Austin’s official Pride festival is this weekend, and I would like you to spend it at church.

Followed by attending the feathered boa and tequila shot reception at the Fourth Street bar of your choice.

Tonight from 7 - 9 p.m. at University Methodist Church, there is a Pride-sponsored Multi-Faith Service. Normally church and Pride festivals do not go hand in hand, but the featured speaker, Rev. Dr. Stephen Sprinkle is working to bridge the gap between religion and the LGBTQ community. As an out and openly gay ordained Baptist minister, a teacher at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, and a speaker and scholar on the behalf of victims of gay specific hate crimes, he’s no Pat Robertson.

His most recent publication came out in January. Unfinished Lives: Reviving the Memories of LGBTQ Hate Crimes Victims, is a major research project chronicling LGBTQ hate crime murder victims in the United States.

Pride is a time to—quite literally—be proud of who you are, and how far our society has come. But there is still work to be done and damage to repair, and there must be a continuing effort to prepare the LGBTQ community for what lies ahead.

An interview with Rev. Dr. Sprinkle shows that he is looking to inspire everyone, no matter your faith, to build bridges where there have previously been bombs.

Was it an issue that you were an out gay man when you were hired at Brite Divinity School? Did they know when they hired you?

I was hired that way, but of course it was an issue. Because, no divinity school or seminary in the southwestern United States particularly wanted to have an out and open gay man on the faculty. But it turned out very well. I’ve had both the best of life in Texas, and some of the most difficult because of that choice that I made to come here. You see, we have, at Brite Divinity School at least 10% of our student body who are gay, or lesbian or transgendered. And we’re the only seminary or divinity school in the southwestern United States that has a full and comprehensive embrace of LGBTQ people.

Adding a church element to Pride is going to be a first for Austin this year, and there has been a lot of dialog created about that. Why do you think it’s important to have someone like you in the Christian community reaching out at an event like this?

Well I’m honored to be asked. I’m particularly pleased that they are doing it in a multi faith context, so it isn’t just about Christians.

But for gays and lesbians, we have to understand that at least 95% of the trouble that the population at large has with gay and lesbian people is rooted uniquely in theological and religious prejudice against us. And so a person like me, who’s an ordained Baptist and a theologian and someone who is writing and speaking lively on human rights, I’m not only a novelty, but I’m something of the alternative voice that is important for the community to have.

For example I think that it is long overdue for LGBT people to have the discussion among ourselves about religious faith. That’s a problem for us. Because there are so many LGBTQ people who have been harmed by religion, and a large section of the LGBTQ community has dropped out of organized religion for reasons that I understand, you see.

Often times at Pride festivals, you will find religious people picketing as opposed to giving speeches. How do you contend with your religious counterparts who are telling you that you are not doing 'God’s work'?

Well, I’m just as accepted by God as they are. All of us gay and lesbian people are. I’m a Christian, and for Christians we know that the good news of our faith is that God loves us, so we don’t need the approval of the other people who seem to speak for God. You know Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell said that the attack on the twin towers in New York city on 9/11 was caused by gay people, feminists, and the ACLU. We don’t need their approval, and their disapproval does not stand between us and the love of God and the service that we want to render to humanity.

What we’ve got to do is move beyond thinking that we have to answer to all of their objections. We don’t.

In fact we can love them, even if they hate us.

We can also oppose them and we can work for justice wherever we possibly can. And I think that’s an important thing to note, because we need religious voices being raised from the LGBTQ community to remind the whole world that we’re not condemned by god. And we have a role to play that god has given us in church and society just like anybody else.

What’s the message that you’re hoping to get across when you speak on Thursday, September 8th?

I’m going to raise the question of what it means to be LGBTQ and a member of a faith community after 9/11. You know we’re approaching the tenth anniversary. Ever since then, gay and lesbian people have played a vital role in the healing of the nation. But we have some questions that we need to face and that is how can we, as religious, or spiritual LGBT people from a whole multi faith point of view contribute to bringing people together, rather than dividing people. We know that religion can either be a bomb or a bridge. And what I want to talk about is how not to be a bomb, but instead to be a bridge so that we can begin to bring people together in our own community and begin to have the conversation about religion which gay and lesbian people so desperately need to have.

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https://austinpride.org/events/multifaith-service/