Strengthening ministry to LGBTQ youth

LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Dr. Cody J. Sanders has a long history of ministering to young people in the LBTQIA community, and he shared some of his experiences and his insights on a recent edition of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” hosted each week by the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong. Listen to their conversation here.

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Sanders, who teaches at Luther Seminary, wrote “A Brief Guide to Ministry with LGBTQIA Youth.” Westminster John Knox Press published the updated edition March 3.

The “A Matter of Faith” hosts asked him: How is what we do as churches and other faith communities seen by youth?

In response, Sanders talked about his days serving Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Harvard Square. One year the church was one of the few to participate in a Youth Pride event. Youth saw signs displayed by the church including “LGBTQ lives are sacred” and “Trans lives are beautiful.”

“They would look a little shocked, then come thank us for being there,” Sanders said. “They said, ‘It’s so amazing to see a church here.’”

“Those youth didn’t come to our church, but they saw us making a public statement about the dignity and beauty of their lives and it meant something to them,” Sanders said. “Two mothers came to the booth in tears and said, ‘I didn’t know there were churches my family could belong to.’ That’s the picture in my mind of what it can mean to youth to see there are churches proclaiming their affirmation and justice-seeking for LGBT people.”

Sanders, who teaches congregational and community care leadership at Luther Seminary, said churches can minister to LGBTQ youth on at least three levels:

• On the individual level, “it really matters what churches are doing for the people right in front of them.” He said he wrote the book “so pastors, lay ministers and youth workers have a little bit of skillfulness to practice care with individual youth and their families.” For grandparents, it can be the recent news that they have “this beautiful trans kid who they didn’t know was trans until recently. They’re looking for some pastoral conversations on how to be supportive and affirming to their grandchild.”
• Institutionally, “it’s about looking at your church’s practices. A lot have become LGBTQ affirming without really following the affirmation up with more robust education and ministry practice that puts that ministry practice into operation,” Sanders said. In addition, church members and friends can help shape other institutions they belong to, including schools and health care facilities, “to make those places the best they can be for LGBTQ people.”
• On the socio-cultural, political level, “I think this is a time when churches need to be involved more and more in the space of public policy advocacy,” especially at the local level, Sanders said, because “a lot of times, those are the places anti-LGBTQ and specifically anti-trans policy is being passed up to the state level.”

He said his book aims “to help the adults in those youths’ lives start with the youth’s life and story. It’s important to be able to sit with the people in your life and to have conversations with the youth in your congregation’s ministry and foreground their narrative.” He called listening with compassion and asking respectful and curious questions “a form of care, especially for LGBTQ youth.”

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During a discussion with the hosts about language use, Sanders said he appreciates reclaiming the term “queer.”

“It takes the power out of the hands of people who have used it as a demeaning term of violence and use it as a term of unity,” Sanders said. “It subtly reminds us of this history of violence, which is a part of our collective history as LGBTQ people.”

As a child, Sanders used to ask God if queerness was “something I could get rid of. Now, after this long trajectory of growing in my faith and my own understanding of sexuality’s role in my life and in my faith, I would never trade my queerness for anything.”

We can’t separate “the bodied realities of our lives together — gender, sexuality, disability, neurodiversity, etc. — from who we are,” he said. “Even our relationship with God — I don’t have a clue about what my relationship to God would be like if I wasn’t a queer person. It has profoundly shaped how I was able to relate to God.” It’s also “shaped ways of seeing and experiencing the Divine I would not have access to if I were not in a queer body.”

For the updated version of the book, Sanders added a chapter on the intersection of queer embodiment and neurodiversity. “What I’m seeing with a lot of churches and youth ministries is that when they become an affirming place for LGTBQ youth, other people start coming to that youth group, too. A lot of times, that’s neurodivergent youth.”

Friends in ministry have told him that when youth bring their friends to church and “grow a beautiful diverse group of people, often neurodivergent people reshape the way youth ministry leaders structure their time — all the way down to being sensitive to lighting and sound and tactile ways of engaging, and how instructions are given.” 

It’s also important to tell “the stories of our LGBTQ faith ancestors. There are amazing stories of courage, beauty, joy, pain and resilience, and we don’t typically know those stories,” Sanders said. Queer people need to hear those stories, and “churches need those stories more broadly” because “when we lose those stories, we lose something of our ability to celebrate the gifts that have come from queer people because we don’t know about them.”

Sanders described three entry points for showing solidarity:

• Wading into it through such activities as showing up at a local Pride event wearing your church’s T-shirt. “There’s very little risk to that,” he said, “but it’s meaningful to people.”
• Swimming goes a little deeper and can include becoming active in a local LGBTQ justice organization or doing legislative advocacy work, “putting a little more of yourself — your time, energy and effort — into operationalizing your allyship,” he said.
• Diving is “being willing to risk something like arrest, to say no to laws or movements that are going to harm LGBTQ neighbors” or being “willing to risk our church’s reputation by being more upfront in our very conservative community about our love for queer people,” he said. “We know it might cost us something, but we believe it is the right thing to do.”

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Go here to listen to previous editions.