Micah preached on theopoetics today. If systematic theology is the attempt to impose order on God and the ways in which we understand the Divine—the scientific, logical ways we wish to God (!) made sense—theopoetics refuses to play that game. Theopoetics reimagines faith as a co-creative art, with its root in the Greek poesis: “to make something new.” Unsurprisingly, this is the root of poetry as well.
In the pledge pitch, Mark reminded us that #ChurchCanBe queer; not only LGBTQ+ affirming, “viewed with suspicion by authority and suspicious of authority.” As someone who doesn’t personally identify as queer, I nevertheless appreciate being part of a church that is truly, audaciously queer, both affirming and welcoming of the LGBTQ+ folks I know and love and firmly committed to questioning and queering authority.
I’m writing this one late, and it’s funny how, a week later, what’s reverberating with me is Ken’s lifting up of the anniversary of the assassination of Harvey Milk. Ken reminded us, in Milk’s honor, to “come out”—not just to come out as LGBTQ+, but to “come out about the things that are important to you.” Eventually, I hope, this website will become my own attempt to “come out” for what’s important to me, and really walk through the world as a little more than what I’ve been.
Abigail Myers 
[…] the brain lately. I’ve been coming across Mary Oliver a lot following her recent death. I’ve been thinking about what Harvey Milk meant by “come out about what matters to you.&… And having spent all day listening to Hozier’s new album Wasteland, Baby!, well, […]
[…] other versions; Shame.0 is a primitive, miserable program upon which improvement is not possible), coming out about who you really are and what matters to you is especially difficult. But I’m becoming convinced that it’s the only real project, […]
[…] Come out about what’s important to you, come out from your hiding place. Find yourself. Find the place from which it is safe to come out, find the place into which it is safe to enter. Donna spoke of the ways in which church can be this place, even and maybe especially for the unbelievers and the maybe-believers: without an explicit or even implicit mission to persuade or convert, we nevertheless stand for what church can be and what the love of God is when we create a place for people in which to take sanctuary and from which to emerge. The cleft in the Rock of Ages is both a hiding place and a point of egress. […]
[…] was preaching on theopoetics yesterday, and not for the first time—not even the first time he preached about it and I noted the occasion. But it was fresh for me nonetheless. Eight months into motherhood and nearly eleven months into […]