Free Community Church in Singapore

With Dr. and Mrs. Yap Kim Hao
and members of the church

I was invited to speak to a Christian lesbian and gay community in Singapore in June. Singapore is known as a “fine” city, because you have to pay a fine if you throw garbage on the street or take too much and waste food when eating a buffet. I could hardly imagine how such a government would allow a vibrant lesbian and gay community to exist. 

Homosexual sex is still punishable by prison time in Singapore, but the government has promised not to enforce the law. The Singaporean lesbian and gay community formed a group called Safehaven in 1998 to offer support and fellowship for Christians to discuss issues about faith and sexuality. The Free Community Church was subsequently formed, whose mission is “to create sacred space and give voice to the lives and experiences of minority communities, recognising their potential to transform lives and the wider church for the common good and glory of God.” 

I was invited by Dr. Yap Kim Hao, former General Secretary of the Christian Conference of Asia (CCA), to visit Singapore. I have known Dr. Yap since my college days when I was introduced to the Asian ecumenical movement. Through meeting other young people at the CCA assembly in 1973 in Singapore, I was conscientized to the social issues of Asia and became aware of our collective identity as “Asian.” 

Since his retirement from full-time ministry, Dr. Yap serves as pastoral advisor to the Free Community Church. I was very impressed that at 83, Dr. Yap has taken on a new cause and has committed himself to helping this fledgling community. 

The Free Community Church rents space at a commercial building. Its members come from all walks of life and they are both gay and straight. The core members who welcomed me include the pastor Miak Siew and a teacher, a psychiatrist, and a business school administrator. Most of the members seem to be professionals. 

I delivered a lecture on “Loving the Body, Loving God.” I discussed the dualism of mind and body in Christian theology and introduced resources in the Bible and in the mystic tradition to envision a more positive approach to the body. I encouraged the audience to recover an expansive view about the body, pleasure, and Eros.  

Some of the things I have said were quite “radical” for the audience, as some of them have come from conservative religious background, as churches in Singapore are generally quite conservative. After the lecture, some were interested in exploring further sexual ethics and morality. One asked how could we love and respect the body when the Bible says that our body is God’s and God is the potter and we are the clay (Isa. 64:8)? 

In my response, I said that it is very customary for those of us who have grown up in Chinese families to think about sex in terms of right and wrong. Sex has been understood primarily in moralistic terms, and is often associated with danger, risk, and taboo. Love, however, is often beyond right and wrong, black and white.  

Why can’t we think of sex in terms of aesthetics—of beauty, communion, excitement, desire, and ecstasy? I encouraged the Free Community Church to practice the ministry of accompaniment with all those who sexualities are questionable or even “indecent,” to borrow theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid's language. 

I am very encouraged to know that in addition to the Free Community Church, there is a small Metropolitan Community Church in KualaLumpur as well as the Blessed Minority Christian Fellowship in Hong Kong, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. 

An all Asia “open and affirming” church and life conference called “Amplify 2012” was held from June 22-24 in Hong Kong. With the theme “Transcending Boundaries—Restoring Hope,” the conference brought together participants from nine Asian countries. Bishop Yvette Flunder, Presiding bishop of the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries in San Francisco and Bishop Gene Robinson, bishop of New Hampshire of the Episcopal Church USA were the plenary speakers. 

At the end of my lecture, a woman came up to ask if I have spoken to other lesbian and gay groups in Asia. I said that while I have met with individual lesbians and gay men in Asia, I have not given a theological lecture in a predominantly lesbian and gay group. I was very grateful to have the opportunity to speak at the Free Community Church and meet Asian lesbian and gay Christians. 

Radical Love by Patrick S. Cheng

Radical love is “a love so extreme that it dissolves our existing boundaries,” writes my colleague Patrick S. Cheng in his new book Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology.

While queer theory could be highly theoretical and off-putting, Cheng’s Radical Love summarizes the contributions of queer theology in the last fifty years in an accessible and readable way.

So what is “queer”? This term was used in a derogatory way, but has been reappropriated as a neutral or positive term since the late 1980s. Cheng defines “queer” in an inclusive manner: as an umbrella term that refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex people and their allies; as a label that embraces transgressive actions against societal norms, with respect to sexuality and gender identity; and as a term used to subvert and erase boundaries especially in queer theory.

After tracing the genealogy of queer theology, the book proceeds to discuss the three persons of the Trinity, following the framework of ancient creeds. God is the sending forth of radical love, Christ can be seen as the recovery of radical love, and the Holy Spirit as the return of radical love.

Following queer, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theorists, Cheng questions the rigid boundaries such as the East and the West, homosexual and heterosexual, male and female, and divine and human. He argues that Christian theology is a queer enterprise, destabilizing all kinds of fixed binary categories.

Queer theologians insist that gender identity and sexuality are social constructs, and these constructs are often deployed to provide sanctions for the status quo. To “queer” is to challenge “common sense” and to render what is hidden, transparent.

For example, the Roman Catholic Church has used Natural Law to justify its arguments in favor of heterosexuality and procreation. But biologist Bruce Bagemihl in his book Biological Exuberance shows that hundreds of animal species engage in homosexual, bisexual, and transgender behavior.

While feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether has questioned, “Can a male savior save women?” queer theologians go a step further to queer the gender and sexual identity of Jesus.

Jesus, as the embodiment of radical love, crosses sexual boundaries. Nancy Wilson and others have shown that Jesus was sexually attracted to both men and women: Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, the beloved disciple in John, and the nude young man in Mark 14:51-52. The late queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid portrays a Bi/Christ that challenges our fixation on binaries.

I suspect many readers will find the portrayal of Jesus crossing gender boundaries even more challenging. Virginia Mollenkott writes about the intersex Jesus Christ, that Jesus has two X chromosomes (from Mary), yet phenotypically male. Justin Tanis suggests that Jesus’ life experience parallel that of many transgender people.

Furthermore, Elizabeth Stuart argues that the body of Christ is the church, which consists of a multitude of genders sexualities. Baptism and Eucharist reveal that gender and sexual identities are not of ultimate concern.

The book might remind some readers of the “boundary war” among feminists in the mid-1990s. While feminists such as Marie Fortune argued for clear boundaries in their work against sexual abuses in the church and workplace, Carter Heyward decried that rigid boundaries could also betray us and reinforce hierarchical relationships.

In Cheng’s book, binary distinctions and hierarchical constructs are overcome because of radical love. Sexual abuses and oppressions of all kinds are clearly contradictory to radical love. But love without justice is blind. I would like to see more discussions on how to protect radical love and how to differentiate radical love from love that goes awry, and from abuses that masquerade as love.

One of the strengths of the book is that it touches on all major doctrines of Christian theology: revelation, trinity, creation, sin, atonement, church, saints, sacraments, and eschatology (the last things). It showcases the breadth of the theological output of queer theologians. The book includes further study questions and a lengthy bibliography. It will be a very good resource to be used in the classroom and in church and small groups.

I hope that the publication of Cheng’s book will stimulate more discussions on queer theology among the younger generation, especially among the racial and ethnic minorities. Although Cheng has included racial and ethnic minority authors, their voices are often drown by those of white authors’. I hope that more work will be available that explores the intersectionality of gender, race, class, sexuality in our changing world politics.