How to cultivate unity in diversity?
Guest lecturer and author Wendy VanderWal-Gritter proposes “generous spaciousness”
“The Church is impoverished if voices are missing,” Wendy VanderWal-Gritter told a full house at Trinity Western University’s latest Gender Café. “So whose voices are missing?” With her good-humoured demeanor, Wendy presented provocative material to the audience of alumni, students, and faculty. “It’s time to ask a new question: how can we cultivate unity in our diversity?”
Wendy is the most recent speaker in TWU’s ongoing Gender Café series. Organized by a small group of faculty, the Gender Caféseries creates space for those seeking dialogue rather than answers.The events are consistently well-attended by the TWU community. Robynne Healey, history professor and co-director of the Gender Studies Institute, said, “The Evangelical Church is a shifting landscape of thought. It’s our responsibility as a Christian university to participate in the discussions.”
Wendy proposes the implementation of “generous spaciousness,” a grace-filled forum for discussing sexual minorities within the church. By engaging in the conversation, and by eliminating sexual orientation as a qualifier for faith, Wendy believes that the church could turn from an outward message of homophobia to a message of unity.
Wendy’s challenge to “be acknowledging diversity to make room for plurality” inspires the types of critical thought that TWU strives to develop in its community. AlidaOegema, a TWU graduate student, commented after the event, “I appreciate her need to prioritize people – the individual stories, struggles, victories, and beliefs. When this issue becomes about systems and campaigns instead of stories and experiences, I think we’ve missed the important parts of engaging graciously with each other.”
And this desire to engage graciously is the appeal of the Gender Cafés. Alida said, “This series brings the questions of what it means to be human to the forefront in an engaging space.”
“There is a keen interest for these conversations,” Professor Healey explains. “I would love for the outside world to get a sense of Trinity Western as the place it really is: complex and complicated. A university is a space for open dialogue; that’s what the Gender Cafés are all about.”
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Wendy VanderWal-Gritter is currently on a tour for her new book, Generous Spaciousness: Responding to Gay Christians in the Church, which proposes a new paradigm for engaging diversity within the framework of the Church.