Prayer didn’t work. Fasting didn’t work. Psychotherapy and inner healing didn’t work. Deliverance failed. And reparative therapy made me want to commit suicide.
I tried everything over the course of twenty years to rid myself of same-sex attraction. I realized I could no longer deny who I was simply because my spiritual community held narrowly prescribed notions of what was acceptable, moral, and holy. So I decided to be true to myself, to discover who God had really made me to be. I came out of the closet and took Christ with me.
“God loves the sinner but hates the sin,” she said. The only Christian from my former life who maintained contact with me through my early coming out process finally said she was “concerned” with my “lifestyle choice” (implying I had chosen a life of sin). I answered with a long letter sharing my feelings and espousing my hard-earned beliefs. “Response to a Concerned Heterosexual Christian” is adapted from this reply.
It details my struggle and everything I did to overcome it. With twenty years in the evangelical charismatic church, a masters in biblical studies, years in Christian publishing and missions work, and time spent pastoring, I present this contemporary issue from a personal viewpoint that’s scripturally educated.
Do LGBT people need to be fixed, healed? Does the stance of conservative Christianity represent the nature of God and Christ to everyone? Do we have scriptural precedent for accepting LGBT people just as they are?
If you’ve struggled with these issues regardless of your orientation, you owe it to yourself and all those inside and outside of Christ’s fold to foster a new understanding, “That they may be one as we are one” (John 17:11,22).
