What does it mean to be inclusive?
At The Land being inclusive is more than a statement but a practice of listening and learning from voices that differ from our own. It means trusting that we are capable of love and acceptance even in the absence of understanding. It means reflecting on our own barriers to belonging, asking for what we need to belong, and leaning on one another as we work together to lower those barriers so everyone can belong.
Inclusion requires relationships and this year we will be focusing on creating connections in our community that challenge stigmas of species, age, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, relationship status, and many other labels used to segregate us into opposite corners of any given institution.
In other words, we will do what we do best at The Land. We learn to love one another more fully through acceptance, respect, and humility.
In 2022, we will extend our inclusivity practice from the incorporation of pronoun pins into worship into the translation of scripture to refer to God in nonbinary images. To support this deepening of our language for the Divine, we will be using liturgy from enfleshed, a collaborative effort creating and facilitating spiritual resources for learning and unlearning dominance in belief and practice.
In addition, we will be committing to reading and listening to authors who hold worldviews differing from the dominant narrative. Pastor Stephanie will be offering ongoing reading lists as well as additional resources to support these practices of holy living where all voices connect to provide a fuller vision of the kin-dom we are called to co-create.
This year we will be asking ourselves, who are the voices we hear and who are the voices that remain unheard as we lift up the silenced voices as teachers in our midst.