Activist Story – Rev. Dr. Yvette Flunder

Creating Change 2005 closed with a thunderous speech by the Rev. Dr. Yvette Flunder, founder and senior pastor of City of Refuge United Church of Christ in San Francisco, and presiding bishop of Refuge Ministries/Fellowship 2000, a multi-denominational fellowship of African-American Christian leaders who promote religious inclusion across lines of race, gender, class and sexual orientation.

Flunder urged conference attendees to recapture the spiritual power of the LGBT movement. “We are a prophetic people,” Flunder said. “The people in this room have been called by God to cut a path through the wilderness.”

She added that the LGBT community was too often divided by differences in beliefs, political positions or tactics.

Encouraging activists to put aside differences for the sake of greater justice, she said, “You may not agree with your brother or sister’s position, but you have to act like you do.” She then encouraged the audience to “get passionate” about someone else’s cause.

“Wear the T-shirt. Put the bumper sticker on your car. We are much more when we are together than we can ever be when we are separate,” she said. Lamenting the tendency of religion to be used for violence and separation, especially against LGBT people, Flunder said, “Let’s give up religion for relationships.”

She spoke to the separation many LGBT activists feel from spiritual traditions and faith communities, saying, “Somebody stole God from some of us. Somebody reached down inside you and stole your spirit from you.” But she encouraged activists not to abandon the spiritual dimension of the work they do for justice, saying, “Activism that is rooted in spirituality can bust hell wide open.”

The audience wildly applauded Flunder’s speech and left the conference with her words resonating as a spiritual call to all justice-seeking people: “I challenge you, prophets, to stand up!”