Response to Poem at Love Undivided 2019 from the Executive Leadership Team

We are aware that, at the 2019 Love Undivided Conference, a poetic prayer including one line calling for “the fall of capitalism and a free Palestine” was offered by a community member from the main stage.

The positions shared were not and are not endorsed by Q Christian. Our community includes people who would strongly agree with such a prayer, those who would strongly disagree, and everything in between.

Q Christian has always valued equal dignity and diversity of thought amongst differing opinions, and all conference presenters were asked to share their viewpoints in a way that held space for other beliefs. In our commitment to cultivating radically welcome space, Q Christian will re-evaluate our multi-layered review process to account for artists offering their original work including poems, prayers or songs from our main stage and we sincerely regret that this line of the poem was overlooked.

While Q Christian will never be silent on matters of policy impacting LGBTQ+ people of faith, we will continue every effort to prevent strong assertions not directly tied to our mission without deep reflection of and holding space for all viewpoints.

In the coming weeks, we will be engaging the community to obtain feedback on how to best continue this difficult work of making space for a variety of viewpoints on all of the topics engaged by Q Christian together, most profoundly within the complex framework of sexual ethics. We will soon be hosting a town hall Q&A with the executive leadership team around how to have difficult conversations in divisive times, as related to our mission, vision and values. An invitation to this town hall forum will be posted next month. We look forward to your continued feedback on the selection of content we promote as a community.  Please send feedback directly to us at listening@qchristian.org.