Monday 14 May 2012

How safe is safe?

We are towards the end of a series of  "Safe Space" Conversations ( couple of previous blogs: here, here and here) in our wider Church community. Am not convinced that it has been particularly "safe" there has perhaps been a glimmer of "conversation"
Whilst not being as awful as I imagined they might be, they have been fairly difficult. And in last week's there were a couple of explosions, as much out of a sense of frustration as anything else. Where on earth does all this go?
There were also some moments of intimacy, when people shared details of their lives.
But, it seems to me,  safety has to have about it a sense of mutuality. For a gay person to self-disclose to  a group of people who they barely know that they are gay may be  a lot more revealing than others disclosing foolish (or even bad) things they may have done when  they were young ( both things happened in our group...).
What it is about human sexuality, the church, society; and about homosexuality in particular that seems to get certain people fixated is beyond me.
There does not seem to me to have been much mutuality in that sense

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Am interested to hear about this. Where in the wider church are these conversations happening?

Stephan Clark said...

The truth is I don't know that there is much going on that is easily accessible. There is a lot of discussion in all sorts of different places.
The "wider church" is a very loose description and perhaps I can be more helpful if you identify the part of the wider church you are interested in (either geographically, denominationally, locally...or interest wise)