Called to Queering Church
June 4, 2024
An Interview with Abby Holcombe (M.Div. GETS ’24)
When Chicago’s Urban Village Church was formed in 2009, co-founded by Garrett alumni Christian Coon (GETS ’98), it was conceived as a model for a different kind of church—justice oriented, LGBTQIA+ affirming, intentionally flexible in form, and intimately rooted in diverse communities throughout Chicagoland. Fifteen years later, the church is thriving—adding new members and featuring a robust children’s ministry when so many churches are shrinking and struggling to bring younger people through their doors. In the fall, recent graduate Abby Holcombe will begin serving as one of Urban Village Church’s pastors! As co-chair of Sacred Worth at Garrett she’s no stranger to theology that celebrates queer people but, as I talk with her, she expresses admiration for the ways that Urban Village Church embodies a holy queerness in its structure, liturgy, and programs, too.
“One of the things I learned in Dr. Ott’s Queer Theoethics class this semester is the inability for there to be a norm in queer theory,” Holcombe says. “It’s inherently antinormative.” If queerness possesses an innately transgressive nature, crossing supposedly fixed borders and binaries, Urban Village Church certainly fits that label. “One of the church’s obvious differences is they don’t own buildings,” Holcombe explains. “If the church isn’t needed in an area anymore, a building shouldn’t hold you there.” Currently, the church operates four ministry hubs—Edgewater, Hyde Park-Woodlawn, Wicker Park, and UVC West—but is open to shifting those locations as the Spirit moves. It also frees the church from the logistics of building maintenance that occupy many churches time, helping them better focus on their ministries. “The point is to create healthy alternatives,” she says. “They meet in theatres, cafés or schools and they’re growing—they’ve found a successful church model.”
This willingness to break longstanding church norms isn’t only restricted to gathering locations. “They have a different liturgy every week,” Holcombe’s eyes light up as she talks about the worship. “The traditional church model has been, ‘Well, you can tweak the sermon if something happened,” she says. “But if Roe v. Wade is overturned on a Friday, our liturgy better change top to bottom by Sunday morning, right?” This willingness to play with form is a practice for which she feels well prepared by her seminary training. “I have been able to experiment at Garrett,” she says. “I learned to constantly reorient, to ask, ‘Is this what we should be doing and saying?’ and—even if we’ve always done something one way—to ask, ‘Can we change it?’” This approach helps Urban Village Church be responsive to the feelings of the congregation, even as they shift. “The best worship service can be done once—it is for a particular people at a particular time,” Holcombe explains. “There is something divine in the willingness to have fluid liturgy that breaks boundaries and changes. Even when it’s awkward, we can find grace in that.”
Perhaps it’s fitting that Holcombe has accepted a call into ministry beyond tidy boundaries. Still, when she talks about the choice you can’t help but share her joy for this journey. “I’m a child of the Pentecostal charismatic movement in Alabama and a queer Methodist,” she confesses. “It feels so good to be in ministries of healing.” Many of the Urban Village Church’s members are similarly exvangelical, and Holcombe is able to bring her own experience to folks working through religious trauma. “Of course there is deconstruction that must be done, but there’s also opportunity for reconstruction,” she notes. “It doesn’t always have to be despair. You don’t have to feel like you wasted your life on this thing, when parts of what you learned are important for addressing public injustices.” As an example, she offers how she uses the extensive biblical education she received in childhood to nurture new life. “I can take those things and pair them with my progessive, process theology—to take public justice issues and speak to them theologically.”
Urban Village Church recently signed their charter to become a United Methodist Congregation, so Holcombe also shares her joy that the General Conference’s recent decision to overturn bans on LGBTQIA+ ordination and marriages creates explicit space for her within the denomination. “Somebody my first week at Garrett told me that part of why exclusion is evil is because it prevents us from doing other things,” she explains. “To be in a new space within the denomination, at a new church, it feels like this weight off my back. Now we can pursue things that make me so excited that aren’t just queer inclusion. I can focus on ecojustice, on housing folks, on bringing food to people.” This freedom is also something she found in seminary. “Garrett is a very queer school, and that was a really good space for me to step into,” she says. “I lived in Alabama, I went to school in Mississippi—I didn’t know there was a school where the gays weren’t underground. Here, we were integrated into full community, breaking bread together, living beside one another, asking for forgiveness.” She hopes to bring this same focus on reciprocal, communal thriving into her ministry.
So, what does that new life look like in practice? One of the things for which Holcombe says she is most excited is a monthly children’s ministry where they hold church outside. “We invite them into a wild church experience,” she says, “I’m very committed to ecojustice, to eco-theologies in right relationship with the Earth.” At first glance, one might not locate such an experience within the broader umbrella of queer theology. But moving church beyond stone walls, reconnecting theologies to embodied ways of knowing, shattering paradigms of a God found above us but not among us or in the very fabric of creation? To do that ministry in a community that’s intentionally multiethnic, many gendered, fluid in form, and united for justice across class barriers? There’s something decidedly queer in that.