Wednesday dinner

It’s Wednesday, which means that tonight, a group of ten of my friends will sit around our table for Wednesday Dinner. My wife and I will barbecue burgers and ultra-sweet Chilliwack corn; other friends will provide salad, drinks and dessert.

Our house will not be spotless, and we’ll likely still be cooking when they arrive, so some of them will have to set the table. We have lowered our expectations of perfect hosting and redirected that energy into making sure everyone in the group feels seen and included. This means finding alternate burgers and buns for friends with dietary restrictions, and fetching the box of toys so the kids know this is a space where they belong.

We have a haphazard planning system. Every week, by Tuesday, someone will hopefully message the group chat to say they can host or to suggest we meet in a park or on a beach, if it’s warm enough here in Vancouver. That person might also offer to provide the main course, though they also know they’re allowed to host without cooking. The rest of us will check our pantries and fridges to see what we can add to the meal, or we’ll ask what we can grab from the store on our way. Contributing food is not a prerequisite for attendance; sometimes getting your own self to that table is all you can do, and it’s enough. It’s weekly, ordinary hospitality, and it works for us.

Craving community

Wednesday Dinner started in 2011 with my wife and three of her friends. They were at various stages in their coming out journeys, and they no longer felt welcome to bring their full queer selves to church. They craved a regular practice of community akin to a midweek “home group” or “small group” meeting, and they figured they didn’t need the church to engineer it, so they began cooking and eating together every Wednesday night. They would make a point of inviting each person around the table to share one high point and one low point from their week.

In the fifteen years since, much has changed. My wife and I moved away to Toronto, then moved back to Vancouver. Housemates have cycled in and out of the group. We’ve met and welcomed new romantic partners; we’ve witnessed marriages and separations. Two wonderful children were born. And through it all, versions of this group have continued to meet on Wednesdays for a meal in someone’s home.

Chosen family

Queer people no longer form the majority at Wednesday Dinner, but the concept of “queer chosen family” remains the heart of the gathering. I’ve also heard it called “found family,” “framily” (friends who form family), or “logical family” (as opposed to biological family). While queer folks aren’t the only ones who pursue deep relationships beyond bloodlines, we do tend to have more motivation to do so, with high rates of biological family rejection and less resonance with the heteronormative concept of nuclear family. Rather than forming kinship bonds around legal categories and circumstances of birth, we forge them around shared values, shared experiences, trust and love.

For some people, queer chosen family can be a matter of life and death. Some Indigenous queer people have practiced this for centuries, including Hijra communities in India, who live together at the margins of society, with their own hierarchical lineages and kinship structures. The groundbreaking film Paris is Burning documents ball culture in 1980s New York, especially among Black and Latinx queer people, where leaders and mentors would assume the titles of Mothers and Fathers, and would welcome homeless queer youth to join their houses, take shelter, and compete alongside them.

Some of these historic houses have legacies that continue into the present day.

In the 80s and 90s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic ravaged the queer community, infecting a large proportion of gay men. When their families and churches abandoned them in shame and fear, the lesbian community stood in the gap, raising funds, doing blood drives, organizing food and housing, and offering hospice care. In recognition for their solidarity, queer people began rearranging their acronym from “GLBT” to “LGBT,” moving the lesbians to the front.

Today, many of us cisgender queer people are organizing to protect and advocate for our trans siblings, whose rights are under threat. Their “transcestors” were among the first to stand up to the police at the Stonewall Inn in that pivotal moment for queer rights fifty-seven years ago, and now we stand up for them.

Emotional lifelines

Even when it’s not about physical survival, chosen family can be an emotional lifeline over the course of our queer journeys. Finding queer chosen family is often easier to do in larger cities; for those in smaller or more isolated communities, the internet is a gift: connecting them to queer people in other places. Some of us seek out queer elders and siblings even before we come out; they become possibility models and remind us of our worth, helping chip away at our internalized queerphobia.

Chosen family can provide resources and support during the coming out process, especially when we lose jobs, homes or relationships in the process. Some of us add children to our chosen families through fostering, adoption or offering a room to someone who’s been kicked out after coming out. If we’re especially lucky, church can be a place to find chosen family, though it’s still more common for churches to be sites of queer rejection.

God’s chosen family

It is ironic that ostracism from Christian families and churches is what forces some queer people to practice the very kind of “chosen family hospitality” that God practices. God’s family is not primarily a blood family, but an adoptive family, a family where God consistently shows hospitality to outsiders.

God blesses Israel so they can bless other nations and widens the tent to embrace people like Naaman, Ruth and Rahab, some of whom become Jesus’ ancestors.

Jesus follows the pattern, drawing a motley crew of disciples as his chosen family, and sending them to the ends of the earth to launch the church. This wildly diverse early church was a family that grew not primarily through childbirth, but rather through grafting Gentiles into the sacred community. I love verses like Isaiah 56:8 where God says, “I will gather still others to them beyond those already gathered,” and John 10:16, where Jesus says: “I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also.” We worship a God who is always at work gathering more outsiders into the fold. By collecting those pushed to the edges, like a bag with a string woven around its perimeter, God also collects those in the middle.

My favourite example of God’s radical hospitality is the unfolding story of eunuchs in scripture. Although attempts to map eunuchs directly onto today’s LGBTQ+ spectrum yield no straightforward results (pun intended!), as castrated and/or impotent humans, eunuchs were the most recognizable sexual and gender minorities of their time.

Deuteronomy 23:1 tells us that eunuchs were initially banned from the temple, likely because of their association with practices deemed idolatrous in the temples of surrounding nations. That blanket legal prohibition makes Isaiah 56 all the more startling. In this prophetic text, eunuchs who serve God are welcomed back into the temple where, despite being unable to conceive children, they are promised an enduring family name.

Then in Matthew 19, Jesus further honours eunuchs by counting himself among their ranks, with his choice to be a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven. Finally, in Acts 8, the Spirit whisks Philip directly into the path of an Ethiopian eunuch, and Philip welcomes this eunuch as one of the first baptized converts of the early church. Following the storyline of eunuchs in the Bible gives us a clear example of the radical hospitality of the Spirit toward those whose gender or sexuality doesn’t fit the norm.

Then in Matthew 19, Jesus further honours eunuchs by counting himself among their ranks, with his choice to be a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven. Finally, in Acts 8, the Spirit whisks Philip directly into the path of an Ethiopian eunuch, and Philip welcomes this eunuch as one of the first baptized converts of the early church. Following the storyline of eunuchs in the Bible gives us a clear example of the radical hospitality of the Spirit toward those whose gender or sexuality doesn’t fit the norm.

Making space

Just as God makes room for eunuchs around the dinner table, we’re challenging ourselves to keep making space for “the other.” We shelter queer teens who are forced out by Christian parents who believe they are practicing “tough love.” We step in as queer aunties, “guncles,” (gay uncles) and “piblings/unties/auncles,” (non-binary terms for “parent’s sibling” or combinations of “aunt and uncle”), finding beautiful roles as safe adults and mentors in the lives of other people’s kids. We build friendships with unlikely people, responding to all kinds of needs, even among our so-called enemies, conveying the wide welcome of God through our diverse intersectional community, woven together with the threads of God’s unconditional love.

Our Wednesday Dinner community has consistently shown up for one another, for better and for worse. When one of us got married this year, the rest of us pitched in as officiants, wedding band members and bartenders. A few years ago, when my mom died suddenly, some of them were on our doorstep that very evening with food and quiet presence.

When we discovered we had different expectations about the regularity of everyone’s Wednesday night attendance, we talked our way through the conflict. We taught ourselves to use new pronouns for one group member. We flexed to make room for animal guessing games with the kids during dinner, even if it means we don’t have time to hear everyone’s highs and lows of the week. We even managed to learn to cook some dishes that are gluten-free, lactose-free AND vegetarian.

Having survived all of this, I think we might last a very long time. I think we might be chosen family.

Again, I don’t believe you need to be queer to try out “chosen family” hospitality, or to start your own equivalent of Wednesday Dinner. Anyone following the way of a radically hospitable God will necessarily receive divine invitations to widen their tent and table. When you do, will you humbly seek the wisdom of the queer community in your practice of hospitality? We have a lot to offer the church. Some of us have skills in communication, setting healthy boundaries and resolving conflicts. Some of us have learned what it means to name harm, to forgive and to repair. Some of us can narrate in great detail what it feels like to be excluded and what it looks like to become an includer. And some of us have a veggie burger recipe to share.

Will you save a seat at the table for us?