender. Findings suggest that this activist spiritual community has resisted homonormatization to create a space of radical inclusivity but must continue to work hard to extend this space and to prevent the reinscription of social hierarchies.

Queer liveability: Inclusive church-scenes

This article explores queer religious youths’ engagement with the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) – a church founded as a space of worship for LGBT Christians. Interested in sources of well-being in queer people’s lives, we show how MCC provided young religious queer people with a sense of home, family, and a phenomenological experience of ‘fit’ and ‘ease’. We connect to literature on the subjectivization of religion and suggest that MCC is a significant actor in this process, with spatial and liturgical practices that encourage the development of one’s own spiritual journey. However, we also temper these claims by showing how ‘tradition’ was still valued by many participants, evidenced in their continued affiliation with other (often non-inclusive) churches. We argue that this complicates arguments regarding ‘inclusivity’ as these ‘non-inclusive’ churches could also provide spaces of succour and support. Finally, we also consider MCC’s relationship with queerness/LGBT: participants differed in whether or not they saw MCC as part of or apart from the ‘scene’, complicating questions raised about assimilation vs. separatism, with the relative weight of ‘LGBT’ and ‘Christian’.

We Who Must Die Demand a Miracle

In the 1980s and 1990s, gay religious leaders and communities faced a challenge that stretched their physical, emotional, spiritual, and theological resources past their limits. The emergence of AIDS forced them to address the familiar challenges of integrating sexuality and faith in a new—life or death—context. It would prove a critical testing ground for whether and how the radical experiment of explicitly gay religiosity could sustain people and communities “in trouble.” This chapter tells the story of how one gay-identified congregation, Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco, and its pastor drew on a combination of liberation theology, LGBT literature, and what David Halperin calls a “queer sensibility” to forge gay religious life in a time of both immense possibility and immense suffering and loss. It does so by looking at one moment in the church’s life—the sermon given by the congregation’s minister on Christmas Eve of 1989—and using it as a lens to examine how liberation theology and LGBT literature were brought to bear on this particular moment in the AIDS crisis in order to make gay Christianity a usable tradition in a time of crisis and change.

Sounding Religious, Sounding Queer

This paper explores the role music plays in ‘queer-identifying religious youth’ worship, including attitudes to ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ musical sounds and styles. It looks at approaches taken by inclusive non-denominational churches (such as the Metropolitan Community Church, mcc), to reconcile different, and at times conflicting, identities of its members. Focusing on ‘spaces of reconciliation’ we bring together the embodied experience of Christian congregational music with the ‘age appropriate’ temporality of modern music, to examine the complex relationship between age, music, faith and sexuality. Young queers did not always feel ill at ease with ‘tradition’ and in fact many felt pulled towards traditional choral songs and hymns. Embodied and affective responses to congregational music emerged in complex and multiple ways: faith infused creativity, such as singing practice, enables queer youth to do religion and Christianity and be a part of ‘sounding religious, sounding queer’.