Radical Belonging in the Church | Pride 2025
“We can’t really belong without being radical!”
Rev. Laura Beth Buchleiter,
QCF Community Member & Volunteer
Here is an interesting question: If you are being radical, can you really belong?
It often feels like this is the conflict many of us face when it comes to being involved in faith communities as queer people. The very nature of being “radical” – pushing the margins of what is generally considered culturally and socially normative or acceptable – can stand at odds with the goal of “belonging”: to feel at home and accepted among a group of people.
The way I have seen this work is simple to state and hard to execute; we have to approach belonging from two different directions.
Most people meet their needs in life by starting with the basics. First are physical needs of food and shelter, then security and safety, then community and belonging, and finally developing our self-esteem and self-awareness – though perhaps not exactly in that order. You may recognize these from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This is what I call a “ground up approach” and a somewhat helpful model when our basic needs look a lot like those of most people around us. It’s why this is often represented as a pyramid.
What I have noticed in my own life, and the lives of many queer siblings, is that we tend to flip the pyramid. We start with a sense of self-awareness that is, in some way, at odds with the world around us. Our self-esteem is then hard earned and from there we find community and friendship – belonging. Only then do we begin to embody our engagement with life in more practical ways.
The bottom line is the people in our churches and in our queer communities are often seeking the same thing, (connection and belonging) we are just coming at it from different perspectives. To build a common, mutual experience of community, to foster radical belonging, we have to learn to start with belonging. To help see this, I like to visualize these patterns as an hourglass instead of pyramids. Instead of starting at the edges and hoping for belonging, we center belonging and move with each other toward both the more practical and deeper experiences of life.
It's vulnerable. It’s counterintuitive. It goes against the flow of most everything we often cling to about our culture or “in-groups”. That’s what makes it radical.
The response to the question from the beginning becomes this: “We can’t really belong without being radical!”
By the Love of Christ, may it be so!
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