People not concepts - Diversity dice put inclusion on the table

The Diversity Dice, designed & produced by Frontier Youth Trust & Q Space.

Read more about how they developed here.

We have a limited stock of Diversity Dice available for sale in our online shop, at the special price of £15 each. Buy securely online here.

AT OTN’S NATIONAL GATHERING in June, Lauren McCombie-Smith from Frontier Youth Trust led a breakout group to introduce Open Table members to Diversity Dice, a resource created by a Christian youth charity and an LGBT+ youth group.

Lauren explains, and movingly shares why this really matters to her.

“In Christian youth work spaces conversations around LGBTQ+ inclusion are still pretty rare. Our hope is to help equip people to have those conversations and journey together to a better world for our young people.”

It was a pleasure to connect with kindred spirits at my second Open Table national gathering this June, on behalf of Frontier Youth Trust [FYT], a Christian youth charity passionate about equipping people to journey with young people on the margins and the edges of culture and society, and affirming the LGBTQ+ community.

Lauren McCombie Smith is the Movement Advocate for Frontier Youth Trust, supporting youth work that is committed to journeying with young people on the margins. She is currently working on the Prophetic Dreamers project; developing inclusive programmes for LGBTQ+ Christian young people.

FYT embarked on its own journey of inclusion in the years prior to the Covid pandemic. As a result, over the last few years we have been developing resources and training around inclusive practice. Sadly, LGBTQ+ young people still stand on the edge of culture and society. This is even more true of Christian spaces. In Christian youth work spaces conversations around LGBTQ+ inclusion are still pretty rare. Our hope is to help equip people to have those conversations and journey together to a better world for our young people.

I began working at FYT at a time in my life where I didn’t know if I could ever do Christian youth work again. I was recently out and had endured watching pieces of my life slowly break away from me. I didn't have a lot of hope that I could preserve my career.

Finding an organisation like FYT that welcomed and embraced all of me changed my life, and led me to walk through the doors of the Open Table national gathering last year.

I had never been in such an openly LGBTQ+ Christian space before. Until a few years ago, my Christian world had been a bubble of evangelical spaces that, for me, cultivated a culture of silence and repression. I'm not sure I was even aware of how unwelcoming those spaces actually were, until I began to experience actively affirming environments like this gathering.

The people I met at Open Table felt like unicorns - beautiful, amazing beings that seemed like myth to me, too wonderful to be real; the embodied dream of an openly queer Christian space.

As someone who walks this path of a queer Christian, I want to remember that feeling of awe. I don't want to forget the miraculousness of that space. As I reach new stages of my own journey, I want to remember that there are still people like me out there, who live in bubbles where they are told that these two parts of their identity cannot co-exist. I don't want to be complacent in thinking that just because I have found some safety that there isn't still work to be done. My story is not unique.

Working with FYT has opened up a world where inclusive theology exists, where questioning is encouraged, and where working from an outpouring of your full self is not only recognised as valuable, but holy.

So this is the version of me that walked through the doors of the Open Table national gathering last year. Totally nervous and excited about what she might discover. We were hoping to connect with like-minded communities, and see if we could share resources. What we got was a lot more. We discovered a thriving community sharing hope and the love of God.

This year I walked back through the welcoming doors of another Open Table national gathering, not just as a delegate but as a contributor. Over the past year my colleague Will had been sharing with Kieran the OTN Coordinator about our Diversity Dice, a resource designed to spark conversation around diversity and inclusion. And this year, the Open Table Network invited FYT to deliver workshops to equip attendees on how to use Diversity Dice in their contexts.

As I walked through the sunny streets of Cambridge, I wasn't sure what to expect. As someone who isn't a member of an Open Table community, and just a grateful guest, I was nervous about my place there. And as a gay Christian, walking through the doors of an unfamiliar church is always a nerve-wracking experience (albeit an occupational hazard for me!). But as I reached the venue, my heart grew calm. From the good omen of the pride flag hanging outside the bar Revolution on my route to the warm smiling faces that greeted me, I felt welcome.

And, to someone like me, that is so valuable as, in so many places that I walk into as a professional, my welcome is not guaranteed. I almost always feel like there is a question mark hanging over my head.

This is one of the reasons I am such a believer in our Diversity Dice resource. I enter environments constantly in which my queerness feels like the elephant in the room. People don’t know what to say or how to include me, mostly because they have never had this conversation before, or maybe never (knowingly) met someone like me.

The Diversity Dice resource is so useful because it offerss an open framework for discussion. It puts the conversation of inclusion literally on the table, and centres the discussion on people, not concepts.

This is what I was hoping to highlight in my workshops at the OTN national gathering. The Dice enable us to reflect on how welcoming the spaces we exist in are, and not just the LGBTQ+ parts of our identity, but all the other things that make up who we are.

In our workshop time, we used the Dice to discuss inclusive language and the protected characteristics outlined in the 2010 Equality Act, on which the Dice are based. We then used the Dice to discuss how different people would experience commonplace spaces like school, hospitals, and buses. How might the different aspects of our identity affect how we experience the world? The activities are designed to open up our eyes to different perspectives so that we can more clearly see how we can take steps to create inclusive spaces.

Talking to an Open Table audience about inclusion felt a little like preaching to the converted! But what a privilege to have diversity and inclusion conversations with people who are so invested and passionate about creating a more inclusive world!

Each person at the gathering received their own pack of the Diversity Dice to take home. My hope and prayer is that they are used, and helpful in sparking conversations about how we create even more inclusive spaces; how we increase our welcome and how we can love as we have been called to love.

We have a limited stock of Diversity Dice available for sale in our online shop, at the special price of £15 each. Buy securely online here.