IN RESPONSE to a recent wave of legal challenges to transgender rights, Christian community leaders have launched Transfigured Mission, a campaign urging UK churches to educate themselves, take action, and create truly inclusive congregations for trans people. The campaign is a response to the April 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling that under equality law ‘sex’ must be understood as the gender assigned at birth.

OUR NEWLY PUBLISHED 2024 Annual Report tells the story of how OTN continues to be a life-line for LGBTQIA+ people seeking a spiritual home. Since our very first Open Table community began in Liverpool in 2008, we have grown into a nationwide partnership of communities across England and Wales. Together these communities offer a genuinely inclusive, affirming space for LGBTQIA+ people, their families and friends to ‘come as you are’, as OTN’s slogan says.

AT OUR AGM on Saturday 5th April 2025 we welcomed a new trustee to our board for the next three years. Our trustees are responsible for thinking through and putting into practice plans which will develop the Open Table Network (OTN).

JUNE 2nd-8th is Volunteers’ Week - a chance to recognise the fantastic contribution volunteers make to our communities and say thank you. The Open Table Network wouldn’t - and couldn’t - exist without the volunteers who give energy, time and talents.

FOLLOWING the success of our Q&As with our Patrons in 2020-21 (still available on our YouTube channel), OTN Co-Chairs Revd Andrew Howorth and Dr Carol Joyner were in conversation in the last of our new webinar series.

OTN is calling on supporters to sign an open letter in response to UK government policies that threaten the safety, dignity, and rights of trans, non-binary, and intersex people. The letter was created by Revd Sam Mackie, formerly part of the leadership team of the Open Table community in Derby, now an LGBTQ+ Chaplain in Essex.