What My LGBT Neighbors Teach Me

I want to talk about something that has been on my heart for a while now.

Christian friends, we need another way forward. It’s time all of us take a deep look inside and note how our community and even we individually have ravaged, traumatized, abused, and deeply wounded the LGBT community.

This shouldn’t be about what we can get out of it. This shouldn’t be about controlling an outcome with the gay people in our lives. It should be about us and Jesus and what He thinks of how we have treated our neighbor.

Yes, I am a Christian who does believe that the call of God to Christian believers is to marriage between a man and a woman. I have never been able to be convinced from a fair reading of Scripture to depart from that belief.

But because this world is broken and hurting and falls short of the glory of God, we also need to realize that holding such a conviction should not give us a superiority complex or cause us to idolize heterosexual marriage. Even Christian marriage falls short. Good people fail to find a spouse. Some are called to singleness. In marriage, husbands and wives fail one another–sometimes in small ways, sometimes in egregious ways. Couples suffer infertility. Romantic expectations are not fully fulfilled.

And some have a longing within their heart to be with someone of the same sex. The aches that we suffer in this world and in our relationships are real and substantial. So, yes, I do believe what has been the traditional Christian teaching about marriage for the Church’s history. I also believe pretty much all of us fall short of the ideal to which we are called.

I believe in the Bible, in its power to change our lives, even as we wrestle with it–as I do virtually every day. I left a denomination that I perceived to not be respecting the Bible and the historic creeds as well as the Church’s biblical teaching on sex. I left because I believed deviating from these faithful teaching was wrong. I still think it’s wrong.