“Open, Welcoming, Affirming, Safe”
Dear Beloved Community,
“St. Gabriel the Archangel Episcopal Church is Open, Welcoming, Affirming, Safe.”
These are the words on the new banner that you will see hanging on the N.W West Union Road side of the church nearest to Holcomb. It looks like this:
So…where do those words come from? What do they mean?
First, they are found on the opening page of our website – stgabrielpdx.org – in the statement of our values and mission.
“St. Gabriel is an open and affirming progressive Episcopal congregation that welcomes people of all ethnicities, heritages, ages, abilities, sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions into all aspects of church life. We work to restore all people to unity with God and each other by sharing our knowledge and love of Jesus Christ.”
That is a mouthful and way too much to put on a sign.
We assume that the words “Episcopal Church” let people know that we love God and seek to share the Good News of God in Christ – isn’t that what all churches do? That is our hope anyway.
So, we chose the words we used believing that they convey the most important qualities of our congregation.
The words “open,” and “affirming” are key signifiers that all people – which the list in our values statement makes specific – are “welcome” in all aspects of church life.
For many people who have been historically excluded from many Christian churches – including the Episcopal Church at one time – those three words speak volumes.
We added the word “safe” to the banner because we felt that given the times we live in, it was important to emphasize that the community inside our red doors is a safe space. It might seem that the words open, welcoming, and affirming would adequately describe us as safe but it never hurts to be specific about things like this.
Last week, I wrote about St. Gabriel being a pilgrimage congregation. We actually have a number of members who have walked to one of the most famous pilgrimage sites, the Cathedral de Santiago de Compostela in the Galicia region of northwestern Spain. There are actually nine different routes that lead to the Cathedral, starting from France to the East and Portugal to the southwest. The most popular route is the Camino Francés which stretches nearly 500 miles from St. Jean-Pied-du-Port near Biarritz in France to Santiago. Over 500,000 pilgrims walk to the cathedral every year. Regardless of which route you take, each camino is dotted with hostels or albergues, places where pilgrims can safely rest for a few hours or for a night (or more if your blisters are really bad!).
Walking a camino to Compostela can be exhausting even for the most intrepid traveler but the camino routes are considered very safe. The spiritual pilgrimage of Christianity for some people is not a safe route. Theology and Scripture can be used as weapons to demand conformity and punish difference. Now, we all know that St. Gabriel, as much as we love our parish, is not a cathedral but I do love the idea of us being an albergue, a safe place, on the Christian camino for pilgrims on their journey towards God. We offer shelter, we offer love, we offer the Good News of Jesus Christ.
Jesus told us to love God and love our neighbor. To welcome the stranger and to feed and clothe the dispossessed. Our new banner proclaims to those on the pilgrimage of faith and to those who are considering whether to join it for the first time and to those who want once more to give it a try that we are here. Our banner proclaims that we, the pilgrims who are already here – the disciples of Christ who have already found the refuge of St. Gabriel – that is all of us – that we stand ready to welcome them with our red doors as open as our hearts.
In the peace and love of Christ,
Everett+
