This guide helps a congregation answer one practical question together: what does it look like to welcome a transgender visitor warmly, from the moment they pull into the parking lot to the moment they find a seat, without either hiding what the church believes or treating the visitor as a problem to manage? The aim is a shared practice. It is not a debate about gender theory. You can work through it alone in about an hour. It works best with a small group, a greeting team or a leadership team over one long session or two shorter ones. Personal stories are always optional. No one should be asked to share their own experience or a family member’s.
What you are working toward
By the end, your group should be able to do three things. It should be able to state its conviction about human identity in plain words. It should be able to point to the specific places in your Sunday routine where anxiety, more than conviction, currently shapes how a visitor is treated. And it should agree on at least one concrete change it will actually make.
Keep that order in mind. A church that skips the first step tends toward vague niceness. A church that skips the second assumes its welcome is fine because nobody has complained. A church that skips the third has had a good conversation and changed nothing.
Begin with the welcome you already have
Before anyone talks about transgender visitors, map what any first-time guest meets at your church. Take a sheet of paper and list every point of contact in order. Include the ones nobody plans: where a newcomer parks, which door they try first, who notices them, what a greeter says, whether there is a connection card and what it asks, how children are checked in, where restrooms are and how a person finds them, where people tend to sit and whether anyone makes room, and what happens after the final song.
Now go back through the list and mark each point with one question. Does this moment ask the visitor to prove anything about themselves before they are treated as welcome? A connection card that asks for a name asks very little. A greeter who sizes someone up before smiling asks a great deal. Most churches find that their welcome already has quiet tests built into it that have nothing to do with gender at all.
Hold on to this sheet. You will walk it again later with different eyes.
Read three passages slowly
Read each passage aloud and spend a few minutes on the observation prompt before anyone offers an application.
The assembly and its favorites
James 2:1 says, “My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons.” In older English, respect of persons means partiality, giving someone better or worse treatment based on how they appear. Read James 2:1-4 in full. James is describing a real gathering where a well-dressed man is offered a good seat and a poor man is told to stand or sit on the floor.
Observe: Where in the passage does the partiality actually happen? Notice that it happens in the seating, before anyone has said a word about faith. James is addressing wealth and poverty in a specific church. Applying his warning to how your church receives any visitor who looks different is an application, not his direct subject. Talk about whether that application is fair to the text.
Received first
Romans 15:7 says, “Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of God.” Paul wrote this to believers divided over practices and conscience.
Observe: What is the measure Paul gives for receiving one another? Ask what it would mean to measure your welcome by how Christ received you, rather than by how comfortable a newcomer makes your members.
Made, and remade
Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Then read 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, which ends, “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.”
Observe: Genesis tells you how God made humanity. Corinthians tells you who sits in the church: people who came from somewhere, washed by someone other than themselves. Ask how these two passages sit together. Does the second soften the first, or does it explain why the church can hold the first without fear?
What Mohler adds to the conversation
On the Jude 3 Project podcast, Lisa Fields asked Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, how a church should respond when a transgender person visits. His first move was to widen the question. Before asking about this visitor, he said, a church has to ask how it responds to anyone who visits. Mohler put the test this way: “do we expect the people who visit our churches already to believe what we believe” and live as we live, or do we want people to come who do not yet know Christ at all?
His answer to his own question was direct: “we want everybody to walk into our churches. And if we don’t mean that we’re just not being faithful to Christ.” He did not stop there. Mohler added that “we want everyone who walks into our churches to hear the full gospel” and everything God’s word reveals. The open door and the full message belong together.
He was honest that the situation is harder than usual. Mohler said “this isn’t just like any other visitor,” and described someone who is biologically male introducing herself as a woman named Stephanie. Telling her flatly that she is not a woman, he said, “That’s probably not the best way to continue a conversation.” He also said a Christian cannot simply affirm the claim as true. His way between those two was to speak the truth in love, the phrase Paul uses in Ephesians 4:15, and he gave it a sequence: “we’re gonna have to learn how to love people before they agree with us.”
Then he named the real threat, and it was not the visitor. Mohler said too many Christians are deeply afraid that “somehow this issue’s bigger than the gospel. It’s not.” He tied that to a picture of every congregation: “the church is made up of broken people, and some of that brokenness is gonna show.”
This changes the walk-through you are about to do. You are not mainly looking for doctrinal mistakes in your welcome. You are looking for fear. Fear shows up in specific behaviors: the greeter who suddenly gets busy, the whispered conversation by the coffee, the usher who is unsure where to seat someone, the deacon who improvises a rule on the spot because nobody decided anything in advance.
What is settled and what is left to relationship
A group doing this work needs to know where the firm ground is. Jude 3 Project holds that God created humanity male and female and that this design is good and purposeful. It also holds that some people experience real, painful distress about their gender, that this distress is not sin and not something to be ashamed of, and that the church has too often met it with slogans instead of compassion. Both halves are part of the conviction. A church that keeps only the first half is not being more faithful. It is being less complete.
On names and pronouns, faithful Christians who share that conviction about creation still choose differently out of love, and Jude 3 Project holds that these choices are best worked out in real relationship. Mohler’s Stephanie example shows how he approaches it. It does not settle the matter for every member of your church. Your group does not need to produce a pronoun policy for greeters. Greeters rarely need one. They need to say hello, learn a name, and help someone find the sanctuary.
Where a church does need decisions, such as childcare volunteering, restrooms or membership, those belong to leadership, made calmly and ahead of time. An open door without anxiety depends on this. When nothing has been thought through, every Sunday becomes an emergency, and emergencies make people unkind.
The walk-through
Take your sheet from the first exercise and, if you can, physically walk the route a visitor would take on a Sunday morning or during the week. Go in pairs. At each point of contact, stop and talk through these questions:
- If a visitor whose appearance surprised the person on duty arrived here, what would most likely happen in the first ten seconds?
- Is there anything at this spot that someone would have to decide on the fly? If so, who should decide it in advance?
- Would a regular member who struggles with a sin nobody can see be treated differently here from a visitor whose struggle is visible?
That last question comes straight from Mohler’s point about brokenness. He said that “every one of us is broken” and that the wholeness Christ gives “is not fully evident in us yet.” A church that has made peace with hidden brokenness and panics at visible brokenness has a double standard, and the walk-through is where you are likely to find it.
Write down what you notice at each spot. Do not fix anything yet.
Practice the first conversation
Mohler said “there’s just not a boilerplate conversation,” and that is good news for this exercise. You are not memorizing lines. In pairs, practice the first two minutes of meeting any newcomer: a greeting, a name, one question about something ordinary, and an offer to show them where to go or to sit with them. Then switch.
Afterward, talk about what made the conversation feel safe or tense. Notice how much of good welcome is attention and how little is information.
One firm instruction for this exercise: do not have anyone act out a transgender visitor. Playing a person as a type turns a real neighbor into a prop, and anyone in the room with a personal connection to this question will feel it immediately. Practice the greeter’s side only.
Questions for the group
- Looking at your walk-through notes, where did you find fear doing the work that conviction should have been doing?
- Mohler said a church has to learn to love people before they agree with it. Which parts of your current welcome assume agreement first?
- How would you state your church’s conviction about human identity in two sentences, including both God’s good design and the reality of gender distress? Where did your group struggle to agree on wording?
- James warns against partiality in the assembly. Is applying his warning to this situation fair to what he wrote? What would stretch it too far?
- What decisions does your leadership need to make in advance so that volunteers are not improvising under pressure?
- Read 1 Corinthians 6:11 again. Does seeing your own congregation as “such were some of you” change how you would greet a visitor next week? Why or why not?
For whoever is leading
Assume that someone in the room has a personal stake in this subject: a transgender friend, a child, a sibling, or their own experience. Set the tone early by saying that no one has to share anything personal, and that the group will not argue about anyone’s body or story. If the conversation drifts into talking about transgender people as an abstract category, bring it back to the walk-through and the practices.
If someone discloses real distress, respond with care after the session, not in front of the group. Seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and God works through trained counselors and clinicians. If anyone is in crisis or thinking about suicide, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text at 988.
Before you leave
Look at your notes and choose one change, small enough to happen within a month. It might be training greeters, a decision leadership needs to make, or an adjustment to how newcomers are seated or followed up with. Name who will carry it out.
Then set a date to walk the route again. When you do, ask whether the change actually happened, and whether the spots where you found fear still feel the same. Mohler said that one day a person could look across a congregation and see “the beautiful picture of brokenness being made whole.” The question worth carrying home is what has to change in your church’s first ten minutes for a visitor to see that picture before anyone tells them about it.