The Mission. The Vision.

What you are to be, you are now becoming. — Carl Rogers

The Mission: to affirm, honor, and celebrate the inherent worth, vitality and indomitable spirits of transgender/gender non-conforming persons and communities through education, community-building, organizing, and collaborative engagement.

The Vision:  we envision a world where every person born is liberated, affirmed, and equipped to be authentically who they are, fulfill their potential, contribute to a shared communal good, and thrive in a diverse, equitable, compassionate, and caring creation.

Overview:  Ministries Beyond Welcome is a community-focused nonprofit organization, formed and led by trans/transgender and gender non-conforming persons, working for greater acceptance, affirmation, socio-political accommodation, and potential spiritual thriving for individual members of our shared community, as well as the community as a whole. We believe that all life is sacred and imbued with an individual measure of the vast, vibrant Spirit that binds all things together—a particular, differentiated, and distinct identity. Therefore, we believe that all persons of gender-diverse self-understanding are endowed with innate selfhood, that the expression of selfhood is spiritual in nature (though not necessarily religious), and that the spiritual journeys of transgender and gender non-conforming persons contribute to a collective, continually-developing understanding of our shared humanity.

We believe in and affirm the vital necessity of trans persons, our experiences, and the sharing of our stories to the overarching story of human experience, relational interdependence, and spiritual being-ness, throughout and across history and culture. We recognize and affirm all of this is and has been true, persistently, in spite of and within the various forms of marginalization, disenfranchisement, oppression, and efforts at erasure to which we have been and continue to be subjected. We also believe that working toward acceptance and affirmation of diverse gender (and sexuality) self-understandings has the potential to heal, expand collective understanding, and deepen our shared experience and expression of spiritual dispositions, wholeness, communal connectedness, justice, and well-being.

MBW recognizes the historical (and current) role of institutionalized religion in the social, systemic, institutional, and legalistic marginalization and oppression of gender-diverse and sexuality-diverse persons; we recognize and acknowledge this condition is interconnectedly woven into and includes racial, misogynistic-sexist, heterosexist, and classist oppressions—especially—as well as others. We acknowledge change-making requires direct, intentional, and collaborative social, cultural and political response and we believe this work to be spiritual in nature and execution.

Thus, we purposefully engage a movement toward greater justice, as an expression of radical love, compassion, and mercy, through stimulation of increased dialogue, awareness-raising, education, advocacy, and direct engagement to create practical paradigmatic and structural shifts within communities, across religious, social, and cultural intersections. We include in this work an intersectional awareness of interconnections and relationships between gender, sex, and sexuality injustice and racial and economic injustice, particularly.