Community: What it Means to Me By Renae Miller

    Community feels like coming home to rest where God has long been leading me.

I’ve wanted to write this piece for quite a while now and haven’t really known where to start. The good thing about that is that this community, little Imago Dei Church in Peoria, IL, is a safe place to not know; to not know what I believe, to not know where I’m going, to not know who I am, to not know all the things about God or myself. But to be invited in to look closer and check it out. 

And that is one of the things that I most appreciate about this community- that we are in a journey of not knowing together. It’s true that a person can go on a journey of belief-discovery or self-discovery independently. I do it in my mind all the time! But there is something so incredibly valuable about doing so with mirrors of God’s image bearers held up around you to help you literally see where you're going, and figure out how what you’re thinking about lands with other people. None of us really want to go to an island of introspection; that turns us into navel-gazers who end up being inadvertently destructive to humanity- and, I think, the community around us helps save us from becoming the last thing we want to be. 

The previous paragraph tells what community means to me on a general level but I’d like to get a little deeper into what this particular community means to me in a specific way. Having been here at Imago since the second Sunday Imago was a church, I’ve seen a lot of changes in the church and in myself personally. Sometime after the beginning of the church, the question of how Scripture applies to queer people became something we wrestled with collectively and thankfully (not without sweat and tears and maybe blood) have come out (!) to a place of being affirming and celebratory of all different queer expressions of humanity. Somewhere along that path, I also started to wrestle with what queerness means to me. I’ve done a lot of different wrestling- assuming a compulsive heteronormative view of the world with no representation, being stuck in homophobic ways and ideas, being curious, being in denial about having any queer feelings/identity, coming to peace, questioning, wondering if I’m going to hell, feeling dumb for not having known myself better before now, etc. 

After lots of wrestling, in the last couple of years, I’ve been able to finally rest in the knowledge that I am queer (maybe bi, but labels haven’t been something I’ve particularly sought out). I’ve been able to embrace the idea that God created me just as I am and it is good, just like God created all other humans and called them good. And I’m just particularly grateful that my spiritual community, Imago Dei, is a super safe place to be able to do that. I’m grateful to walk with others who have wrestled, some who have been my representation, and some of who have been allies before I knew I needed allies. It feels weird to make some type of announcement about this, but it also feels like I wanted to share with my spiritual family what I’ve learned and been working on accepting about myself. I feel like most folks will smile, say, “Thanks for sharing with us” and not think much else, nor will they be as judgmental as I am of myself in my own head. 

I still have much wrestling to do- how can someone possibly be realizing their queerness at my age, what does that even mean in a monogamous heterosexual marriage, how do I fit in a queer community when I have the privilege of passing in a heterosexual marriage, how do I wrestle with internalized homophobia and the outwardly homophobic person I used to be, etc. I’m just super grateful to be in a place where I can continue to wrestle with questions with other Siblings in Christ who bear the same image of God that I do. 

This lovely spiritual community has been with me on this whole journey- you have helped me to see that I couldn’t pray the gay away (it doesn’t work) and I don’t need to. You have helped me to reconstruct a version of loving all of humanity, in all of our beautiful sexualities and gender expressions, that fits within scripture and the person of Jesus. My task of rebuilding after a belief shift has been so much more possible within a community that also wrestles, breaks down, and rebuilds. Thank you. 

I want to encourage us all to lean into what community means to us- the wrestling process together, the rebuilding process together, the encouragement process together- and the share-life process together. I love that we serve a God in three persons (whatever that actually means): God is a community by literal definition- community is what we were built from- community is God’s image stamped in us collectively.