This page is for people kicked out of church for being trans, and for people who worked out on their own that staying was not survivable. A congregation can remove you from a building and a mailing list. It cannot remove you from a baptism. This is the core of who this church was built for.
If you are in danger tonight, these answer faster than we can, at any hour. Nothing on this page is more important than the four numbers below.
“What they revoked was membership. What you have is something else, and it was never theirs to cancel.”
Pastora Tori Matthews, Ordinary and Chief Pastor
Being removed from a roll is an administrative act. It ends a relationship with an institution, and it can cost you a community, a family, a job, and a whole vocabulary you loved. That loss is real and this church does not minimise it.
What it is not is a reversal of your baptism. Nothing in Catholic order, ours or anyone else’s, gives a congregation the power to undo one. If you were baptized, you are baptized, and no meeting held about you changed that.
Some of you were never formally removed at all. You read the room, counted the cost, and left before they could finish the job. That is exile too, and it is treated here as exile, not as a personal failure of endurance.
Say as much or as little as you want about what happened. The Ordinary answers these personally, usually within a day or two.
The Rite of Welcome for the Exiled
A public act of reception for someone put out of a congregation, or who left one that had become unsafe. It welcomes; it does not re-baptize, because there is nothing to redo.
The Renunciation of Harmful Teaching
A form in which a person renounces, by name, the teaching that was used against them. Saying it aloud in front of a witness is not the same as deciding it privately, and people who have done both say so.
On both
Neither has a fee, neither requires membership, and either can be done privately with a single witness or not at all. Both are described with the other blessings.
The Rite of Welcome, the Renunciation, or a conversation first while you decide. Undecided is a normal answer.
What was done to you shapes what is said. Nothing is put in your mouth, and anything you do not want named stays unnamed.
Private with one witness, online, or with people you bring. You choose whether it is recorded, and the recording is yours.
Your choice — every timeBloom keeps its registers in bound books, in ink. What is entered about you is shown to you first, and it is not published.
Some people need the account to exist somewhere outside their own head. This is that place. Testimony is received whether or not you ever want it seen by anyone else.
Not adapted for you, not made an exception for you. Built for you, by people who were also put out.
Nothing is saved to your name. Press Esc to close.
If you are in danger tonight, these answer faster than we can, at any hour. Nothing on this page is more important than the four numbers below.