Upcoming Event: Building Catholic Futures Week in St. Louis
Witnesses to LGBTQ+ Flourishing in the Church
Building Catholic Futures is coming to St. Louis for a week of events at several institutions and churches around town! The following is the announcement I made at my home church. If you are in the St. Louis area, I invite you to join us at any of these events (and register!), and if not, please pray for us!
Hello, my name is Grant Hartley, and I am currently a Masters of Divinity student at Aquinas Institute of Theology in town (it’s the building right in between Humphrey’s and the Foundry, right next to SLU), and I have been here at St. Francis Xavier College Church for around four and a half years. I grew up an evangelical Protestant, but three years ago I formally entered the Catholic Church. It’s a long story and I won’t go into all the details now, but I am grateful to say that College Church was the safe and welcoming community I needed to be able to make that transition.
One significant aspect of my faith journey has been my sexual identity: trying to figure out how to think about the relationship between my faith and my sexuality has taken up a lot of my brain space over the years. As you might expect, navigating religious spaces has involved a lot of ups and downs. Oftentimes it has felt that I have heard way more “no”s than “yes”es, way more about how not to live than how to live. But, as one of my friends has said, “you can’t have a vocation of ‘no’”! All these years I have been working to discover what flourishing in the Church could mean for me and other LGBTQ+ folks, and have been seeking out LGBTQ+ witnesses to that kind of flourishing.
That’s why I want to draw your attention to an announcement in the bulletin today. This coming Saturday, June 1st at 11:30am, Building Catholic Futures will be offering a panel discussion among four gay believers here at College Church on the topic of “What Does Gay Discipleship Look Like?”
Building Catholic Futures is an organization focused on equipping Catholic institutions to serve, form, and share the Gospel with LGBTQ+ folks. Its founders Eve Tushnet and Keith Wildenberg have a wealth of experience and insight; Eve has written two award-winning books on gay Catholic experience (both of which were helpful for me), and Keith has decades of experience mentoring and evangelizing in gay communities. They will be joined by Nate Tinner-Williams (co-founder of the Black Catholic Messenger, award-winning writer, speaker, and consultant on issues of young adults, racism, and Catholic social teaching) and for some reason, they have asked me to fill in for another panelist who could not make it (I have years of experience in campus ministry, am a writer, speaker, and co-host for the Life on Side B podcast, which facilitates conversations among Christian sexual and gender minorities).
Building Catholic Futures will also have a few other events that following week around town: Monday through Wednesday (June 3rd-5th) from 10am-4pm, they will partner with the Center for Community Engagement and Evangelism at Aquinas Institute to offer a three-day workshop focused on helping pastoral ministers (both lay and ordained) to better understand how they can meaningfully reach out to LGBTQ+ neighbors. On Friday (June 7th) at 6pm they will be at St. Stephen Protomartyr Catholic Church offering another panel discussion on the topic of “Finding the ‘Yes’es of Scripture”. If you want any information about these events—or if you would just like to connect with me!—please come find me in the back as you leave.
Please consider joining us this coming Saturday at 11:30am for what I have no doubt will be a challenging and refreshing conversation (and did I mention that lunch is provided?). I am excited to see what conversations here at College Church are generated by this event. Thank you.