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Call to Worship
~ About Pride Sunday
Led by Pastor Ken
The first Pride marches were held on June 28, 1970 in cities
around the United States, on the one year anniversary of the
Stonewall Uprising. Thousands of LGBTQIA+ people gathered to
commemorate Stonewall and demand equal rights. Invisibility
was not an option anymore. Within a few years, gay rights
organizations were founded throughout the world. The first Pride
Sunday at a church is attributed to the Metropolitan Community
Church (MCC) in the early 1970s, shortly after the Stonewall
riots. The MCC is a Christian denomination founded in 1968 with
a specific focus on serving the LGBTQIA+ community. In the
decades after Stonewall, a number of Mainline Protestant
denominations also began holding annual Pride Sunday worship
services as a way to celebrate LGBTQIA+ identity and affirm the
church's commitment to equity. Both Pride and worship are acts
of celebration and protest, acts of remembrance, and
enactments of a world where all belong. We practice these acts
in a world where the safety and rights of LGBTQIA+ people are
threatened each day.
On Pride Sunday—or Imago Dei Sunday—ON THE SUNDAY WE
CELEBRATE OUR 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF BEING AN OPEN AND
AFFIRMING CONGREGATION, we cry out for justice and rejoice in
the beauty of our embodied selves. We remember the suffering
of those who came before us and imagine new ways of loving
ourselves and our neighbors. Pride Sunday is a celebration of the
image of God in everyone and the diversity of humanity. In the
beginning when God breathed the breath of life in us, God
blessed us and called us very good.
There is no better way to celebrate the fact that we were created
in the image of the Divine than by being unapologetically
ourselves and becoming the people God called us to be:
authentic, whole, complex, and made to love, even when others
say, “they have gone out of their mind” (Mark 3:21).
Both Pride and worship are acts of celebration and protest, acts
of remembrance, and enactments of a world where all belong.
We practice these acts in a world where the safety and rights of
LGBTQIA+ people are threatened each day. On Pride Sunday/
Imago Dei Sunday, we cry out for justice and rejoice in the beauty
of our embodied selves. We remember the suffering of those
who came before us and imagine new ways of loving ourselves
and our neighbors. Today, you are welcome in this worship ser-
vice exactly as you are, embracing all aspects of yourself: your
doubts, curiosity, anger, hope, disappointment, complexities,
faith, and joy. You were made very good. Let’s rejoice in this
truth and worship the One who made us all.
Singing Our Faith
~ There Is Room For All
There is room for all, in the shadow of God’s wing.
There is room for all, sheltered in God’s love.
And I rejoice and sing,
“My refuge and my rock, in whom I trust!”
There is room for all.
There is room for all.
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