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      SUSTAINING COMMUNITY

      WHILE CREATING COMMUNITY among marginalized people centers on a common need for acceptance and affirmation, sustaining community is quite another matter. In order for peace and order to exist in the village there must be a way to be, together. It is often difficult for people who have not had full rights to community life to understand that freedom without responsibility and accountability is as detrimental as slavery. Freedom cannot be an end unto itself. Freedom from something must flow into freedom to be something else or it is not truly freedom. The object of getting free is being free: the object of being free is living free.

      Martin Luther states that the true freedom of the Christian comes from faith in Christ and love for our neighbor. In describing the “free” Christian community he says, “Christians live not in themselves, but in Christ and in their neighbors. Otherwise they are not Christians. They live in Christ through faith and in their neighbor through love.”¹ If we are free from evil, hatred, and dysfunction, we are constrained to help establish the beloved community, where all can live free.

      In order for a community to thrive, there must be an understanding of faithful community-building behavior and a disseminating of duties and chores. Faithful community-building behavior suggests that each member of the community concerns him-/herself with the effect of her/his behavior on the good of the community. The dissemination of duties and chores ensures that all members share in and contribute to the welfare of the community.

      There must also be respect for understood boundaries. In the village there are no doors on the huts, but one must know when it is intrusive to enter, and even though clothing is minimal, one must know the rules of touching and staring. Although all are welcome at the table, a certain behavior is expected.

      Additionally, sustaining Christian community requires an intentional effort to design a framework that includes everyone in the life of the church. We must constantly revisit the commitment to be inclusive and compassionate along with being responsible and accountable. Sustaining community in an atmosphere of openness and mutual vulnerability requires a conscientious look at village ethics for a people whose common denominator is oppression, but whose lives and lifestyles may differ greatly. The idea about village ethics of a straight person who has been incarcerated, or a mother who has a history of drug use, may be very different than those of an SGL youth or person living with AIDS. Finding common ethical ground is as important to the survival of the community as the theology of the welcoming table is to the creation of community.

      I will lift up some ethical, pastoral, and ecclesiological considerations for sustaining community on the margin and some additional recommendations for community life.

       MARRIAGES AND UNIONS

      Sexual ethics and boundaries are essential to the health of the community because the definition of ethical sexual practice differs significantly from one individual to another. While volumes have been written about heterosexual marriage, very little has been written regarding sexual ethics for SGL Christians and couples. The family, straight or SGL, is an integral part of the church community. Defining family for SGL Christians is a struggle in itself as family units other than the heterosexual norm are just now truly emerging; however, the stability of family relationships is foundational to the stability of the community. According to Kater,

      What this means for twentieth-century Christians is that we cannot hope to fulfill the Biblical demands for justice and love by imitating the social institutions of twenty centuries ago, but are called instead to examine our own institutions and mores in the light of the City of God. Marriage is Christian, not when it conforms to law, from which we have been set free, but when it becomes a sacrament.²

      How should the church respond to families that do not fit the acceptable social norm? When is marriage a sacrament? The Christian church had a similar dilemma two hundred years ago when it sought to determine how to justify the inclusion of slave families that did not fit the requirement set forth by the church. Some churches as far back as the 1800s had decided to conditionally welcome slaves as members. The issue was how could the church receive them “in good standing” when some of the married slaves had both their current spouses and another spouse and often other children on another plantation. This was due in large part to the ability of the slave master to sell slaves away at will. Underlying this issue was the fact that slave marriages were not considered valid and legal, as slaves were not truly “people,” but possessions. How could the church make their marriages sacred and make them accountable to their vows if their master could force them in and out of their marriages? One church, the Welsh Neck Baptist Church of South Carolina, decided that to grant membership to the slave couples was “less evil” than excommunicating them. It further stated:

      That servants separated by their owners, & removed to too great a distance to visit each other, may be considered dead to each other; & therefore at liberty to take a second companion, in the lifetime of the first; as the act of separation was not their own voluntary choice; but the will of those who had legal control over them.³

      This forward-thinking group of Christians was able to see beyond the religious legalism of their time and find a way to help these families so different from their own.

      Good sound relationships are foundational in the formation of families. But what is a family? In my history and in the experience of the African American community, it was often not nuclear and was not typified by the television programs of my youth—Donna Reed, Leave It to Beaver, or Father Knows Best. I relate to Michael Piazza, pastor of Cathedral of Hope Metropolitan Community Church, who said, “We live in a world where families are as diverse as the people who inhabit them. Family values must mean more than living in the suburbs with 2.4 kids, a large screen TV, and a thirty-year mortgage.”⁴

      Aunts, grandparents, family friends, and nonrelatives raised many of my friends. I, like many others, am the product of a broken home, but it did not seem broken, as the village/church was so familylike. We were in a community where the adults were responsible for everyone’s children and we as children were responsible to the adults who cared for us.

      Some definition and affirmation must be given to same-sex couples to establish beginning points for relationship accountability to and from the community. Relationships must be established in some way to indicate clearly what the expectations are for the church, the extended family, parents, children, and former significant others.

      Same-sex unions should not only be an acceptable practice in the Christian church, but these unions are essential to the harmony of the church community where SGL parishioners