Today we’re sharing a special conversation courtesy of our friends at Lift+Love. This is a conversation recorded at their first ever Gather Conference in 2023, the world’s largest Christ-centered gathering of LGBTQ Latter-day Saints and those who love them.
In this session, two men sat down together: Tom Christofferson and Darius Gray. Both are devoted Latter-day Saints who know what it is to love the Church while also having experienced real marginalization within it.
Darius Gray is a Black Latter-day Saint who was baptized on December 26th, 1964 — fourteen years before the revelation that lifted the priesthood and temple ban. He entered the waters of baptism knowing he could not hold the priesthood, and he built his faith anyway. He helped found the Genesis Group, he waited, he worked. And on a day in June 1978, everything changed.
This June, we’re sitting with what that means.
There is something powerful in Darius’s story—his rootedness, his patience, his refusal to let institutional limitation become the ceiling of his faith.
Tom Christofferson, as a gay Latter-day Saint, knows something about that too.
What you’re about to hear is a conversation between two men who have walked and who are walking long roads, who are holding hard questions, and who are bearing witness to a God whose work continues to unfold in their lives.
It is warm and honest and full of hope. We think you’ll find, as we did, that it stays with you.
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JOIN US AT THE WAYFARE FESTIVAL ON JULY 11!
You're invited to the Wayfare Summer Festival!
The quality of attention that we bring to the world changes what we find. In our time of mass distraction, artifice, and vice, we need to develop our capacities for spiritual discernment more than ever.
New speakers announced for the Wayfare Summer Festival!
This year we’re bringing 13 special breakout sessions to the Wayfare summer festival! These will be intimate, interactive opportunities to learn together with some of our tradition’s brightest and most expansive thinkers. Find the session descriptions below!
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How do I fight today's battles?
How can one person make a difference? Is there a healthier way to think about forgiveness? How can I trust the direction I receive from God? How are good friends a blessing? What does it mean for Jesus to be King?
How can God dwell within me?
How might I think about sin and temptation? What is the gift of discernment? How might I think about temples and covenants? What does it mean to have my heart perfect with the Lord?
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Crucial Conversations Across Faith Divides: The Courage to Stay Connected
On June 16th, Joseph Grenny and Tucker Boyle invite you to an evening designed to equip you for some of the hardest conversations life brings, the kind that happen between loved ones when faith changes.
Joseph will draw from his decades of work with crucial conversations, walking us through practical principles for navigating high-stakes moments without losing the relationship or ourselves. Tucker will bring a somatic and nervous system lens to each principle, helping us notice what’s actually happening in our bodies when these conversations get hard.
The insight at the heart of the evening: people on both sides of a faith transition share remarkably similar embodied experiences. The protective urges, the impulse to shut down or push harder, the way the body tightens before the words even come, these aren’t signs that something is wrong with you. They’re signals worth learning to read. This insight can open a pathway to patience, empathy and even compassion when in otherwise risky moments.
All it takes is one party to a conversation with this capacity to dramatically alter its outcome.
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