Eastern University

On Wednesday, December 2, I returned to where it all began for me.

Eastern University in St Davids, PA is a small Christian college outside of Philadelphia, and is also my alma mater.

At the end of 2005, finally beginning to come to peace with my own identity and with the help of friends and supportive faculty, we started a Gay-Straight Alliance on Eastern's campus. We called it Refuge, and our presence sparked columns in the Waltonian (the school newspaper), meetings with deans, defaced flyers, and a new energy and safe space for conversations around LGBTQ identity. The latter things continued to far outweigh the former, and four years later, they are still going strong.

Last week, I went back to speak to the group of students who are currently there working to be an officially student-government sanctioned group - about how and why Refuge got started, as well as the exciting things we have planned with Sanctuary Collective. It was so energizing to see an almost entirely different set of people excited about the same things we were when we first started. Young people like these will change the way Christ-followers interact with their LGBTQ peers, and I feel blessed to see it as it's happening.

Eastern is a school that focuses a lot on Christian community and social justice, and I have high hopes to see the school that encouraged me to see the world through a new lens become an environment that is explicitly a safe place for LGBTQ people to live and thrive.

Let's make it happen!