Calvary, Clifton priest helps create communities of “joyful belonging.”
By Nancy Bryan
When Sherry Darling got an email through her family’s foster agency, inviting them to an event called “Tacos and Tie Dye” sponsored by a group called The Brood, she jumped on Google to learn more.
The agency had offered Darling’s two-mom, transracial family invitations to other events that Darling says they would not have been comfortable attending. But The Brood, which is led by the Rev. Olivia Hamilton, curate at Calvary Episcopal Church in Clifton, and supported by a grant from the diocese’s Commission on Congregational Life, proclaims on its website that “No matter what your family constellation looks like, you are welcome here.” Darling decided to take a chance.
“I took our younger son to the event and it was exactly what I was looking for,” she says. “It was an answer to prayer, as we had wanted more connection for our family and especially for our kids.”
The Brood, which describes itself as “LGBTQ+ affirming, trauma-informed, and … mindful of the ways that injustice and oppression impact individuals and families,” has been connecting foster, adoptive and kinship families since Hamilton, a foster and adoptive parent herself with her wife Molly McHenry, founded it in 2021. About twenty-five families currently participate in the group.
“I’m not entrepreneurial, but people keep hearing about it and I’m excited by the growth,” Hamilton says.
Before being ordained and called to Calvary in 2020, Hamilton was a hospital chaplain for children with mental illness in the Boston area and in Cincinnati. She brings those experiences to her work at Calvary, where she is responsible for youth ministry and “social justice broadly defined,” she says.
The parish “has long been a welcoming place for the LGBTQ community,” says vestry member Megan Rich. “That’s been evident from the first day we attended in many ways. So, the door was open for Olivia to build something really cool. She has such unique and interesting skills. I’m very grateful she is at our church.”
At The Brood’s first gathering, parents said they wanted to worship with their children, to have respites from child care, and to have a firmer support network. Darling says the group meets those needs for her family.
“The Brood offers people the opportunity to feel welcome, included, supported, whether they go to church or not,” she says. “It’s a space to bring concerns and fears along with joys and have people able to celebrate the big and the small. It’s a blessing to learn more about other people’s spiritual practices, to get a sense of how hard everyone is working for their community.”
In 2022, the Commission on Congregational Life decided to invest in The Brood’s potential with a three-year grant for program costs. With the support, Hamiltion has been able to offer monthly Pray + Play gatherings, occasional caregiver retreats, and microgrants for immediate needs of the group’s foster, adoptive, and kinship families. Recently, The Brood was able to purchase a therapeutic high chair for a family with a special needs child and to help a kinship family with a utility bill.
Hamilton views The Brood as the kind of ministry that is essential to the Episcopal Church’s future. “We, as a denomination, are in a position where if we don’t think critically, faithfully, about the future, we will be left in the dust,” she says. “Church is, and will continue to become, less relevant. We have to look at who in our community could we be walking alongside? Who can we as people of faith accompany? It’s not about pledges or people in the pews, but being Jesus’ hands, heart, and feet in the world. Both queer and trans kids and foster and adoptive families have not had the most robust welcome.”
The Brood, says Hamilton, also inspired Divine, a program for queer and transgender middle and high school students and their families sponsored by Calvary, Clifton and Christ Church Cathedral, Cincinnati. The five-week program, which took place earlier this year, included dinner, conversations with adult mentors for the youth, and parent discussions facilitated by Mike Johnson, a member of the cathedral and principal of Summit Country Day School in Cincinnati. Most of the first participants were Episcopalians, but the group expanded to include people of other, or no, religious traditions.
Megan Rich participated in Divine with her child. “The large group experience at Divine included older youth,” she says. “My child and I both benefited from hearing the way they talked about scripture and the way they understood Jesus.”
Rich found the opportunity to talk with other parents especially helpful. “We are all struggling to support our kids,” she says. “I don’t know my child’s experience. Exploring gender wasn’t an overt part of my childhood. To learn new language, to talk with parents further along this journey, or newer to it, who can offer a new perspective became a safe space to talk, always with the goal of supporting our children.”
One of the primary benefits of Divine, she says, was knowing that “the door to the church remains open to my child. They know that there is a safe space within our church.”
Hamilton sees both benefit and challenge for the church in these ministries. “While in a broad sense we’ve said, ‘This is our church and you’re welcome to come,’ both The Brood and Divine upend the idea of where church ends and community begins; the walls are more porous. This is outreach as well. Who are we reaching out to and what is our motivation?
“For me, I’m compelled by the story of Jesus, love, and inclusion being a good story that needs to be told. I want to tell it to as many people as possible, meeting people where they are, tending to their hurt and creating a community of joyful belonging.”
Read this story in the Summer 2023 edition of Connections Magazine.
