What can penguins teach us about the love of God?

At the beginning of February I led the monthly service for Pride Church Leeds. This is a community of LGBT+ Christians and allies from across Leeds and the surrounding area who come together to worship God in a place where we can bring our whole selves. This morning, as I read the news of the Church of England General Synod’s decision to halt work around same-sex blessings, I found myself reflecting on that service.

February was a difficult month to lead. It includes Valentine’s Day, a day many people struggle with, and which is even more complicated for many in the LGBT+ community, simply because many of the cards and gifts available are created for and by cisgender heterosexuals. It also includes LGBT+ History Month, which is both a celebration of the change that has taken place over many decades and a lament for those who have been hurt, and continue to be hurt, along the way. The sermon picked up on these themes and explored our call to build a place of welcome and safety together, and it all started with penguins and pebbling. I wish I had recorded the full message I shared, I have a few pages of rough notes and a somewhat unreliable memory, but let’s begin with the penguins and pebbling.

Penguin mating rituals are a little unusual. In many species, they begin with the gift of a pebble, which, if accepted, becomes the first step in building a nest and raising chicks together. I say “potentially,” because this is not always a given, penguins are also among the species for which we have evidence of same-sex pairings, and many penguins form long-term bonds. That, however, is something of a side note. It is easy to romanticise the act of gifting pebbles, but at its core this behaviour is about building a place of safety in a cold and inhospitable environment.

Many people know what it is to try to live faithfully in places that feel spiritually cold. For LGBT+ Christians especially, faith has often been something carried without institutional shelter, sustained through friendships, hidden communities, quiet courage, and small acts of care that made survival possible. LGBT+ History Month reminds us that the communities we now experience did not simply appear, they were built, often at cost, by people who refused to let hope disappear. This week’s decision by the General Synod reinforces how necessary that work remains. It makes it even more important that open and affirming churches, as well as ecumenical gatherings such as Pride Church Leeds and the Open Table Network, continue speaking and act to build places of safety, not for the LGBT+ community, but with it.

One of the most striking aspects of the penguin nest-building analogy is that these nests are not built once and left untouched. They are continually repaired and rebuilt each year. As Christians, we are called to build this place of safety together, not to rest on our laurels when we think we have achieved something, and not to give up when our progress seems to have been swept away and our efforts appear wasted.

So what are the pebbles we bring? In John 13 we read of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, a deeply humbling task normally reserved for the lowest servant. In a moment of uncertainty and approaching loss, Jesus chooses something practical, intimate, and humble. Immediately afterward comes the command: “Love one another as I have loved you.” The measure of discipleship is not the perfection of belief or the clarity of doctrine, but the visibility of love lived out in action. Love, in this sense, is not spectacle but the willingness to act and live in ways that sustain one another. We all have our own pebbles to bring. They may seem small and insignificant, but all are important, and the church is incomplete, and, I would argue, unstable, without them. It has been one of my most significant realisations over the past year, without my friends and family who are part of the LGBT+ community, I am incomplete, and the church as a whole is incomplete. Far from being the best way forward, I believe this week’s decision risks weakening the body it seeks to preserve.

All of this comes together in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (2:12–22), which addresses communities who believed themselves to be outsiders, people described as “without hope” and “far off.” Paul does not deny that exclusion existed. Instead, he declares that Christ has broken down the barriers that once separated people, and that those who were once strangers are now “members of the household of God.” Most importantly, he says that believers are being “built together into a dwelling place for God.” Paul does not describe a structure built by some and inhabited by others. He does not imagine a church constructed for people, nor a community where belonging is granted by a few to the many. He speaks of something mutual, built together. The dwelling place of God comes into being precisely through the shared participation of those who once stood outside.

The Church does not always live up to that vision, and all too often it continues to exclude LGBT+ people from the work of building altogether. At other times it attempts to build something for them, offering welcome that does not trust them with agency or voice. Both approaches ultimately say the same thing, that some people decide how belonging is shaped while others simply receive it.

Yet the gospel invites something different. It calls communities into the shared labour of love, where each person brings what they have, where no one controls the shape of belonging alone, and where leadership looks less like authority and more like the towel and basin of John 13. This kind of community does not emerge once and remain secure forever. Like the pebble nests rebuilt each season, welcome must be enacted again and again. Faithfulness is not maintained by declarations alone but by the small, steady acts through which people care for one another, listen, protect, and remain present. Safety is not automatic, it is something communities practice.

And yet this is not a burden placed solely on human shoulders. Ephesians reminds us that it is ultimately God who makes a community a dwelling place. Our offerings, our small stones, are not proofs of moral achievement. They are signs of trust. God is the one who gathers them, shapes them, and breathes life into what we build together.

And so, even in moments when the wider Church hesitates, we continue to bring our pebbles, trusting that God is still building, stone by stone, a dwelling place where all can belong.

We ended in prayer placing stones together round a candle to symbolise that act of building and trusting together.

Tonight, we’re not pretending we all arrive with the same resources.

Some of us have smooth stones.

Some of us have heavy ones.

Some of us may feel we have very little to offer at all.

But God builds shelter from shared offering.

This is the kind of church we are committed to being:

a place where faith and sexuality, disability or gender identity are not in competition,

where no one is asked to leave part of themselves at the door,

and where safety is not conditional.

In Christ we also are being built together into a dwelling place for God.”

As we place our pebbles, we pray not just for welcome here,

but that God would dwell among us.

God who shelters life in harsh places,

receive these stones, not as proof of our goodness,

but as signs of our trust.

Build among us a place where all your people can rest,

where faith and identity are held together,

and where love does not have to perform to belong.

Make this community a visible sign of your welcome,for us, and for this city.

Amen