The lights go up, and the stage is set. The audience begins to fill the assembly, and an anticipatory buzz fills the room. Backstage, you adjust your outfit, warm up your voice and rehearse the cues one last time before it’s “show time.” You notice the time and step out onto the front stage, your heart aflutter and the audience looks on with expectancy.

You may think I’m describing a drag queen’s performance. In fact, I’m talking about a Sunday morning for many ministers. 

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The word performance may unsettle some churchgoers, conjuring images of fakery. But there is a fascinating intersection between ministry and drag that has less to do with pretending and more to do with liberation. At their best, both can become acts of transformation.

This became clear to me as I worked toward a Master of Divinity over the last three years. I grew up poor, queer and undiagnosed with ADHD in the early 1980s, so attending university let alone seminary — for a professional graduate degree — was so far out of my realm of imagination growing up. But after a life lived fully, and at times scratching the bottom of the gas tank while navigating addiction recovery, I encountered unforeseen challenges in learning to navigate this world.

You see, a certain degree of performativity shapes how we all move through society. That said, the church world and — indeed, the seminary world — demanded an........

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