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.
[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.
