God’s Doors are Open to All
When you drive up Highway 421 north from Boone, into Vilas, you can’t miss our church. In 2020, we joined churches around the nation proclaiming God’s love by installing 6 doors on the front of our portico painted in a rainbow. They read simply: “God’s doors are open to all.”
For us at High Country United Church of Christ, this phrase is simple. Our church’s founders believed that all people should be welcome in the body of Christ–no exceptions. However, that isn’t true for all churches, and that’s why we have the rainbow doors.
The “God’s Doors Movement'' (https://godsdoors.org/) recognizes that a large portion of mainline Christian churches have been closed to LGBTQ+ congregants, lay leaders, and ministers. The rainbow doors signal to those outside our church that it’s different here.
It’s a bold step to put rainbow doors on the front of the building. We worried about vandalism and angry letters–or even someone showing up in dissent to Sunday morning worship. The Spirit called us to do it anyway, reminding us of all those who had walked through our doors seeking rest and support when others had turned them away.
When I speak about LGBTQ+ inclusion to folks outside our church, I often must talk about why we believe what we believe. So many of us have heard the properly named “clobber verses” pulled out of the Bible that create the foundation for LGBTQ+ exclusion in the church, and I have plenty of thoughts about those verses and how they’ve been interpreted and translated with purpose to exclude. To be frank, I don’t think these arguments get us anywhere. When we think about the Bible and its truth differently, we are never going to sway folks to agree with us based on its verses.
What grounds us more is our people. Seeing a couple committed to one another for over 40 years having their union legalized shows us the joy of God. Hearing transgender folks in our midst talk about becoming more fully themselves by changing their name and starting hormones shows us the fullness of God’s creation.
At High Country UCC, we have chosen to follow Jesus’s example of love and community that reaches out to folks on the margins and those whom society has cast out. We are reminded that in the face of every person we see a glimpse of the face of God. And if we really believe that, how can our doors be closed to anyone?
