At my church, I participated in the liturgy guild which is a group of congregants (members of the church) that help to create the liturgy, or all the goings-on in the service. For the season of Pentecost, leading up to our Pride celebration at the end of the month, we decided to focus on language.

So drawing from the story of Pentecost where the Holy Spirit comes down as tongues of fire and people are able to hear people speak in their languages of origin, we had people pray in languages other than English.

Another step we took was to say that we see God as inclusive of all genders, and took out pronouns and nouns that referred to God as masculine, male, or as “father.”

We went through the first week’s Acts and Gospel readings and changed all of the gender pronouns to “they/them” and removed all of the he/him pronouns for Jesus. We replaced “Father” with “Parent.”

There are no he/him or she/her left at all. It was an incredibly powerful experience going in and “re-writing” to make the bible more inclusive. 

I intellectually knew this was an important exercise. I didn’t realize how emotional it would be, also.

Here is a sample of how we changed the language:

There was an interesting discussion about Jesus and he/him pronouns. He seemed to clearly identify as a man, though during the season of Pentecost we also discuss the Trinity, all in one. I think this is where human understanding completely fails to comprehend and describe God.

In some cases, the Holy Spirit is given she/her pronouns when given the name “Sophia,” or “Wisdom,” so do we see Jesus as he/him, the Holy Spirit she/her and God as inclusive of all genders? Not sure if that resonates with me. I think the inadequacy of human language to describe is what makes most sense, and I like leaving out gender pronouns, especially for God and Jesus to be leaving an open question, the mystery unsolved. This is what makes most sense to me personally.

Throughout the month we also referred to God as The Word, The Source, YWHW, and The Parent. We had a “Naming God” station, which I will write about more in the future.