Brian spoke at the Queer Christian Fellowship conference (formerly known as GCN) in Denver in 2018 on “Making Meaningful Connections with Pastors”, in the late afternoon of 20th January 2018.
The talk was designed to help ordinary people in talking to their pastors and went for 60 minutes (could better be expanded to 90 minutes). It covered topics including:
- What it’s like to be a pastor and how they might be feeling about your conversation about same sex/LGBTIQ+ issues (and how that impacts interacting with them)
- How to tell your story and why it’s critical to tell it when meeting with a pastor, emotion and all
- We spent a little time starting to develop a story, using a series of questions as a prompter (this would be expanded in a longer session)
- Some strategies for talking to pastors – including: asking questions, avoiding theological argument, using resources, Church Clarity, some of the research and useful books out there, seeing any conversation as a journey, ensuring you have support, and other points.
- One of the church clarity leaders shared briefly and we had an Aussie also share about his journey with a local pastor
The emphasis was on empowering and enabling attendees to see themselves as capable of making a difference.
The slides are here: Slides – PDF
The handout/worksheet is here: Worksheet Handout – PDF (short form handout – a longer one includes a summary of points)
If you attended the workshop:
Research papers shown will be listed on the website in the near future. If you’d like to be emailed about that when it happens, subscribe in the email subscription system to the right. This will also subscribe you to occasional updates from my site (you’re welcome to unsubscribe once the research is published, or at any time, of course).
There are a number of books listed in the slides that you can check out (please note the sites mentioned that have much more comprehensive lists; there is a lot of good new stuff coming out and a lot of good older stuff that I didn’t have room to list).