The Values of the Womaen’s Caucus Hospitality Center

by Audrey deCoursey

At this year’s Annual Conference, the Womaen’s Caucus will be co-hosting the Hospitality Center with VOS and BMC. Both VOS’s and our applications for booths in the exhibit hall were approved by Annual Conference Program & Arrangements Committee (PAC), but PAC did not approve the application for booth space for the Brethren Mennonite Council for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Interests (BMC) (as it hasn’t since its inception). In solidarity with our sisters and brothers of the BMC, our steering committee decided to opt out of our approved booth space and work to strengthen the Hospitality Center.

Our committee made this decision through much discussion and prayer, and our work for this year’s presence at Conference has been undertaken through a spirit of grief that such a brokenness in the body of Christ continues. We decided that this year offered us a chance to try to heal that wound through the first, necessary-though-painful step of acknowledging that the wound is there. And so, we chose to locate Womaen’s Caucus’ official, ongoing presence at the Hospitality Center during this Annual Conference.

This decision lives out our values in many ways:

As peace and justice-loving people, we value standing in solidarity with people who are oppressed and marginalized, especially when we are ones with privileged access to resources that should be more fairly portioned out. In this case, BMC has been excluded for years, and we wish to offer our support to their struggle for full inclusion in the life of the Church of the Brethren.

As a people whose faith tradition was founded in small gatherings of the faithful, in a wider political climate where their kind was not liked, with an established church that did not appreciate the new wisdom and energy they brought to worship life, we see it as our duty as Brethren to ground ourselves first in our faith lives, and only participate in the workings of institutions as much as they support what our faith teaches us. We believe it is our duty to not conform to unjust rules and institutions, and to ‘tear down strongholds’ when those strongholds get in the way of living out our lives as disciples of Jesus Christ.

As feminists, we value the creativity to seek out and craft new spaces to worship, to invoke the Holy Spirit, and to build community. We recognize that Jesus is present wherever two or three are gathered in His name, and we reclaim both our radical Brethren traditions and our roots as Christians in accepting our responsibility to open the doors to new places to understand and serve God.

As a mere committee intending to steer the caucus, and in recognition that we five womyn are not the total composition of Womaen’s Caucus (thank goodness!), we expect that this decision might not accord with the wishes of all feminist women and men of the church. Accordingly, we welcome the thoughts of all Caucus supporters, about our decision this year and about how we should continue to steer the Caucus in coming years.

Beyond the decision to stand in solidarity with BMC outside the exhibit hall this year, the Hospitality Center itself lives out many of our values:

As a people who sacralize the act of communion, hospitality is a root value of all struggles for justice. We believe that we benefit from conversations with strangers, and that the perspectives of the people at the margins of societies and institutions offer unique insight to the realities of those societies and institutions. Further than the knowledge that diverse and excluded and foreign peoples bring, the real bodies of people need our hospitality. Real bodies are being harmed and real bodies need to be healed and fed. The table spread by Jesus invites us all to be filled with the love we need, via spiritual and physical nourishment.

As people who wish to share the good news of God’s incarnation on Earth, we value creating a safe space for the oppressed in our midst and a welcoming space for new members from outside the Church of the Brethren. We do not see our ministry as solely to the people within the conference hall, but to the whole world, and especially to Brethren who have been harmed by the church itself and have left because of it.

As a people who listen to Jesus’ words and actions in our holy Scripture, teachings that exemplify resistance to senseless rules in the face of real human need, we value love over law. Because ‘the Sabbath was made for humans, not humans made for the Sabbath,’ we value rules and laws (only) to the extent that they empower the principles they are created to sustain; in the case of religious laws, we claim the Christian duty to ignore and oppose rules that come at the expense of living out the principle behind them, which is love. We see many ways violent relationships harm people; we have yet to see how same-gender-loving relationships harm people more than any other sort of mature, adult relationships harm people; we see lots of ways to spend our time fighting harm – so much so, that we do not have time to waste upholding laws that distract us from the real breaches of Jesus’ call to love and serve our God and our neighbors.

We invite all who are interested in working toward loving, right relationships among all people and with all of Creation to join us in our Hospitality Center, because we have much work to do together.