Celebrating Pride in the Heart of the City at South Church

By Frank R. Zilinyi (Dir. of Music at South Church),

In the early 2000’s, getting off the NYC subway in Union Square as a teenager on my way to an organ lesson, it was completely unremarkable to see at least a handful of kids my own age begging for change, holding up cardboard signs that read, “My parents kicked me out because I’m gay.”

Being 15 or so, and madly in the throes of the kind of unrequited love that only that first surge of adult hormones can inspire, I remember experiencing a second-hand rage on behalf of these fellow kids. I think we grown-ups have the ability to forget the kind of passion that those teenage crushes put us through–That feeling of butterflies in your stomach, flapping their little wings so hard that you think you might puke right in the middle of English Lit. It’s an unavoidable and passive experience that you simply can’t do much about. And for these children, the object of these feelings just happened to be a member of the “wrong” gender.

Their little sharpie-scrawled signs held a deep truth in their use of the correct stative verb (i.e. “I am gay”). Romantic love, especially in the beginning of our amorous careers, has very little to do with personal reflection, choice, or agency. You feel how you feel and there’s not much to do about it.

It’s with this learned truth in mind that we as a church affirm the lived experience of members of the LGBTQIA+ community. We affirm that something like who we fall for, who makes our heart skip a beat–who gives us that deep, pit-of-your stomach longing for connection–is a trait that is as organic and as indisputable as the color of our eyes or the shape of our nose.

If we believe that there is a loving God who does not play practical jokes on their creation–like placing our souls in the “wrong body” or giving us deep romantic longing for the “wrong gender”–then we must affirm all people’s right to love who they love, and to be who they are. And so we did twenty-two years ago, when South Church became an “Open, Welcoming & Affirming” congregation. We affirm that all people are created in God’s image, and are to be loved and respected as such.

On June 8th, we will celebrate the anniversary of this milestone with a special worship service, celebrating both the Christian holiday of Pentecost (when God’s Spirit came to the first disciples and gave them the gift and power of understanding) and the start of Pride month. We will do this “Loud & Proud” as they say, not because this is the central tenet of our faith–but because so many of our fellow Christians have made rejection of the LGBTQIA+ community a central tenet of theirs.

To those who are carrying the spiritual equivalent of those cardboard signs (i.e. “My church kicked me out because I’m gay”), we say–as we do every Sunday at the start of worship–“No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.”

I also have it on good authority that the food will be delicious and the playlist will be “lit.” Nobody devils an egg like South Church.

Editor’s note: The worship service is to begin at 10:25am on June 8th at South Church, followed by the Pride Celebration.