New Student Profile: Weston Morris ’24
By the Rev. Kyle Oliver
Entering MDiv student Weston Morris ‘24 grew up in the Episcopal Church and had a robust Christian formation experience as a young person in North Carolina. It wouldn’t be long, however, before he would question his sense of belonging at church—though thankfully not his place in the Body of Christ.
“I’m a transgender man, so I transitioned when I was in college and didn’t really feel like there was a place for me as a trans person in the church,” he said. “I didn’t have any role models. I didn’t have a whole lot of faith that the church was going to be ready for me, even if I was technically ready for it.”
In the end, Morris took a leap of faith, concluding, “I don’t get to choose what I’m called to.”
His journey took him first to the Episcopal Church in Colorado, where he served for two years in the Episcopal Service Corps. His community organizing work in that role focused on social justice and accessibility in marginalized communities, a theme that has pervaded his other pursuits and that ultimately drew him to CDSP as a postulant for holy orders in the Diocese of North Carolina.
Welcoming Every Body
In his second year of Episcopal Service Corps, the final months of which coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Morris was taking stock of what he was learning at work and in life.
“I knew that I had built up a lot of skills in advocacy and also education when it comes to identity,” he said.
He decided to team up with friend and colleague the Rev. Tory Moir to launch a ministry deeply entwined with both their personal stories and professional experiences.
“We sat down and we decided that we would start to try to engage with local communities in Colorado around the issue of inclusion of trans identities in churches,” he said.“If you talk to pretty much any youth minister, they have trans youth in their youth groups or genderqueer, questioning, or gender fluid people. It’s a really important topic right now, because it’s getting a lot more air time.”
Thus was Welcoming Every Body formed. Morris says the organization’s work with congregations has focused on providing contextually specific education and facilitation since churches begin this work from many different starting points. Sometimes they start by discussing the idea of identity, and ultimately gender identity, in a very general way. Other congregations want to dive into theological understandings of gender and sexuality.
The common denomination, he says, is mutual respect and empathy.
“It does tend to be a really vulnerable space for people. It’s really important that the space be set up in a way that is non-judgmental and seeks to be open and also honest,” he says.“I think being real people in the room is very important.”
Crip Camp
The other sense of the phrase “every body” that is important to Morris’s journey is the connection to his experiences working in disability justice.
“I am really passionate about us living into the embodiment that we’re given by God, through being alive and making the most of whatever that reality is, and removing barriers for people’s engagement regardless of body,” Morris said.“I think my trans identity is really important to my understanding of that, because the way that bodies interact with the world says a whole lot about who we can be and our theology.”
In the year following his experience in Episcopal Service Corps, Morris was looking for other work, in addition to leading workshops for Welcoming Every Body. What he found was an administrative position supporting James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham, the directors of a documentary called Crip Camp.
“Jim is a disabled person. He has spina bifida. When he was young, he went to a camp in upstate New York that was pretty radical and revolutionary,” Morris explained. The revolutionary dimension of that camp? Full access and inclusion. “It was a camp for disabled kids where they got to be exactly themselves.
He got to interact with other disabled people for the first time.”
In addition to convening a transformative experience for participants at the time, the camp had an outsized impact on the history of disability justice. Camp alums would go on to form a network of mutual support and action that helped champion and ultimately pass the Americans with Disabilities Act.
“It’s an untold story full of living legends,” Morris said.
Although he didn’t know it when he started, Morris’s time working for the creators of Crip Camp would coincide with the film’s nomination for an Oscar and distribution via streaming giant Netflix. The quantum leap in exposure for Crip Camp made the job more intense but also more exciting. Morris says it also gave him plenty of time to reflect on its implications for churches.
“It didn’t matter which disability you had, how your body was messing with your brain that day, what meds you were on, or what your ability to swim or walk or hear was,” he said. “You would be included regardless. Everyone had the right to talk and to be who they were in that space. I think we can learn a lot as a Church by emanating and mirroring that welcome.”
Finding CDSP
Morris is excited that his recent move for seminary will put him in closer contact with the Crip Camp directors and other participants, many of whom live in the Bay Area. But he says the choice of CDSP was also connected to the school’s theological commitment to welcoming every body.
“CDSP has the most accessible financial aid information and has the most appropriate gender language on the website,” he said.“I can’t emphasize enough that it was really seeing that they already use words like spouses and partners and asked for pronouns on forms. There were clear signs that
I wasn’t going to be the only queer or trans person at the school. Not only that I wouldn’t be the
only one, that I wouldn’t be the first— and I have been the first for a lot of spaces.”
Still, Morris admits that there are challenges ahead, both for individual members of the community and the institution. He laments that CDSP’s hillside campus poses significant accessibility barriers for people with disabilities, and he hopes to contribute by participating in the relevant planning processes as campus renovations unfold in the coming years. He sees this work not only as a matter of justice, but also a valuable teaching opportunity for the school and its students.
“The Episcopal Church has an aging population. Everyone will become disabled at some point. That’s just the truth of being alive in bodies,” he said.
He also named the positive potential of doing this work well, at CDSP and beyond—a lesson he has learned in the many venues of his formation heretofore.
“There is tremendous potential for growth in the church by making spaces where people’s embodiment isn’t a barrier to participation.”
