Dean of the Chapel – Houghton STAR

Student Lecture Promotes Unity With LGBTQ Community

Micah Cronin ’17 approached the front of the recital hall stage prepared with a tongue-in-cheek self-introduction: “Many of you know me as Mary Cronin, and so you might be a little bit confused right now. It’s okay; I have not been replaced by my evil twin.”

On April 5, Cronin and Dean of the Chapel, Michael Jordan, hosted a forum entitled “Baptized into One Body: LBGTQ-Affirming Christians at Houghton College,” which aimed to spark dialogue and compassionate listening on LBGTQ, specifically transgender issues. For the first half of the forum, Cronin shared personal thoughts, convictions, and experiences with members of the college community. The evening then moved to a question and answer session where Jordan and Cronin interviewed each other using anonymous audience-submitted questions.

Cronin was raised female, but identifies as male, choosing to go by Micah and use male pronouns. Jordan chose to honor this decision despite disagreeing with it.

“I’ve agreed to call Micah by his chosen name tonight, rather than by Mary, and to use masculine pronouns when talking about him,” said Jordan. “My reasons for this are at once rather complex and at the same time very simple, because he asked me to.” Jordan explained he felt “to insist on calling Micah ‘Mary’ tonight would be like taking all my interactions with Micah and using every one of those to remind him that I disagree with him, and that’s a really hard way to build a relationship with someone.”

Cronin, who believes that the church should embrace LGBTQ-affirming Christians, cited a Pew Research Center report which found an increasing number of LBGTQ people are joining the church even as church membership decreases in the overall American population. Cronin expressed frustration with “rhetoric regarding how ‘the church’ should respond to the LBGTQ community,” insisting that this fails to grapple with the reality of the situation.

“Queer people are the church,” said Cronin. “I’ll say it again, queer people are the church.”

Cronin addressed ways in which traditional Christians can, intentionally or unintentionally, marginalize people who fall outside the heterosexual and cisgender circle. Cronin focused on a refusal to acknowledge both the complexity of the LBGTQ community and the complexity of the human beings within that community. According to Cronin, traditionalists who use outdated or inaccurately-narrow labels like “homosexual” or “same-sex attracted” to refer to the LBGTQ community send an implicitly demeaning message: “Our complexity does not matter. Our personhood does not matter. We do not matter.”

Likewise, said Cronin, reducing LBGTQ people to their sexual behavior fails to acknowledge them as human beings, “The conversation around queer people is so saturated with discussion of sex acts that it has long since passed the point of objectification.”

Colleen Shannon ’17, who attended the forum, said she appreciated “the respectful discussion, but also the direct conversation.” She said it is possible to err too far on the side of respect, to the point of ignoring an issue entirely.

Referencing an anonymous question which had referenced Cronin’s “trans-ness” (which

had prompted a joke from Cronin about the “Trans-Ness Monster”), Shannon commented on the importance of demystifying nontraditional perspectives on sexuality and gender. She said, “It’s not some mythical creature up in Scotland; this is a reality in culture, in American culture and in Christian culture and in world culture.”

Jordan said, “I think part of the message of Jesus is that we understand things about God better in relationship with other people.” Jordan said he hoped the forum and discussions like it would give students practical, relational experience that would prepare them for future interactions with people who hold differing beliefs on sexuality.

Cronin counseled traditionalists and progressives to “remember that first and foremost, anybody who has been baptized in the name of Christ and trusts in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection as their hope and their salvation is a part of Christ’s body.” She continued, “ That extends to LBGTQ people, that extends to conservative people, that extends to anybody who we find inconvenient. And if we remember that, then we will actually be able to be brothers and sisters in Christ.”

During one of the CLEW services, Dr. Marvin McMickle referenced a gospel song sung in many African-American churches: “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me; the world didn’t give it, and the world can’t take it away.” I thought back to a seminary friend, who used to sing it, an African-American friend who invited me into his church, his neighborhood and his life. In my ignorance, I thought of his neighborhood as impoverished, disadvantaged and frankly, “bad,” a neighborhood that I, on my better days, might help to save.

Little did I know, that neighborhood, and that friend and that church, would help to save me. When my friend took me to his church in his “bad” neighborhood, I met the warmest, most hospitable Christians I had ever known. I met people who had less than I had, but shared more; people who society had pushed to the margins, but who welcomed me into the center; people who had known more suffering than I, but had more joy.

That experience recalibrated my spiritual life. I had to wrestle with the obvious fact that I had, in the end, very little to offer these fine Christians. I had more money and possessions, certainly; and yet, in the presence of these good people I realized that these were more liabilities than assets to the spiritual life. My friend’s church exemplified the fruit of the Spirit in a way that I did not. I was stuck in an anxious pattern, unable to discern God’s gifts in my life, and they knew genuine and obvious joy. While I frittered and worried about finding God’s call on my life, they lived with bold confidence that they were God’s people for this time and place. While I gritted my teeth and tried doggedly to save the world (to embarrassingly little effect), they were joyfully operating as the hands and feet of Christ in their community.

This reality makes me especially excited for this year’s Faith and Justice Symposium, with the theme “Stories of Hope.” We sometimes imagine that people who have been through war and armed conflict are incapable of hope. Places like Somalia, the Ukraine, Iraq, the Sudan (and other nations like Rwanda and Ethiopia before them) become bywords, shortcuts we use to approximate otherwise unimaginable suffering. “There can be no hope there,” we say, “unless those of us who follow Jesus bring hope to the hopeless,” and in so saying we honor not Jesus but ourselves.

Yet, of course, the reality is different, and far more joyful: God is already at work in all of these places. There is already hope there because God is there. And it is not merely a bud that one day might flourish, but often amid the poor and war-torn there is a more genuine, a more lasting hope; because it is a hope that quite obviously does not depend on everything being just right, or on the absence of war, or the presence of physical peace, or on stable government or riches. It depends only on God to give it: after all, the world doesn’t give it, and the world can’t take it away. That kind of hope was in short supply in my life before I met my friend. I had a fairly hopeful approach to life, but was always worried about something going wrong, or running afoul of God’s will. In the end, I guess I hadn’t known what it meant to truly hope, to hope without the nagging fear that something could go wrong and, in the process, take my hope and happiness away.

Usually, events like this symposium challenge us to get involved and work for justice. And ultimately, I hope you do that. But before you sign up to help, before you run off to bring Jesus’ light to a dark world, listen to these stories of hope; hear that God is already there, amid all of His children caught in war and conflict, bringing hope to the oppressed. And above all, I pray that you allow yourself to learn from these stories of hope, to learn what real hope is, a hope that might just be sturdier than whatever you call hope today: because the world didn’t give it and the world can’t take it away.