One Spark

Although my grandmother was a woman of deep faith and someone I looked up to, my immediate family never shared her affinity for church-going and hardly ever talked about God unless us kids were in trouble! When we did manage to get to church, I didn't understand it, and when we weren't there, I didn't miss it. And the distance I felt from church and religion quickly turned into apathy when I came out in college and soaked up all the angst of queer friends who had a real bone to pick with religious leaders and their churches (understandably) and wanted nothing to do with either.

Vision

Christ's Peculiar People
       Holy Spirit Empowered
              Transforming Our World

1 Peter 2:9
But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people; so that you may proclaim the praises of God; who has called you out of darkness into God's marvelous light. (KJV)

But a few years later, after some internal rumblings that a change was on the horizon, I witnessed an African-American man walk down the center aisle of a concert hall in a black mini-skirt, cream blouse and pumps! As if that weren't enough, he proceeded to direct the Lavender Light, Black and People of All Colors Lesbian and Gay Gospel Choir! I was stunned, stumbling somewhere between disbelief and hysterics. In the midst of some deeply rooted and as yet unexercised embrace of God, these forty or so queer (mostly) black folk swept me up into an existence that seemed almost impossible.

Because of my time with Lavender Light, I heard these words for the first time… "This is the Day…the Lord has made! I will rejoice…I will rejoice!

It changed my life! I befriended people who looked like me, enjoyed the same music, and shared a faith in God that I finally felt like I could embrace fully. Most importantly, they believed that their voices were unique and God-given.

It was also through the work of Lavender Light that I found MCC! And none of it happened by accident!! Wylene Tookes sparked an interest in something my young mind was fascinated by but couldn't grasp - not because she proselytized, but because she firmly believed that God would care for and love us all as surely as the sky is blue and the sun is hot. That spark was just powerful enough to get me out one cold night to see an LGBT gospel choir sing about that same God. And through that choir, I have a family of faith whose mission it is to preach about that God, bear witness to that God and share that God with everyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear. And now, in my call to ministry, that mission has become my mission.

You never know the impact one person can have on a life. And MCC exists so that other people can be impacted like I was impacted by Grandmother, who, even in her final days, lectured my mother (her daughter) about the nature of God's business: "If God knows him to be a man and not a woman, then what business is it of yours?!"

Thank you, Grandmother. Thank you, Lavender Light. Thank you, MCC. And most of all, thank you, God!

by Myke Slack, Student Clergy,
Vision of Hope MCC in Mountville, PA
(from the MCC Church's People of African Decent web site
http://www.mccpad.org/)

Mission

Core Values

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