Introducing the Radical Welcome Advisory Team

Last year the Transforming Hearts Collective was excited to announce the beginnings of plans to create a pilot program for congregations that want to take their “welcome” to the next level. We are thrilled to share that these plans are progressing and, because it matters that this work be engaged in an accountable way and not in isolation, we are now supported by an Advisory Team that will be lending their expertise, gifts, and perspectives to this effort!

Minister Candace Simpson is a sister, preacher and educator. It is Candace's philosophy that Heaven is a Revolution that can happen right here on Earth.

Rev. Theresa I. Soto is a Unitarian Universalist minister and liberation worker. They live in Ashland, Oregon, and aspire to building new futures of unprecedented equity. They like kale and gummi bears, but probably not together. They strongly dislike mayonnaise from jars.

I’m Rev. Dr. Marni Harmony. I’m now retired after 40 years in Unitarian Universalist ministry, which was mostly parish ministry but I have also served as a hospital chaplain and then a couple of interim ministry positions after my last settled ministry.

I'm Kim Sweeney, queer mother of two teenagers with a background in education, faith formation, and organizational change. I live in western Massachusetts and I'm excited to work with this rockstar group of people.

I’m Dani Henri and I live in Portland, Oregon. I am a musician and songwriter. I am also a disabled trans gay man. I also do work at the intersection of queerness, sex, and disability. I work in retail and social media in the adult industry. Samples of my work on queerness and disability can be found here.

Rev. Dr. Jonipher Kwong is a gay cis-male in his 40s living the LA life after a stint in Honolulu and currently serves the UUA as Congregational Life Staff in the Pacific Western Region. Originally ordained with the Metropolitan Community Church, he’s done parish, community, and now institutional ministry. Here’s his website if you want to know more!

Building on the successes and failures of the UUA’s Welcoming Congregation Program, which three-quarters of Unitarian Universalist congregations have used over the last 28 years to expand their understanding and welcome of LGBTQ people and which became a model for similar programs in other denominations, our goal is to create a program that will help faith communities truly take things to the next level (within and beyond Unitarian Universalism).

We want to help congregations believe in the possibility of transforming their culture around “welcome,” difference, the purpose of spiritual community, marginalized experiences (particularly sexuality, gender, race/ethnicity, class, and ability), and social justice. We plan to create a program that is intersectional, heart-centered, spiritually grounded, up-to-date with respect to LGBTQ identity, flexible and custom-fit, and transformational.

If you’re interested in staying tuned in about our progress, sign up to stay in touch below, in the footer of the website. And if your congregation is dedicated to transformation and interested in being a part of the pilot program, please contact us!

Radical Welcome Pilot Program

The Transforming Hearts Collective is thrilled to announce the beginning of plans to launch a pilot program for congregations that want to take their “welcome” to the next level—with the support of a grant from the Unitarian Universalist Funding Program!

Growing out of a call to support congregations in becoming places where queer and trans people of all races/ethnicities, abilities, classes, and ages can fully get their spiritual needs met and bring their gifts forward, we are working to create a pilot program that will help faith communities transform their congregational culture around “welcome,” difference, the purpose of spiritual community, marginalized experiences (particularly sexuality, gender, race/ethnicity, class, and ability), and social justice. We plan to create a program that is:

1. Intersectional. 
   No faith community can claim to be LGBTQ-welcoming if that welcome only extends to LGBTQ people of particular races, classes, abilities, and ages. Rather than treating different aspects of identity and experience separately, we plan to create a program that fully integrates sexuality, gender, race/ethnicity, ability, class, age, and more, and is grounded in the experiences and needs of people who have multiple marginalized identities.
    
2. Heart-centered.
   We believe that in order for transformation to happen, we need to reach people’s hearts, not just their minds. A lot of LGBTQ inclusion work focuses on intellectual understandings of what it means to be trans, or what the experiences of gay people are, rather than deeply engaging on a heart level with how oppression keeps us all from being our full authentic selves when it comes to gender and sexuality. We plan to create a program that centers compassion, care, and love.
    
3. Spiritually grounded.
   Practicing radical welcome is a way of practicing Beloved Community. There are deep, spiritual roots to our call to engage with difference differently. We plan to create a program that grounds participants in their faith and gives them concrete tools and spiritual practices for the work of welcome.
    
4. Up-to-date with respect to LGBTQ identity.
   Language and understandings around gender, sexuality, relationships, and families have been shifting and evolving at breathtaking speeds, and many faith communities are decades behind. We plan to create a program that pushes participants to engage with modern understandings of gender and sexuality and stays perpetually up-to-date rather than becoming quickly obsolete.
    
5. Flexible and custom-fit.
   One of the key flaws of curriculum-based programs for faith communities is that they don’t work the same way in congregations of varying sizes, resources, demographics, and geographic locations. We plan to create a program that allows each congregation that engages with it to have a custom-fit experience.
    
6. Transformational.
   Transformation requires much more than a curriculum, which is why we plan to create a program that engages a congregation’s full membership and leadership, as well as engaging every area of congregational life, including worship, religious education, social justice, and more. We also plan to create a program that establishes practices for continued growth in this area, rather than a “one-and-done” approach.

We plan to utilize a grounded and accountable method of creating this program, starting with creating an advisory committee of people representing a diversity of sexualities, genders, races, classes, abilities, ages, congregational experience, leadership roles, etc., then working as a collective to create a pilot program, identifying initial congregations to participate in the pilot, and working closely with those congregations to improve the program before launching it in full.

Ultimately our goal is to help faith communities transform and live into their full potential as places of radical inclusion and forces for justice in the world. We can’t wait to share more as this program develops!