The Global Fringe

Kicking off this miniseries centered around faith and sexuality, I couldn’t imagine a more generous and gracious voice, my friend Tim Schraeder. He said, “I’ve been welcome to the table, but told I didn’t have a voice.” As a gay man, Tim was an “inside outsider” in the evangelical church world. A recovering evangelical mega-church marketer and social media guru, Tim’s wrestled deeply for over a decade with his own identity, sexuality, faith, and vocation. With unbelievable grace and compassion, vulnerability and strength, he shares more of this story for the first time so publically.  

If you have wrestled with your faith and how to engage in the LGBTQ+ conversation, you need to hear Tim’s story. If you know someone who’s LGBTQ+ and has loved God, this episode will give them hope. If you’ve ever hidden a part of your identity for the sake of fitting in yet still feel like an “inside outsider”, Tim’s journey will inspire you to fully come out into the light and stop hiding. 

About Tim: Recovering evangelical megachurch marketer, LGBTQ+ believer, and brand-new New Yorker.  

Connect with Tim at [email protected] and follow him online at @timschraeder. Read Matthew Vines’ book, God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships. 

For a while now I’ve wanted to do a series on faith and being LGBTQ+, but I wanted it to be the right time with the right people. The time is now. Can you be gay and Christian? How do you reconcile a couple Bible verses with being affirming? How does reparative therapy work – or not? How do LGBTQ+ Christians feel like an “insider outsider”? What can we learn about God through their stories? Perhaps most importantly, how can we be bridge builders regardless of our theological position? 

Over the next few episodes, I’m going to share the stories of some brave friends who are LGBTQ+ and are people of faith. But before I open up their stories to you, I want to share a bit of my own journey in processing faith, theology, and the testimonies of non-straight folks. If there was ever a global fringe, it’s here.

This episode will mess with you (at least it did me). Dominique Gilliard is an author, pastor, profession, justice seeker, and one of the most influential activists in the U.S around issues of racial injustice and systemic brokenness. In this episode, we talk about his unusual upbringing and how those holy interruptions became the fertile soil for his life’s work. We discuss the role Christianity has played in the justice system and mass incarceration and what law and order really mean. Dom gives us a mind-blowing history lesson about the school to prison pipelines, as well as the hidden pipelines of mental health, private prisons, and immigration. The stories and statistics will likely cause heart and mind to be stunned and activated around the work we need to do to reframe our theology to better reflect the Gospel. Get ready! 

About Dominique  DuBois Gilliard. He’s is the director of Racial Righteousness and Reconciliation for the  Love Mercy Do Justice  (LMDJ) initiative of the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC). He is the author of Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores. He also serves on the board of directors for the Christian Community Development Association and Evangelicals for Justice. In 2015, he was selected as one of the ECC’s “40 Under 40” leaders to watch, and Huffington Post named him one of the “Black Christian Leaders Changing the World.” 

An ordained minister, Gilliard has served in pastoral ministry in Atlanta, Chicago, and Oakland. He earned a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies and History from Georgia State University and a master’s degree in History from East Tennessee State University, with an emphasis on race, gender, and class in the United States. Dominique earned a Master of Divinity degree from North Park Seminary, where he currently serves as an adjunct professor. 

Connect with Dominique at https://dominiquegilliard.com. 

Follow him on Twitter at @DDGilliard  and on Instagram @dominiquedgilliard. 

Men and my white friends need to listen to this episode. Amena has a powerhouse way to speak with such poignancy and persuasion to core issues of identity, belonging and purpose. She speaks in Technicolor and with beauty. Her friendship has illuminated what it’s like to be a black woman in our country, which has been a model as we raise our black daughter.  

In this episode we talk about her new book “How to Fix a Broken Record”, redefining womanhood when it all doesn’t go as planned, the beauty and terror of being black, and how to care for your soul in it all. A storyteller at heart, Amena weaves us through her narrative, easily finding connection to ours. She even generously shares a recent poem, “Breathe”. 

About Amena Brown. She is a poet, speaker, author, and event host. Named one of Rejuvenate Magazine’s Top 40 under 40 Changemakers, Amena is the author of five spoken word CDs and two non-fiction books: Breaking Old Rhythms and her latest release How to Fix a Broken Record. She has performed and spoken at events across the nation such as Creativity World Forum, IF Gathering, and Chick-fil-A Leadercast, as well as touring with Gungor, Ann Voskamp and the Voices Project Historically Black College and University Tour. Amena is also the host of the limited edition How to Fix a Broken Record podcast about her book of the same name and the co-host of podcast, Here for the Donuts. She and her husband, DJ Opdiggy, live in Atlanta where they host an open mic every fifth Thursday at Urban Grind Coffee. 

Engage more with Amena http://www.amenabrown.com/

Tash is my favorite tattooed, whiskey-drinking Kiwi! She breaks all kinds of cultural barriers because of her commitment to help people change the way they think and see the world. As a globe-trotting writer, marketing and strategy consultant and coach, Tash knows how to guide people from here to there to accomplish their unique goals. She was a youth pastor in her former life but still looks for ways to invest in teenagers. In this episode we talk about how she’s found herself on the fringe as a woman, a New Zealander living in the U.S, and as someone being uninvited from the table. Instead of becoming a victim or angry outsider, Tash is inventing ways to reinvent herself, take action, and build the life she wants to create. We also dabble in our mutual commitment to fight the patriarchy. 

Engage more with Tash at www.tashmcgill.com.   

Follow @tashmcgill on Instagram and Twitter.