The 2023 Justice Summit on Trans and Nonbinary Belonging in the Church will begin and end with worship, each with a keynote preacher. Rev. Nicole Garcia - Faith Work Director at the National LGBTQ Task Force - will preach at the opening worship service and will also lead a workshop on Raising a Progressive Christian Voice in the Public Square. Rev. Tyler Connoley - Conference Minister for the Central Pacific Conference - will preach at the closing and will lead a workshop on Genderqueer Heroes in the Bible. Read about these two preachers below.
 

“I’m so excited to welcome these two powerful trans and nonbinary preachers to our Justice Summit pulpit,” Rev. Noah Brewer-Wallin, Assistant Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, said. “Working toward trans and nonbinary belonging in the church requires everyone, cisgender and transgender alike, being able to imagine that it is possible. We need to see, hear, and experience trans and nonbinary people in our pulpits and our pews. We need to believe that we [trans people] are already there.”  
The 2023 Justice Summit will take place on October 7, in person in Boston, MA and online.
Register here!
 

Rev. Nicole M. Garcia, M.A. LPC (she/her) is a queer transgender Latina who serves as the Faith Work Director at the National LGBTQ Task Force. Nicole earned a Master of Arts in Counseling from CU Denver and is a Licensed Professional Counselor in the state of Colorado. Nicole earned a Master of Divinity from Luther Seminary in St. Paul MN and is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Rev. Garcia works to lift the voices of multiple faith and spiritual perspectives with an emphasis on amplifying the voices of Black and Brown people, partnering with faith-based nonprofit organizations to carry out faith-based work to achieve impact. She is dedicated to preaching queer liberation theology and is passionate about doing the work of moving social justice from a concept to reality. 
Learn more about Rev. Garcia here. 

Rev. Tyler Connoley (they, he)  is the Conference Minister for the Central Pacific Conference, United Church of Christ, previously serving in the conference settings of the Southwest and the Missouri Mid-South. They have spent most of their adult life serving in the church, first as a lay leader and then as an ordained minister, including five years as a chaplain.

Rev. Connoley loves connecting people and helping them find their calling, and has years of experience in group and individual discernment processes, which they bring to local churches in times of transition and conflict. Their gentle prophetic voice persistently calls us to relationships of love and responsibility.

A biblical theologian and storyteller, Rev. Connoley has a Master of Arts in Religion and a Master of Divinity, both from Earlham School of Religion. Their MA thesis examined stories of eunuchs in the Hebrew Bible.