Thousands of clergy have lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) children, siblings or other family members. Many more lay Christians are family members of LGBT people.
Straight Episcopal clergy and their spouses formed the national network CFLAG of Clergy Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in 2003. As we include lay people and LGBT people, both clergy and lay, we are becoming Church Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Our purpose is to:
- Share experiences
- Support families and LGBT people
- Witness to the church
We are ordained church leaders, for whom the issues of diverse sexual orientation are both deeply personal and unavoidably professional. We are parishioners who see the church in controversy, largely unaware of how many of us with gay family members are sitting in the pews. Today's debate about homosexuality in the Episcopal Church is not abstract. It is about us and our children, siblings, parents, cousins and spouses or ex-spouses.
CFLAG Submits Paper
to the Anglican Communion's Listening Process
'We commit ourselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons and we wish to assure them that they are loved by God and that all baptised, believing and faithful persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are full members of the Body of Christ.' — 1998 Lambeth resolution 1.10
CFLAG has submitted a white paper to the Anglican Communion's listening process for inclusion in a study guide being prepared for Lambeth 2008. Download the entire paper here.
The paper begins as follows:
Families of Gays Share Their Experience
We are everywhere. While the portion of humanity with same sex attraction is very small, nearly
every GLBT person on earth has many heterosexual family members. We are spread out across
the theological, social, national, cultural, and political spectra in every province, nation, race, and
culture.
Whether visible or not, an estimated one in five persons in the world—including those who
worship and preach in Anglican churches and support its ministries—has a family member who is
not heterosexual. We fill the Communion's pulpits and pews.
Most of the time, the church speaks about us as if we were not in the room. We seldom hear our
experiences and insights, and those of the GLBT people we love, reflected in the current debate.
Yet our experiences can help the church, especially at this time. We have struggled with the
reality that a beloved family member is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. Many of our
families have come not only to accept, but to rejoice in that reality. Often with great difficulty, we
have explored our fears of sexual difference, learned how to live with difference in our own
families, and have been blessed and enlarged by the experience.
More on the Anglican Communion's Listening Process.
After Tanzania: The Church Needs CFLAG Now
A message from CFLAG mom Jane Tully to families and friends of gay and lesbian people throughout the Episcopal Church:
Friends,
A week before the Primates met in Tanzania, a young gay man just starting college near New York City came to CFLAG for help. His father in Massachusetts has told him in so many words to "go straight" or be cut off. He has three months to decide what to do.
For Episcopalians with LGBT family members, this is an old, sad story we know only too well, now playing itself out on the international stage. It seems that the House of Bishops has until September to decide to go straight, or at least appear to, or the Episcopal Church will be sent into some form of exile.
We know the story
For those of us with gay children and other family and friends, it's sad but not surprising that our anxious Anglican family is begging its only fully "out" member -- the Episcopal Church -- to hew to family expectations and fears and not embarrass the family on the world's religious stage. Like the young man's anxious and grieving father, powers in the Communion are saying to us, "Don't threaten our sense of who are and how things are supposed to be. We can't bear it."
Read entire letter
Send your response
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