Happy Pride!! Today, as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, I am been almost overwhelmed with gratitude to be part of such a resilient and beautiful community. While the news and my social media feeds seem to be filled with more contention than unity lately, Pride month always brings with it a certain joy that offers a break from the heaviness of the world. It has been incredibly inspiring to see so many of you posting photos this Pride season. Thanks be to God! Y’all are so gorgeous and full of God’s abundant love! You’ve marched, tabled or hosted a booth at Pride festivals, and led incredible worship services in big cities with tens of thousands of attendees and at small rural pride fests with hundreds of folks, and everywhere in-between. At each Pride event I’ve seen testimony of the power of visible LGBTQIA+ clergy and affirming churches to help others remember that God loves them just as they are.

I want to lift up the witness of the Maryland, Washington DC, and Northern Virginia (DMV) MLP group in particular. They were marching in the Capital pride parade when a mistaken belief of an active shooter caused a number of people in the crowd to flee and take cover. For many terrifying minutes worst-case scenarios abounded before it was determined to be a false alarm. The DMV More Light group was close to the epicenter of the reported threat and I am so grateful it turned out not to be an active shooter. The threat of and experience of violence is very real for so many of us and I’m grateful to the DMV MLP group for their incredible presence at the Capital Pride Parade and for many decades in our church.

Click here to see various reflections on Pride, including one from read a testimony from Billy Kluttz, who organized the MLP DMV group and to see an incredible sample of some of the Pride posts we’ve witnessed. If you have a post you’d like to share to be featured in the next few weeks, please email it to us! Send a photo and a quote on what your witness has meant to you or those in your community to be featured.

This weekend More Light will be celebrating another kind of Pride event: the ordination of Jess Cook to their ministry as Program and Communications Manager! We rejoice that 41 years after the first Church declared there was “yet more light to shine forth” and 8 years after the ordination standards changed in the PC(USA), More Light’s work will be recognized for what it has always been: a valid ministry working to further Christ’s call to the Presbyterian Church. We will be offering two ways to stream the ordination service live. If you’d like to join, go to our Facebook page and we will go live shortly before 2pm ET. We will also be streaming through Zoom, which you can access here. (If you have questions about how to join via Zoom, check out this page on our website.)