Michael Schuenemeyer
United States
He/Him
Rev. Michael Schuenemeyer is a United Church of Christ minister, advocate, and longtime leader in the movement for LGBTQ+ justice, HIV/AIDS awareness, and human dignity. Ordained in the United Church of Christ in 1984, he began his ministry in Southern California before joining the UCC’s national staff in 2002.
For two decades, he served as Minister and Team Leader for Health and Wholeness Advocacy and as Executive Director of the UCC HIV & AIDS Network.
His work has helped advance LGBTQ+ inclusion, marriage equality, transgender and nonbinary justice, HIV prevention, and efforts to eliminate stigma and discrimination. He was a co-founder of the U.S. HIV & AIDS Faith Coalition and served as its chair from 2014 to 2022. He has also worked internationally with faith communities and organizations addressing HIV/AIDS and human rights. After retiring from his UCC national ministry in 2022, he founded Expansive Dignity, LLC, continuing his work at the intersection of faith, dignity, health, and justice.
Schuenemeyer has helped create resources and liturgies that affirm the sacred worth and freedom of LGBTQ+ people, including the Sacred Worth, Sacred Freedom Litany.
His ministry reflects a lifelong commitment to the belief that every person is worthy of dignity, belonging, and freedom. He continues to bring faith, advocacy, and compassion together in the work of creating a more just and inclusive world.
Steps to Liberation
Embracing Our Sacred Worth and Sacred Freedom
Rev. Mike Schuenemeyer begins with a question about moments when we sense something greater speaking to us. For him, one such moment came unexpectedly during high school.
As a teenager struggling with belonging, self-esteem, bullying, and the realization that he was at least bisexual, if not gay, he was walking through an empty gymnasium when he heard a quiet voice within him: “Don’t worry. I love you, no matter what.”
The experience became a kind of compass for Mike. The voice was not dramatic or commanding; it was gentle, loving, and reassuring. Over time, he came to understand it through his faith as an expression of the Divine—a reminder that love could not be separated from his identity. That experience would eventually shape both his faith and his vocation.
Years later, while serving with the United Church of Christ’s National Ministries, Mike encountered a group that would deepen that understanding. At the UCC’s 2003 General Synod in Minneapolis, the Transcendence Gospel Choir, composed largely of Black transgender people, came to sing during worship.
A resolution was being considered to include transgender people within the denomination’s hate-crimes and Open and Affirming policies, and members of the choir spoke publicly about their lives.
They shared stories of faith, trauma, resilience, and the harm they had experienced—including harm inflicted by religious institutions. As Mike listened, he heard something astonishingly familiar.
Again and again, beneath their different experiences, was the same sacred assurance he had heard as a teenager: “Don’t worry. I love you no matter what.”
That recognition changed Mike’s understanding of where God could be found. The Divine, he writes, is not confined to sanctuaries. God speaks in gymnasiums, choir rehearsals, protests, hospital rooms, whispered prayers, and in the lives of queer and trans people who refuse to surrender their dignity.
Faith, in this understanding, is not something imposed from above; it can be discovered through the lived experiences of people who have been pushed to the margins.
This understanding forms the spiritual foundation of Sacred Worth, Shared Freedom, the Lavender Interfaith Collective’s multifaith statement affirming the inherent dignity of LGBTIQ+ people.
The statement calls communities, religious leaders, and institutions to defend human rights, expand democratic freedoms, and stand against anti-LGBTIQ+ violence and discrimination.
For Mike, it represents more than a declaration. It is a threshold—a decision by people of faith to refuse to allow fear to have the final word.
Mike also offers a powerful way of seeing the Rainbow Flag.
The rainbow becomes a sacred lens, revealing multiplicity instead of singularity, fluidity instead of fixedness, embodied truth instead of imposed doctrine, and liberation instead of fear. Through that lens, human diversity is not a problem that needs to be solved. It is something to be honored.
The Rainbow Flag therefore becomes more than a political symbol. It becomes, in Mike’s words, a sign of dignity and solidarity—a reminder that liberation is spiritual, communal, and relational as well as political. Its message travels across the world and across generations: you are worthy, you are beloved, you are free.
Mike argues that this freedom is shared. When one community is targeted, everyone is diminished; when one community is protected, everyone becomes stronger. That principle is reflected in the experiences he describes of queer and trans young people uncertain whether they will be welcomed or wounded, parents frightened for their children, elders watching old patterns of hatred return, and communities choosing to stand together rather than remain silent.
The call of Sacred Worth, Shared Freedom is therefore ultimately a call to courage. Faith communities are asked to move beyond simply welcoming LGBTQIA+ people toward protection, advocacy, and solidarity.
And everyone—whether a person of faith, a community leader, or simply someone who believes in human dignity—is invited to move from conviction to action.
For Steps to Liberation, I think Michael’s story offers an essential spiritual dimension: liberation begins with the recognition that every human being has sacred worth—and becomes real when we stand together to protect that worth.
The Rainbow Flag carries that message across generations, movements, and nations.
