The Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Report | Inclusion & Belonging
“Outdo one another in showing honor.”
— Romans 12:10b, NRSV
Over the last three years, Q Christian Fellowship has been engaging in various rounds of community research and self assessments around our alignment with our efforts to pursue equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). We pursued this research in order to better understand the diverse perspectives of the community and our responses to address those lived experiences. The Executive Summary and the OAD (Organizational Assessment and Diagnosis) Report will be released in full at the end of November 2024.
Our next four weeks of Monday Invocations will focus on some of the questions this report raised for us at QCF. A summary of the first section of the report, which was on Inclusion and Belonging, can be read at the bottom of this page. While we heard from community members the ways QCF has pursued creating an environment of inclusivity and radical belonging, a really important question was brought up:
“What are the ways in which QCF can (continue to) foster relationship building between individuals in our community?”
As I thought about the ways that I’ve seen our community build relationships, this phrase from Romans 12 came to mind: “Outdo one another in showing honor.” Some of the most beautiful connections and growing seasons in our community have come from a deep sense of belonging. And when do people feel like they belong? When they are welcomed and honored for exactly who they are.
At Q Christian Fellowship, we invite our community into a “Big Tent.” It is a place where we make space for the many and the “other”, a place where differences are protected and a place where we strive to connect beyond disagreement. Community in this model may not be as straightforward or easy as other more exclusionary models, but there is so much life to be given in honoring each person for exactly who they are!
We all make up a beautiful tapestry of various sexualities, genders, races, ethnicities, faith traditions, worship styles, abilities, gifts, and stories. These gifts that make you you are different from the gifts that make me me. And that is a glorious thing! A taste of heaven! What radical transformation might await us if we explored disagreements with curiosity and met differences with honor?
And so I’d like to exhort you all, dear friends, to take up this challenge from Romans 12. Outdo one another in honoring everyone you meet within the Q Christian Fellowship community and beyond!
OAD Report Executive Summary Excerpt | Inclusion & Belonging
In the first thematic area, “Inclusion & Belonging,” interview participants identified ways that QCF has been inclusive and ways that it can be more inclusive. They indicated ways in which people (both individuals and groups) fostered positive experiences associated with the QCF community, such as being invited to events, sharing space with like-minded people, and seeing diverse representation on the main stage at the annual conference. Interview participants shared a range of perspectives about who is included within the organization at large. Two examples that we heard from multiple participants are the observations that QCF is becoming more racially diverse and that QCF’s community still appears/operates as predominantly white. Participants also shared somatic/embodied responses to the terms “inclusion” and “belonging.” The word “belonging” was responded to with more evocative terms such as “safe,” “communal,” “relational,” and “hopeful,” while the word “inclusion” was responded to with terms such as “box to check,” “corporate,” “buzzword,” and “assimilation.”
Q Christian Fellowship continues to seek to fully engage a diversity of identities, expressions and experiences in our programming and resources. Yet, our goal is to center marginalized identities that are often not included in many other faith spaces. We see from participant responses that our community is also pointing us toward the pursuit of solidarity with the marginalized, a core part of our vision: “Q Christian Fellowship prophetically models a world where all LGBTQ+ people are fully loved by family, church, and community, and Christians worldwide live up to their calling to be instruments of grace and defenders of the outcasts.”
