The keynote speakers were amazing: Justin Lee is the founder of The Gay Christian Network and shared his story and ways to best talk to people who disagree with our perspective about LGBT issues. Jennifer Knapp is an AMAZING musician who sang and talked about her experience with the Christian music industry and then being kicked out when she “came out”. Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian, and peace worker from Ireland who works the Irish Peace Center’s project that led to “LGBT experiences of faith and church I’m Northern Ireland. I talked to him for a bit afterwards and found out that he knows my cousin, Jenna Liechty and her husband Peter because they lived in Ireland for the past few years and worked along with him. Amy DeLong is an ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church who led our worship service and gave a great sermon about being progressive in our outreach towards LGBT persons and our restorative justice to those who disagree.

There were so many workshops to choose from, but two of them I enjoyed were a panel of the Boltz family when their Christian musician father came out and their amazing journey of full acceptance, and then a workshop called LGBTs and the bible. Heather Rittenhouse spoke of the scripture verses and translations that are often used to condemn homosexuality as well as those that are used to SUPPORT the full acceptance of LGBT persons and their relationships. Read more ›

~Text by Audrey Roth Kraybill from her presentation at Bethel University

I stood in line, my heart pounding, waiting my turn to do something I hadn’t done in a long time: act up in church.

I was participating in a silent protest at a national delegate session of Mennonite Church USA.  I stood with a group called Pink Menno waiting to quietly and respectfully show that I totally disagree with church policy regarding   homosexuality.

One by one we entered the room, each of us carrying a photo of someone alienated by the church polity. Then it was my turn. I asked to carry a photo of a young man. I wanted to represent my 25 year-old gay son. I walked through the door and held my photo up high, holding back my tears.

Pink Menno is a movement that supports inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender members in the Mennonite church. It started in 2008 when a brother and sister imagined a church where all are welcome. They wear pink to demonstrate their support for LGBT members of the church, and to work toward changing its exclusionary polity toward them.

How did I, an average grey haired, bifocal wearing Mennonite Mother who prefers being gently draped in figure-disguising clothes find myself willingly crammed into a tight Pink tee shirt that accented every bulge? How did I, a Mennonite Mother studying for masters of divinity at a Mennonite seminary find myself doing ecclesiastical disobedience in the very denomination I want to serve? Read more ›

Pink Menno is excited to continue the momentum around lgbtq inclusion in the Mennonite Church, in between bi-annual conventions. In the coming year, we are focusing on building organizing capacity on our Mennonite college campuses. One powerful, effective way we can do this right now is to rally financial support from the Pink Menno network for the Bluffton University Safe Spaces.

This fall, student leaders want to attend Love Across the Spectrum, from Nov. 8th and 9th. $475 will get 10 student leaders to this conference. Bluffton Safe Spaces does not have equal access to funding. Because Safe Spaces is a campus initiative that reports directly to President Jim Harder, a move President Harder made three years ago in order to allow the group to continue to function at Bluffton after having been denied in its application for student organization status, the annual budget for the group is set at $750.00.  However, Safe Spaces programming has exceeded that budget cap for every year of its existence, and has had to draw on additional sources of financial support to carry off its programming.  Among those past sources, the Women’s Studies Committee at Bluffton, the BMC for LGBTQ Concerns, and private donations from faculty, staff, and alumni have been instrumental in supporting Safe Spaces programming.  This year, Bluffton Safe Spaces has reached out to Pink Menno for help. Read more ›

This is the statement we are sharing with the delegate assembly of Mennonite Church USA on July 5, 2103 in Phoenix, Arizona.

We come to you as Mennonites who are burdened by our church’s practices of exclusion, silence, and violence towards gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer people. We carry with us not only the faces of lgbt sisters and brothers, but also their hopes and dreams of a church whose language of welcome and justice matches its actual practices.

It is right that as a church we carefully and prayerfully examine the meaning and disparities of race and citizenship as it is practiced in our country and in our church. We seek to understand the ways that our prejudices and privilege have hardened our hearts to the suffering of immigrant people. We repent of the ways that we have contributed to the diminishment of others by our votes, indifference or blatant support of injustice. Lives matter to God, and the cries of the marginalized do not go unnoticed.

In this same spirit, we call upon the Mennonite Church to repent for its harsh and unwelcoming treatment of the sisters and brothers, parents, teachers, leaders, friends and family among us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. As Pink Mennos, we refuse to allow our leaders to pit marginalized groups and people against one another in the name of unity or convenience. We reject the premise that our church is incapable of understanding the insidious connections of oppression and privilege as they are played out on the bodies of immigrants, women, children, people of color, lgbt people and the many who are excluded from full participation in our church and society. We bear witness to the pain and loss that accompanies the violence of rejection, exclusion, silencing, condemnation and complacency. We affirm MLK, Jr.’s jailhouse words that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Today we bring before you our faces, our yearnings, our bodies, our dreams, our faith, and declare that we refuse to be strangers to one another. As followers of Jesus, we cannot, and will not rest until the Mennonite Church abandons its exclusionary impulses and embraces the width and breadth of God’s welcome, so that all may participate fully and God’s kin-dom is made whole.

Video of statement

Jump to 28:00 to watch Katie read the statement in the convention live stream archive:

Pink Mennos: It’s time to make our cause more visible at Mennonite Church USA Convention. We’re planning a surprise action for Friday morning (July 5). Come to the hospitality space (here: http://www.pinkmenno.org/locations/)at 10pm tonight to join.

Please share widely and like to get the message out!

It’s only a few days until we gather for convention and I know you have all been anxiously waiting to see what the t-shirts look like this year.  Well I’m happy to say that Pink Mennos will once again be some of the best dressed at convention!  Check out the designs below and get ready to purchase your tee in Phoenix!