One in One Hundred: a Christian’s experience of negotiating Faith and Homosexuality

I was in my tiny London box of a bedroom getting ready for work in the West End. It was a Wednesday morning, between Christmas and New Years’ Eve, 2012. This is a strange time of year for me. In 1999, at the age of 17, I spent this week on the Mid North Coast, 600km from my Sydney home, living on a campsite with a group of evangelical Christians, telling children and teenagers the enduring good news that Jesus loved them. I did this for ten years.

While planning the 2007 evangelism trip I met Andy. Kind, intelligent, musical, dedicated to God, he quickly became one of my closest friends. He stayed my friend for the two and a bit years I dated an atheist. With amazing empathy, he listened to whatever I threw at him.

And then on that Wednesday morning in 2012, we caught up via skype, and I asked him how his Christmas was, and he said, “Oh, really nice, until I told my family I was gay.”

Sorry, what? I type.

Yeah, not a typo, He replies.

Something was wrong here.

Having grown up in the Anglican Church, I confess that in my late twenties, I carried some unquestioned narrow opinions on sexuality. I had no problem accepting that people, out there, in the world, might be gay. For goodness sake, I worked in theatre. But Christians. They weren’t gay. It was something I assumed could not be possible.

 Later, in Sydney, Andy would tell me he also had assumed being gay was not an option. He was twelve when he started experiencing what most churches will only describe as same-sex attraction. Believing this was sinful, he worked to push those attractions aside.

 While at uni, he dared to ask his closest Christian friends to pray for him. He never said he was gay, or even that he was same-sex attracted, instead, he told them that previously he had found gay porn a temptation. He’d struggled with it. He’d ask them to pray that the struggle wouldn’t come back. But the reality was the struggle, or temptation, or whatever you want to call it was always there. It never went away.

At some point he was going to have to admit he wasn’t a straight man with a misplaced inclination for gay porn. He was, in fact, gay.

Never having heard his quiet prayer to be released from the temptation of gay porn, not having known he’d spent years seeing a councillor in an attempt to banish his same-sex attraction, Andy’s seemingly nonchalant typed coming out message that January morning took me by surprise. I didn’t know what to do with the information he was telling me. What did it mean for our friendship, for his faith? Andy assured me that identifying as a Christian remained his priority, which meant he had to reconcile two supposedly competing and incompatible aspects of who he was.  

Earlier this year, at the start of the Easter break, I drive round to Leichhardt to see Andy, and ask how the process of reconciling his faith and sexuality is progressing. We’re both back living in Sydney. Two years have passed since he began telling people he was gay, since his grandfather said he would go to hell, since a Baptist minister told him it would be best if he never spoke to anyone about his sexuality and a theology student told him he was questioning if it was time to ‘hand him over to Satan’.

I sit on the low brick wall at the front of Leichhardt Uniting Church waiting for him. A sandwich board on the footpath lets me know the church is open, and that justice is found here. Andy texts to say he is running late, but he turns up within five minutes carrying several packets of black sheets that will be used to cover the windows of the church during the candlelit Maundy Thursday service that evening. We leave the sheets inside the church, then head next door to the church owned residence where Andy lives.

In the kitchen he shares with twenty-two other adults, Andy flicks the kettle on and offers me left over gluten free vegetarian lasagne. I decline. We take our Earl Grey back to his room. I sit on the only chair, and Andy sits cross legged on his bed opposite me. It’s my turn to listen.

Andy’s Christian story begins in a similar way to that of many children born to church going parents. He grew up in a Christian family, as had both his parents. There was constant exposure to Christian influence. His family, however, always encouraged him to question what he was taught, and not to take everything for granted.

                “I think,” Andy pauses, “I think I was a pretty snobby kind of Christian, a culture Christian.”

                “A snobby Christian?” I ask, “As in, what you thought about God or how to do church was right and other Christians were wrong?”

                “Perhaps. Well, probably more that I thought being a Christian was definitely better than not being a Christian”. He laughs, “That I was enlightened”.

                Like other enlightened Christian boys, Andy knew God required a strict sexual ethic, but unlike the others, feeling like he was attracted to guys and not girls, was going to make life trickier.

                “So what did you do?”

                “I spent a large chunk of my life trying to get rid of that side of me, and trying to understand where it had come from, and what on earth I had done wrong. I believed, theoretically, that God loved me, that I was a Christian. But I also felt that I was gay. So, I reasoned that therefore, I had to not be gay because I couldn’t be both”

                Andy is not alone in having felt that because love for God was his number one priority, the fact that he was gay, had to be silenced. At my own church, I am told there are some people who identify as same-sex attracted, but when I asked to be put in contact, I was informed they didn’t like to talk about it. I can only wonder what stories they might be able to share.

                 Psychologist Stuart Edser in his 2012 book Being Gay, Being Christian: You Can Be Both, writes of his own pain in reconciling faith and sexuality. As a psychologist he sees many people who experience depression, guilt and shame because they are gay. His writes that just as we can’t be sure how many gay and lesbian people there are in wider society, we can’t really be sure how many are in the church, yet there is no reason to think or believe gay Christians don’t, or can’t, exist. He references several surveys which have tried to determine the percentages of gay and lesbian people in the general population. Most are not conclusive, but suggest around 3% of people are homosexual, however some report up to 10%. When I consider that over a hundred people attend my church, chances are that there will be someone who doesn’t fit the heteronormative ideal, and even if it’s only one person, does not everyone in the flock of one hundred matter?

                Before finding his home at Leichhardt Uniting church, Andy had been going to an inner city Baptist church. He started attending this church in 2006 after moving to Sydney to study at the Conservatorium of Music.  Though he made friends and was involved in the activities of the church, his unfading, but unspoken, attraction to men always made him feel more sinful and less loved than everyone else. Christians believe we’re all inherently sinful, but Andy felt that his sin, the sin of who he was, was worse than the secret failings of others. Yet unlike other character flaws like greed or lack of compassion, the fact he was attracted to men seemed impossible to control.

                On the recommendation of his church, Andy went to counselling, with the goal of understanding, and overcoming, his same-sex attraction. He didn’t call himself gay. In fact, he didn’t think anyone was actually gay, just that some people had been conditioned to think they were. The theory being that without the right kinds of male influences in youth, the need for male affirmation had become sexualised.

                “Did this help?”

                “A bit, because it made me feel less like the way I felt was my fault. But it didn’t solve anything. People would assume I must have had a bad relationship with my dad, been neglected or abused. But my relationship with my dad was great, so the only other theory the counsellor had was peer pressure.”

Without experiencing any real results, Andy persisted in counselling, in asking for prayer, in hoping for change. At the end of 2009, changes did start to come his way, but not in the way he’d expected. Instead, Andy found opportunities to leave Australia.

                Andy travelled the world with many varied motivations. He went to South East Asia to take part in humanitarian projects helping with community development; he want to Germany to attend language schools; he moved to London for teaching experience. One of the unexpected, though perhaps not all that surprising, outcomes was the opportunity to experience different expressions of Christianity, and as a consequence rethink his own faith. The snobbery he had felt in his secure, educated, mostly middle class existence began to fade.

                “I met a lot of different types of Christians. They practiced Christianity differently. They had different theological understandings to me.”

                “How where they different?”

                “Oh!” Andy, makes a long exclamation that is part sigh, part a gathering of thought. “Experience of the Holy Spirit. That was a really big one. I couldn’t understand why so many of these really solid, so called bible believing Christians, who really had their faith built around an academic understanding of Scripture, could brush away so much of experiential faith.”

               

The Christians Andy met while travelling, were all experiencing their faith within the bounds of their own cultures. All these people were living and worshipping in different countries, in different spaces and with different influences. But they were united in experiencing the Holy Spirit as a reality in their lives. Belonging to God was perhaps bigger than belonging to a particular denomination, and physical local church.

                The process of analysing his faith enabled Andy to reconsider the expression of his sexuality within the context of that faith. When Andy came home in 2012 he wanted to get on with being committed to the church, to mission, to serving his community, to caring for those who were in need. But now having seen so many other types of church, as Andy sat back within the walls of his Sydney church, it didn’t feel like home anymore. He wanted to be able to talk honestly about his sexuality, and for it to be ok for him to admit who he was. He wanted to stop cagily talking about a weakness for gay porn, and stop pretending he was still looking for the right woman to cure him of illicit desire, and be his wife.

                Over the winter his church took a break from regular weekly bible study meetings and ran some topical sessions. Working with a local ex-gay ministry organisation, his church hosted some sessions on Christian responses to homosexuality. Curious, Andy went. On the final night the main speaker, a man now married but who had previously identified as same-sex attracted, said he’d never met a same-sex attracted man who’d had a good relationship with their father, implying that the key to a successful ministry was to first deal with the broken relationship.

                Andy was uncomfortable.  People had been telling him this for years now, and it ignored the complexity of his situation. At the end of the session, he walked away from his friends and went to confront the speaker.

                “You can’t use that line with integrity anymore. You’ve now met a same-sex attracted man who has a great relationship with his dad. Me”

                 

                Reflecting on the talk, it occurred to Andy that this man, who was married, was confessing to the fact that sometimes, just like everybody else, he still had to resist temptation, to be careful with the material his eyes strayed upon while he was online. That sometimes, the lure of gay pornography still called. People in the audience had nodded along, but suddenly Andy thought, hang on, most men, would be choosing to turn away from graphic pictures of women, not men. And maybe if the attraction is still there, even though you married a woman, and had children, maybe you’re not ex-gay at all. Maybe you’re actually gay. Andy was done with lying. He wasn’t going to change, he’d tried for fifteen years, and he’d had enough. He was gay.

After this Andy spent around six months reading and considering the passages of scripture that seemingly spoke against homosexuality. Still cradling his now cold cup of tea, Andy looks at me.

“At that point I thought, this is just kind of like a disease or something, perhaps like being born disabled. It’s something that’s not necessarily part of the natural order, but, something that just is, and therefore we find a way of dealing with that.”

I simply nod.

 “I thought, you know, people weren’t designed by God to move about in wheel chairs, they’re designed to walk on two legs, but, we’re in a world where bad things happen. People can be born disabled, through no fault of their own, through no external circumstances either, and we find a way of coping.”

For a while Andy framed his homosexuality within this context. Ideally he would have been straight, but he lived in a fallen world, and he was gay. He would admit to it and live with it. He would be different to everyone else.  He would choose to be celibate which would be tough, but that seemed the only way forward. The alternative, seeking a gay relationship surely meant leaving the church, and in his heart, Andy knew he wanted to stay. The church, well more accurately God, was his first love.

“I thought, God wants me to live a holy life, so that’s the kind of life I will live.”

                Andy began to accept who he was. But this reasoning pathologises homosexuality in a way that, long term, isn’t particularly helpful. Celibacy is a difficult calling. Whether freely chosen for the sake of committing to mission, or in the case of the Catholic Church, entering the priesthood, or because you’re single and believe the only right expression of sexuality is within a heterosexual marriage, it is a difficult road to walk.  If your community does not support you, or is structured in a way that implies single life is somehow less valid, committing to celibacy will not only be difficult, it will be isolating and unappealing.

                Andy went to see his minister to talk through his concerns.  The conversation was abrupt. If he wanted to stay in the church and stay on ministry teams, he was to be celibate. Andy laughs dryly as he tells me the line from his minister was “the day you enter a relationship with another man is the day your relationship with this church ends”. He decided to leave before that happened.

                Many people might never have stepped into a church again. But Andy searched for a church that welcomed gay and lesbian people, and he found Leichhardt Uniting. The church website advertises that they are a safe and affirming church, welcoming people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex.  The church leadership seek to be loving and supportive of all the people in the congregation, regardless of their background, status, ethnicity or sexuality.  

                The reverend Dr John Hirt, who leads the congregation at Leichhardt knows several ministers who are quick to acknowledge they have friends who are gay, or that there are gay and lesbian people in their churches. However, it often transpires these people are on the periphery of parish life. Dr Hirt, however, strives to include gay and lesbian people in all aspects of church life, to demonstrate that he believes all members of his congregation are equal in the eyes of the Lord. If people in his congregation have gifts and talents that can be used to serve the community, if they live in a way that demonstrates the reality of their love for God, if it appears that the Holy Spirit is shaping the character of an individual, these are the things Dr Hirt looks at, not their sexuality.

                Being welcomed by Leichhardt Uniting gave Andy a place to continue living as a committed Christian, without feeling ashamed of his sexuality.  He met and talked with other gay Christians. One couple, have been together for a decade. There are gay Christians on the leadership team, leading music, contributing to decision making and planning. They readily admit that being able to be so involved at church keeps faith at the centre of their life.

                In a community that so happily recognises gay and lesbian Christians, Andy finally felt he was allowed simply to be. Rather than be questioned for even daring to think he might be gay, or might want a relationship one day, Andy could be supported in coming to terms with the tricky passages on immorality, and the apparent sinfulness of homosexuality. He grappled with definitions of sin. After much prayer, bible reading, meditation and reflection, it seemed sin was something that was damaging. Either to himself, to others, to his relationship with God or to his ability to witness. According to this understanding, being gay did not seem sinful, and ultimately nor did the prospect of going out with another man. He questioned what he believed about salvation. He was not saved by not being gay. He was saved through faith in Christ.

                “Do you ever feel angry at God?”

 “No, not angry. I used to feel disappointed that I couldn’t be straight. Now I’m disappointed in the response I sometimes get from other Christians,” Andy looks down. “Sometimes there is a happiness in ignorance. Sometimes you can go along to church and think you’re thinking about things, but you’re not really.”

                It’s now dark outside. My tea is finished. The Maundy Thursday service will be starting soon. I want to give Andy so many hugs to make up for all the years where, because he felt unable to talk about his sexuality, I wasn’t able to be as supportive as I would have liked to have been.  It’s a good thing I have this life and the next to make it up to him. 

All That Remained

The first morning

I woke up in your house

You walked outside

To find

That in the night

Your bird had flown away

And all

That remained

Was me

And her cage. 

So, what is it like to be a gay Christian?

 

I had coffee with a gay Christian[i], and these are my reflections.

 

So, on a Wednesday morning, just after the Easter long weekend, I drive to Leichhardt and meet up with a member of the congregation and leadership team at Leichhardt Uniting church. He’s waiting for me outside the church, sitting on a low brick wall. Today he is in jeans and a navy Tshirt, and his softly waved blonde hair is brushed neatly off his face. If we were at my church, I’d probably label him a Hipster Christian. He’s in his late twenties, he’s dressed well, but casually, and I can’t help but think he’s kind of pretty.  I’m not saying that as a gendered assumption about masculinity or masculinity in gay men, it just seems to be a thing with young, trendy Christians. But, as it happens he is gay, and he is Christian, and he’s been saying he’s both of those things for over ten years.

 

We walk down Norton St to Ragamuffin, where I get a regular flat white and gluten free, vegan apple and berry muffin, and he orders a large soy flat white. We talk briefly about uni, my degree, his current research for his PhD.

 

The son of Salvation Army Officers, he grew up with Christian teaching around him, and with church community being central to his life. He didn’t know any gay Christians, and kind of assumed being gay wasn’t an option, so as a teenager, realising he was interested in other guys, the natural course was for the significance of the church community to fade. He had dated a girl at fourteen, in the very chaste kind of way that fourteen year old Christians date, so it didn’t seem odd that in their time together not much other than hand holding happened between them. He recalls a time when he had just started going out with his current partner, and for the first time really questioned if he was still a Christian.

“It was a Sunday morning, and my mum called me,” he doesn’t look at me directly while telling this story, “and she asked if I was going to be home to go to church with her and dad. When I got off the phone my boyfriend asked what we’d been talking about, and I told him, and he said ‘oh, so you are you a Christian?’” there is a moment of silence here. “I hadn’t really been thinking about it, but I said ‘yeah, I am’, and my boyfriend said, ‘me too’.”

At that time his partner was in his second year at uni, and had just started going to a mid-week campus bible study lead by the now minister at Leichhardt uniting. People from that bible study asked to start up a Sunday gathering, and both my coffee companion of the morning, and his partner decided to go.

“It was in Ultimo, it was really convenient. But it was also really small. There were only six or seven of us”

But that really small Sunday gathering became their Christian community, and it did grow with time. Later, people from that gathering moved to Leichhardt uniting to help build the community there. When I ask what the experience has been like, living as a gay Christian for a decade, he immediately speaks about community.

“I can’t quantify how important a supportive church community is.”

He speaks of his love of being involved in the church. Of leading music, of contributing to planning and decision making. He knows that were he to be at a church less accepting of people who are gay, while he might be nominally welcomed he would probably have to take a back seat, and he’s fairly sure that would detract from his sense of belonging. At the core of his faith is a desire to be able to give to his community. He started helping with music, leading singing, contributing to communal worship ten years ago.

“We just had one girl playing the flute –

“which is such a good congregational kind of instrument,”

“Exactly. And she heard me singing, it was obvious, we were that small, and she asked if I’d be willing to stand at the front with her to lead the songs.”

This is a thing that we both know wouldn’t happen in a more conservative church. I myself have been stood down from singing in church when I was dating an atheist. I wasn’t sleeping with him. That had never been an option, and at the time my church leader questioned me, it was a long distance relationship, so, physicality wasn’t really a thing. Questionable sexuality is a big deal. But maybe it doesn’t have to be. Aside from that one big point of being gay, the relationship I hear about that morning seems to be a model example for fidelity and commitment – commitment to each other and to the church.

This young Christian speaks of his constant love for his church, and his want to be loved and supported by his church. He believes that in making sure his church community is healthy, he is helping to prepare the church to be involved in issues of social justice, in the local and wider community. But his church comes first. He’s done admin, and music, and leads prayers. And he’s seen the community at Leichhardt steadily grow and be involved in local issues, like petitioning for affordable housing.

Social justice is important at Leichhardt Uniting. I get the feeling it’s what makes their hearts beat. But as I’m reminded over the course of our conversation, Jesus hung out with the marginalised. And Jesus loved the marginalised - widows, prostitutes, actually just women in general. He spoke to them, he loved them. Tax collectors, illiterate fishermen. It doesn’t take much biblical familiarity to know this. And what I’m learning today, is that for this gay Christian at any rate, being gay means identifying with those who, because of their sexuality, historically have been marginalized. Surely Jesus loves him (and them) too.

 

I have with me a copy of the Sydney Anglican Doctrine commission report on sexuality. It says all sorts of things. Some interesting, some ludicrous, some heartbreaking. I open it up at a passage which claims that homosexuality is fashionable, and that this is partly why society in general has become more accepting of gay people.

I watch as he reads through the section of the book. At one point he raises his eyebrows. I wonder if he’s at the bit where they claim that for “millennia” marriage, straight monogamous marriage, has been the accepted mode for good society and the right upbringing of children. He finishes reading and casts the book aside and slightly laughs. I wonder if we didn’t laugh, would we just cry. I admit I cried reading that report.

“Its interesting that they use the acronym LGBTI.”

“In that you wonder what they’re trying to say?”

“Well, what do they really think about intersex or transgendered people? How do they fit in?”

It’s a fair point. The book later relies on the fact that God created humans male and female, as a complimentary binary. That doesn’t leave much room for the T and I bit. Or the LGB bit either.

If sexuality could be freely chosen, which the argument of fashion would like us to believe, why would someone, particularly a Christian, choose to be part of a group that would make their Christian life so difficult?

I ask if he thinks this kind of focus on whether or not homosexuality is a sin is perhaps not really the best debate to be having? Is worrying about gay marriage the big issue or should we be focusing our attention elsewhere?

Without a trace of doubt he immediately speaks about global contexts.

Yes, maybe for gay and lesbian people in Sydney, in the West, there is a certain amount of equality, but that’s not the case globally.

“Sure, I’d like to be able to get married one day. But as a church, we really need to ask ourselves, does debating the sinfulness of homosexuality justify the persecution of gay people, often by the church, say, in parts of Africa? You know, as a social justice cause, marriage really isn’t such an issue.”

I’m reminded of some of the standard dialogue between say, strands of feminism. Where the loud cry of liberal feminism for equal pay, equal representation on boards and as CEOS and this sort of thing, often drowns out the socialist or global voices trying to negotiate care-giver parity, or find productive post-colonial ways of working with women in developing nations. And in this man, a committed Christian who loves Jesus, and a gay man committed to his partner of ten years, I hear a call to something bigger than worrying about any individual’s right to get married, and instead a focus on the needs of those on the edges of our globalised society.

And, I suppose, in this case at least, speaking up for the needs of the most vulnerable, wherever they are, whether it’s someone in the inner city who can’t meet the costs of living, or a person on the other side of the world facing persecution, perhaps from the church, because of their sexuality, that is what it is like to be a gay Christian.

 

 

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[i] I am writing a paper for a class at uni asking the question, what is it like to be a gay Christian? I’m not doing this to prove anybody right or wrong, but to hopefully open up the way the church talks about homosexuality, because it is not just a thing or a force to fight, it is people and their lives. I know that the stories of a few individuals is not conclusive proof for anything, rather I’m gathering these stories because every individual has a story, and it is only by getting to people and their stories that we can begin to think with empathy, and I firmly believe that whatever your stance on the rightness or wrongness of homosexual activity in the life of a Christian, or gay marriage in general, if you don’t colour your argument with empathy, if you don’t take the time to know your gay brothers, sisters, friends, neighbours and colleagues it will be very hard to ever have a productive conversation.