Twenty-one years ago this month, I attended my first ever Pride Festival. I was living in Chicago at the time, and many of my new friends in our master of music program at Northwestern were going and invited me along.
We gathered at one of their apartments, right in the center of the action. The parade began, alight with the colorful extravagance of all the groups represented along the way. There were dancers and performers, elected leaders and Fortune 500 CEOs, families with kids and senior adults waving from car windows. Joy from these LGBTQ leaders modeling a true and beautiful way of being in the world blanketed the thousands of us watching in wonder.
By that point, I already was realizing that Pride wasn’t what I had expected, when I then saw what would forever shape the course of my life.
Emily Hull McGee
One after the other, in floats and cars and walking groups, there they were: the churches and faith communities, filled with folks who looked just as comfortable walking down North Halsted as they would welcoming folks to their Sunday school classroom or showing up with their casseroles at the potluck supper.
The faith groups were all together — churches, synagogues, mosques, from Baptist to Ba’hai and back again. I knew these people. (One doesn’t grow up a preacher’s kid without a keen recognition of church folk!) I recognized them. I was them!
Yet at that point in my life, I knew not a single church, not one, that would make their witness of celebration and inclusion so clear. Frankly, I could hardly believe such a witness was possible! In the midst of that celebration, I wept, hard and hopeful, filled with thanksgiving for the faithful before me.
“Someday,” I squeaked through tears to my friend, Sarah, “someday I want to be part of a church that would walk in a Pride parade.”
“Someday I want to be part of a church that would walk in a Pride parade.”
Years passed. These annual Pride pilgrimages enlarged my love. And yes, the churches that marched never failed to unravel me and put me back together in the best possible way. During those deconstructing years, they returned me yet again to hope: that one’s faith in Jesus and inclusion of all God’s beloved children could (and do!) peaceably, faithfully, wholeheartedly coexist. It was the witness of my LGBTQ friends whose voices were essential in helping me hear God’s call on my life into the ministry. My call and these relationships are utterly inseparable.
And so in 2011, two years into my season as minister to young adults at Highland Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., all these tender feelings surfaced for me yet again when a group in our church began wondering about having a presence that year at Pride. Some in the church wondered what pushback we’d hear, if this meant we were sanctioning what might happen in other corners of Pride, if this would reduce the complexity and fulness of our congregation to the label, “the gay church.” (One doesn’t serve as a minister without a keen recognition of the fear about what others might think!)
And so with tentative curiosity for what might unfold, the young adults of our church, in cooperation with a new LGBTQ-centered ministry called True Colors, got the green light to attend.
A handful of us showed up that day. We had a hastily put together banner, no swag, and nothing but ourselves, a heap of love and the wind of the Spirit at our backs. The parade began, and we started walking. And as we rounded the corner onto Main Street where the majority of the parade watchers gathered, tears began to stream down my face. Here we were, a Baptist church that loved Jesus with our whole hearts and loved each other all the same, a church where I had the incredible gift to minister.
I knew these people. I was these people! I hadn’t thought it possible, and yet thanks to God’s transforming love opening minds and hearts and hands to a wider welcome, we were there. I watched people do a double-take at our banner, one turning to a friend and mouthing, “That’s a Baptist church?!” All along the route, we were met with surprise and overwhelming gratitude.
A dozen years later, in 2023, the beloved community of First Baptist on Fifth gathered for the first time to share love and celebration with our LGBTQ family in Winston-Salem, N.C. After all this time — the years of gains and losses for the LGBTQ community, years of transition and growth for our church, years of a Confession of Identity and new friends finding their way into our congregation because of it — here we were.
“Without question, the Spirit changed us that day.”
God’s goodness and presence had been our steady companion along the way. A pilgrimage of celebration, sacred ground beneath our feet. Without question, the Spirit changed us that day.
You see, we went not to proselytize or pander, but to be with, bearing witness to a good God whose love knows no boundaries and celebrating the wideness of God’s dazzling human creation. We were not the first church in this space by any means, and certainly not the last either. That way had been paved before us from sister churches and their trailblazing pastors, and within us from our own faithful leaders, every seed of love planted, tended and nurtured for years under their care.
But that way would not have been possible if not for the profoundly courageous presence of our church’s LGBTQ family, who, in the words of Bill Coffin, “risk something big for something good” in order to find their place in God’s beloved community.
This year, we were back at it again, with urgency and clarity and love above all else. Despite the sweltering heat, our joy was made precise. Our pride, holy.
Then and now, 21 years and all the rest to come, I walk in honor of generations of queer folk who have come before us. I walk with courage for our children to come behind us. I walk in gratitude for the witness of the church — imperfect yet hopeful as she is — and in unyielding expectation for her transformation. I walk with you, with all, with hope for what is yet to be.
Emily Hull McGee serves as senior pastor at First Baptist Church on Fifth in Winston-Salem, N.C.