The Rev. Margie Baker & Canon Sarah Louise Woodford
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of spending some time with the Rev. Margie Baker of St. John’s, West Hartford. We spoke about her first book, God, Gospel, and Gender: A Queer Bible Study for Teens, which was published June 2024. The following interview has been edited and condensed for publication.
Sarah: Margie, could you tell us about how God, Gospel, and Gender came to be?
Margie: I love the story of how this book came into existence, because it was very much an accident and not at all my plan. I was at Forma in 2023 and they were having a pre-conference worship service at Virginia Theological Seminary’s chapel. After the service, I saw Lisa Kimball, who is a professor at VTS. She’s a lay person and is all about life-long and life-wide formation. She said, “Oh, Margie, it’s so good to see you. Margie, this is Justin—Justin, Margie should write something for you.” And it turned out that Justin was one of the publishers at Church Publishing. And he turned to me and said, “Well, hi, Margie, what do you want to write?”
A few weeks before this meeting, I had been talking to a parent who is a trained catechist about how there’s not a good Bible study for children who have questions about LGBTQ issues. There are books that exist that are affirming but they’re not based in the Bible. And so, I told him that I would love to create something that was affirming and based in the Bible. He said, “Okay.”
I then created a plan for the book and ran it with my Monday night Bible study group. They were my guinea pigs over seven weeks. And that’s a group who ranges in age from 25 to 80. Over the next six months, I wrote it, and it was published in June 2024.
I did not mean to write this book. It was not my plan.
SW: How does your book specifically expand Bible studies through a queer lens?
MB: It’s a book for everybody. It’s for teens and tweens, but it’s also for allies. It’s for people who have questions, and it’s for queer and trans kids. What I found, and this resonates with my own experience growing up in the church, is that I always believed in the dignity and inherent worth of queer and trans folk, myself included, but I always assumed that was in spite of the Bible. I also came from a progressive Episcopal church, and so we didn’t necessarily spend a lot of time reading Scripture. I knew that there were some verses that were harsh, and I had never thought critically about what Scripture says big picture-wise for the dignity and belovedness of all God’s children. And so, when I fell in love with scripture in seminary, I was able to find that big-picture lens in Bible studies for adults or children.
I wanted to look at the first creation story through a queer affirming lens. I wanted to look at the way families come in all different shapes and sizes, and that Jesus—or that God—seems to bless the ones that don’t look traditional. What are we saying in our culture when we talk about traditional families and to just have a wider lens on what it means for God to create everything? What does it mean for God to change people’s names—what does it mean that God renames Jacob, Israel? And what does it say about the fact that we get to transform, and we get to change, over our lifetimes into something that’s closer to what God called us to be than maybe the way we were known at first.
SW: Margie, could you speak about the process of testing your book material out on your Monday night Bible study group? How did they help you create the book?
MB: I started off with, I think, six weeks of ideas. Then I would give our Zoom Bible study the Scripture through Google Slides, so we’re all reading the same thing. Some people brought their own favorite translation along. And they asked amazing questions and came up with other things that ended up being chapters. Like somebody, when we were talking about Genesis 1, was wondering: “Well, what could that say about the second creation story in Genesis 2?” Then we started playing with what happens if you know that Adam comes from the word for earth, and that it means earthling or muddling, and that it doesn’t have anything to do with sex. In fact, the word man doesn’t show up until after woman is created out of his side, not his rib. Then that became a chapter, because if it’s not about women being subordinate to men, then what is that story about? Maybe it’s about being made for community. Adam, the earthling, needs other stuff as well. And in fact, it’s not enough for the earthling to have God and to have other animals, but the earthling needs somebody of its own kind, and that we’re made for community. So maybe it’s not about a nuclear family and it’s not about marriage, but it is about being made for community and not being made to be alone. That’s an example of how we moved through questions together and how they helped me create new things.
SW: Was there a particular section you enjoyed writing?
MB: There’s one activity at the beginning of Chapter Three, which is about God and different types of families. Because this was initially designed for teens, the opening activity for Chapter Three is called “Bible or Teen Drama?” There are different scenarios and you have to say whether it’s from Scripture or whether it’s from YA (young adult) or adult fiction. So that was really fun to write, just with an eye toward humor.
SW: What do you hope your readers will gain from reading God, Gospel, and Gender?
MB: I hope that people know it’s not just for the LGBTQ community and that the vast majority of the people who came to my Monday night Bible study were allies, or maybe had never had an opinion because they didn’t need to, and then one of their kids came out as trans, for instance. I hope my readers will discover that the book is a way into Scripture that’s friendly, faithful, and makes space for questions and God’s grace. Jesus doesn’t speak about homosexuality in the Bible. Isn’t that interesting? Jesus does call us to love God and to love our neighbor. Jesus is always putting everything through a lens of love. So for me, it empowers me as a queer person, but it also empowers an ally to say, “Wow, I can love God, and I can love my neighbor, and I can specifically stand up for my queer and trans friends, not in spite of Scripture, but because this is who God made me to be. This is who God has called me to be. This is the work that God has called me to do.”
