My partner Sissi Loftin and I are parishioners at St Michael's Episcopal Church in Brattleboro, VT.  We joined because it was a welcoming community and the rector Thomas J. Brown is gay.

• See Janet's Lambeth blog.

The Rev. Vicki Gray is deacon at St. James', San Francisco.  A Vietnam combat veteran and retired diplomat, she is active in secular politics and a variety of peace and justice ministries and, only incidentally, transgendered.  Now widowed after her wife Mimi's death eight years ago, she writes poetry and tends Mimi's garden.

• See her Letter to Lambeth here.

My partner, Janet Brocklehurst, and I are members of St Michael's Episcopal Church in Brattleboro, VT where Thomas J Brown is rector.  We joined St Michael's because it was a welcoming community and because Thomas is gay.  I am a college friend of Rev. Dr. Carter Heyward and have followed the Episcopal Church's struggles with equality since the ordination of the Philadelphia 11.

• See Sissi's Lambeth blog here.

Mr. Thomas C. Jackson

Tom is the President of Oasis California, the LGBT Ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of California. He has just earned an M Div degree from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific,  lives in the Bay Area with his husband, and has been a member these Episcopal Churches: All Saints in Ayer, MA, St, Michaels in Brattleboro, VT; Emmanuel in Baltimore, MD; Emmanuel in Bel Air, MD; St. Andrew's in Meriden, CT; St, Paul's in New Haven, CT; Christ Church in New Haven, CT; and St. Bede's in Menlo Park, CA.  He served as a seminarian in St. John the Evangelist in San Francisco and on the Board of the St. Thomas Day School in New Haven.

Tom lives in with his husband Alex in the Bay Area. The couple were joined in a civil marriage at San Francisco City Hall in 2004 (which was among the thousands of same gender marriages later annulled by the California State Supreme Court). They married again in San Francisco City Hall this spring in the wake of the California State Supreme Court decision opening civil marriage to Same gender couples.

•   Support Tom's pilgrimage with a donation to Oasis California here.
   
•  See Tom's Lambeth Blog here.
   

The Rev. John Warfel

I’m the rector of Grace Church, Middletown, NY, a welcoming congregation with lots of kids in a small city in New York’s Hudson Valley. (Check out our parish website, gracechurchmiddletown.org, especially "The Epistle", April 2007.)  I have been out since I was a teenager (I’ve never really been in the closet). Having been honest and upfront about my sexuality, both throughout the ordination process and for the past 15 years of ordained ministry, I have a very positive story to share with any who care to listen. What I said to the Search Committee of Grace Church eleven years ago still holds true today: I’m not a gay priest, I am a priest who is gay.

• See Fr. Jim's Blog here.

I have been a member of the Episcopal Church for the past 25 years; the Episcopal Church has had a profound effect on my life and faith.  As a young adult, I struggled to reconcile my sexuality and my faith. The process of embracing both my sexuality and my spiritually was, and still is, a process, sometimes difficult and painful. I grew to understand that I did not need to choose between my sexuality (and choice of partner) and my faith. As I have gotten older, I have become more open. My partner, a UCC minister and college chaplain, and I have been together for 12 1/2 years, and we have two wonderful boys, ages 8 and 6. Ten years ago, in August of 1998, my partner and I were married in an Episcopal Church. We had three Episcopal priests and a Baptist minister participate in our ceremony. At that time, I remember reading and hearing reports from Lambeth. It was a strange feeling to have just celebrated our union in the Episcopal Church, surrounded by love, and then to hear reports from Lambeth about the church and sexuality. Since then, both our boys have been baptized in the Episcopal Church. Now, ten years later, it feels important to be a part of this listening process, to tell my story and story of my family. I want to feel that my family and I are fully included in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. I want our children to claim their Episcopal identity without qualification or shame. I also see Lambeth as a pilgrimage for myself, an opportunity to be open to listening and learning from others and to grow in my own faith.

See Mimi's Lambeth Blog here.