We Are Enough | Pride Invocation
“Songs carried through marches.
Songs hummed in grief.
Songs sung in church basements and Pride parades and protest lines and late-night car rides home when someone is trying to rally everyone around one simple idea: love.”
Min. Darren Calhoun
Happy Pride, Beloved!
This Pride, we are exploring the intersection of worship, music, and what it looks like for us as LGBTQ+ Christians to Play It Proud. This year’s theme emphasizes our joy in our community, in our communal worship of the Divine, in our gratitude for unconditional love, and in our collective expression of who we fully and freely are. Over the next five weeks, you will hear from LGBTQ+ Christian musicians and worship leaders as they share how songs of faith continue to guide them.
Today, QCF Board Member and vocalist, Min. Darren Calhoun, kicks us off by reminding us how love has the final word.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how liberation and music are a powerful team.
Before movements have mission statements and websites, they often have songs and stories that shape what they become.
Songs carried through marches.
Songs hummed in grief.
Songs sung in church basements and Pride parades and protest lines and late-night car rides home when someone is trying to rally everyone around one simple idea: love.
One song that’s been sitting with me lately is “We Are Enough” by The Many. I think it resonates so deeply with me this Pride season because it names something many LGBTQ+ Christians know intimately: how easy it is to hide.
“It’s so easy to lie / So easy to hide / Pretend and go along / And act like nothing’s wrong.”
For many of us, those words are not abstract poetry. They describe the ways many of us have survived.
So many LGBTQ+ Christians were taught to disconnect from ourselves (and others) in order to stay spiritually safe. We learned how to perform holiness while hiding heartbreak. We learned how to shrink. How to edit ourselves. How to survive.
And yet songs have a way of telling the truth before we’re fully ready to say it out loud ourselves.
As someone who’s led worship for 20+ years and who sings with The Many, I’ve come to believe music can do something arguments often cannot. Music reaches the body first. It bypasses defenses. It reminds us we belong to one another.
That feels especially important during Pride Month.
Because even after years of healing, it can still feel “so hard to show up / so hard to trust love.” It can still be difficult to believe that who we are — and what we carry together — could actually be enough.
But that chorus keeps pushing back against shame and isolation:
“You are enough.
I am enough.
Breathe in the love.
We are enough.”
Not because we earned it.
Not because we perfectly resolved every theological argument.
But because divine love was never something we had to audition for in the first place.
As a Black queer Christian, I don’t experience Pride as separate from faith. I experience it as deeply connected to resurrection. To truth-telling. To community. To the stubborn belief that another world is possible even when institutions fail us.
And maybe that’s why songs matter so much.
Because songs carry stories.
Stories carry people.
And people carry each other.
The bridge of the song says:
“No matter what you feel right now / No matter what you’ve heard / Love has the final word.”
Honestly, I can’t think of a more needed message for this moment.
In a world full of fear, erasure, and political attacks on LGBTQ+ lives, choosing joy together becomes sacred work. Choosing visibility becomes holy ground. Singing together becomes spiritual communion. We are reminded that we’re all in this together, no one is alone.
So this Pride Month, may we continue to tell the truth loudly.
May we continue to sing with courage.
And may we continue to play it proud.
Because no matter what we’ve heard — love still has the final word.
