"We Are Family"

Monday, July 14, 2025

Happy Monday, my friends! As most of you know I recently returned from a week in Atlanta, GA, for Holy Convocation with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM). The experience was exhausting, enlightening, challenging, powerful, and loving. I now understand what people have said about TFAM embracing and loving on perfect strangers until they become family. That’s precisely what I experienced. I left convocation with so many new friends and connections, people who in most cases I had never met only several days earlier.

Family can be a challenging reality for LGBTQIA+ people. Far too often Queer people have been rejected by their families and denied the opportunity to create their own families. Though not limited to Queer people, you will often hear us talk about chosen families or those people who have become our family because of experience, circumstance, and the fact that love is neither exclusively biological nor tribal. We can also find ourselves in families whether or not we consciously chose those families. A truth among introverts is that we were often discovered by extroverts and pulled into groups. Some people, including many introverts, conclude that this is one of the ways, maybe the only way, that we find friends.[1] 

I’m immensely blessed and privileged to have been born into a family which has always supported me. Though my aunt once remarked that my parents, sister, and I naturally operate at a higher decibel level, they have embraced all that makes me who I am from being a nerd to being a church geek and pastor to being the Queer person I continue to live into. There will never be any family which will be more important or profound to me than my parents, sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, unless I build one myself with a partner and/or children. That said, I’m blessed to be a member of many other families including, in no particular order, my LOVEboldly family; my Blue Ocean Columbus family; my Phi Mu Delta family; my Sewanee, UVM, and MTSO families; my Middle Church family; my New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio families; my Cambridge, OH, family; my Queer family, particularly in Ohio; and now my TFAM family. Each of these families means something special to me with people who have shaped who I am and have continued to support and love me even across distance and time.

The impact of family, of having people who love us, who ally themselves with us, who allow themselves to be vulnerable with us, cannot be underestimated. The Trevor Project’s national surveys of LGBTQIA+ youth and young adult mental health consistently demonstrate that youth who are supported and affirmed in their identities experience a lower incidence of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts.[2] The Bible, too, speaks to our need for family and is ripe with all kinds and configurations of families. Yes, the Bible demonstrates that family can be more than any simplistic “natural” or “traditional” idea of what a family “should” be.

What families are in your life? Where have you found and built families?

Let us pray: God, whose family includes every person who is alive and every person who has ever lived, we thank you for our families. Thank you for parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, piblings[3], children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, niblings[4], cousins, friends, partners, spouses, and the many people who are members of our families regardless of their biological, adoptive, or familiar connections to us. Bless the people who love us and grant, we ask you, safety and peace to each person we love. Help us build and grow our families as we reflect your love to the people we meet. May our world know more love and less destruction, more connection and less division. We ask this all in the name of Jesus, our liberator. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends. Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +

[1] While Myers Briggs places me right on the cusp between “introvert” and “extrovert,” I strongly lean into the introvert camp. I maintain, however, that I’m an introvert who loves people.

[2] The Trevor Project. 2024 U. S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People. Retrieved from https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2024/#intro on July 9, 2025.

[3] One of several gender inclusive options for aunts and uncles (a combination of the words “parent” and “sibling”).

[4] One of several gender inclusive options for nieces and nephews (like “pibling,” modeled on the word “sibling” and the “n” from “niece” and “nephew”).