All But Invisible: Exploring Identity Questions at the Intersection of Faith, Gender, and Sexuality

By Nate Collins and Wesley Hill

What does it mean to be gay ... and a Christian? Beginning with how the Bible describes the Church, author Nate Collins outlines a vision for community life that challenges Christians to examine obstacles that inhibit spiritual unity. This new vision calls straight and non-straight believers alike to patterns of Christian obedience that respect and honor their similarities and differences.In addition, Collins provides a theological framework for understanding how Genesis 1-2 describes both gender and sexuality. He then unpacks biblical concepts like desire, lust, and temptation, and applies them to modern constructs like sexual attraction and orientation.Collins explores the theme of identity, focusing on facets of personal identity that are central to the experience of Christian gender minorities. He looks at what Scripture says about the formation and function of Christian identity, highlighting several theological and sociological tensions. Collins writes for believers who have a traditional sexual ethic and provides a compelling vision of gospel flourishing for gay, lesbian, and other same-sex attracted individuals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Sep 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9780310526032

Nate Collins

Nate Collins (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) has served as an instructor of New Testament Interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is currently a partner associate at The Sight Ministry, a Christian organization based in Nashville, Tennessee, that provides resources and support for individuals, families, and Christian organizations regarding LGBT issues. Nate has been married to his wife, Sara, for thirteen years, and they have three children.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

An Invisible People

A man of two worlds, [the] pilot felt himself to be misperceived in both, and thus was at ease in neither.

—RALPH ELLISON, THE INVISIBLE MAN

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I was twenty-three years old and one month into my first semester of seminary when I heard several Christians engage in one of the worst gay-bashing conversations I had ever heard. I was sitting with three other seminary students in an empty classroom. We had been sent there by our Hebrew professor to review for a quiz, but after about fifteen minutes, the conversation shifted to the topic of homosexuality. This is when the comments began, piling up one on top of another during the next thirty minutes until we had finished our assignment and left the room to rejoin the class.

For those thirty minutes, I sat there, numb. After we were dismissed from class, I made a beeline for a bathroom stall, and then the tears fell.

Three months prior to this experience, I shared before a group of fifty guys, some of whom were my closest friends, that I had struggled with homosexuality (the phrase I used at the time) for as long as I could remember. I told them how I had spent my entire childhood feeling different from other boys. I described how at first it was only a vague feeling, but as I entered my teenage years, it became both undeniable and surreal. I explained that my homosexuality (again, the words I used at the time) had been a constant source of shame in my life and that detachment from reality was the only way I had found to cope.

As I look back, I don’t have many first-person memories of those teenage years. I observed my life instead of living it. For the most part, I wanted to be invisible, and I was.

This is a book about an invisible people, people who find themselves at the center of a cultural debate about what it means to be human, to be a person, and to be a sexual being. You can’t escape the debate—it’s everywhere. It unfolds in public places like workplaces and restaurants but also in the private spaces of our lives, at family gatherings and in our living rooms and bedrooms. Some in this group choose to remain invisible, fearing rejection and judgment. They keep their orientation private and bear their burden alone. Others are invisible because they don’t want to rock their social boat and be an inconvenience to others. They soldier through the awkward comments and the myriad other difficulties that gay people face in struggling to fit into a straight world.

But even more specifically, this is a book about our people. When I say our, I speak as a Christian believer. Christians who aren’t straight but who also observe a traditional sexual ethic are some of the least acknowledged and understood people today.¹ They don’t fit into the mainstream gay culture, but neither do they feel entirely at home in your typical evangelical church. According to most studies and the smart people who interpret them, gender and sexual minorities account for about 3 to 5 percent of the general population, but there is no reason to believe that this statistic is any different inside our churches.² Gay people are the greeter who hands us a bulletin with a smile when we enter the sanctuary, they are the usher who passes the offering plate, they are the single man who sits alone in the same pew Sunday after Sunday, and they are the teenage girl who is the twinkle in her father’s eye and has a scary secret. Gay people are us.

For some, this might seem too outlandish to be true. Some might think this is an overstatement at best, an extreme and unwarranted accusation to make about the spiritual health of churches I’ve never attended. In his book Us versus Us, however, Andrew Marin presents the results of an extensive study conducted by the Marin Foundation on the religious backgrounds of people in the LGBT community. His findings were eye opening, particularly the following statistic: 86 percent of people in the LGBT community reported a significant level of church involvement at some point in their childhood or teenage years.³

Whether or not we see gay people as our people now, at some point they certainly did. Many of them grew up in our churches.

But not only is this a book about our people; it is also a book about my people. It is a book about people, like myself, who don’t see themselves as heterosexual or straight. Because I happen to be one of these persons, much of what follows is, unavoidably, the result of my reflection on my experience as a gender minority who is also a conservative Christian with traditional views on sex and marriage.

Before we get started, this is a good place for me to make one thing clear: gay people are not monolithic. My experience cannot stand in as the universal gay experience. Gender minorities are found in all walks of life, in all socioeconomic strata of society, and in every culture. They have a wide variety of personalities, likes and dislikes, and character traits. Some are married to an opposite-gender spouse (as I am), while many others are not. The personhood of gay people is as multifaceted as the personhood of straight people. If I strike up a conversation with a lesbian couple holding hands in line at the grocery store, I know exactly nothing about their lives except that they perhaps live together. Gay people are just as diverse as straight people. As my friend Stephen Moss once said, your grandmother and Kim Kardashian might both be heterosexual, but the similarities probably end there.⁴

Likewise, conservative Christians who have nonstraight orientations are also quite diverse. Writer Eve Tushnet highlights a few ways these individuals vary that are especially important to keep in mind.⁵ First, we do not all agree on whether it’s important to discover the origin (or cause, if you prefer) of our orientation. Some of us resonate with one or more of the various theories from pop psychology about how we came to be gay, but many others don’t. We’ll talk about some of these origin stories at greater length in later chapters.

Another difference Tushnet mentions is that Christians who aren’t straight use different metaphors when they talk about their orientation. If you spend time around some of these individuals, you might eventually hear one of them refer to their struggle with same-sex attraction. Others, including Tushnet, don’t resonate with the language of struggle and prefer to think of their orientation primarily as something they submit or surrender to God. This also will make more sense as we move into later chapters of this book.

Finally, let me also add a word to those looking for in-depth exegetical engagement with biblical teaching on homosexuality. There are many books available today that look at how to interpret the six verses in the Bible that explicitly mention same-gender sexual behavior, but that is not the focus of this book.⁶ In this book, I won’t be interacting in great depth with any of the widely cited exegetical arguments about the ethics of same-gender sexual behavior. This should not suggest that the way we interpret the Bible is unimportant or that where one lands in interpreting texts that refer to same-gender sexual behavior is inconsequential. As I said, I firmly and unapologetically believe the traditional position on sexual ethics: that Scripture prohibits sexual expression outside the context of a self-giving, monogamous marriage of a man and a woman.

But debates about the meaning of the six verses in Scripture that mention homosexuality aren’t the only kind of response that Christians can, or should, provide when participating in conversations about gender and sexuality, especially in our current cultural climate. According to Christian psychologists Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse, part of the ineffectiveness of traditionalist or evangelical voices in the public sphere can be attributed to their . . . focus on making negative claims . . . instead of embedding rightly negative condemnations in a positive ethic.⁷ I want to unpack that claim a bit more in this book and push this conversation forward in more positive ways.

Our Dilemma Today

In his book Desiring the Kingdom, Christian philosopher James K. A. Smith makes the paradigm-shifting claim that we can’t simply think our way into finding the right solutions for some of the most vexing problems we face in our lives.⁸ What these situations require, according to Smith, is not merely enough time and brainpower but a fresh perspective or way-of-being-in-the-world. And we must first be able to acknowledge the gaps in our perspective before we can become open to something that might fill in those gaps.

To set the stage for this fresh perspective, I want to look at two big-picture problems facing twenty-first-century Christians who want to explore a more thoughtful way forward in thinking about gay orientations and identity: the vision problem and the idea problem.

A VISION PROBLEM

The first problem we’ll explore is the vision problem, because I think it’s one of the fundamental dilemmas facing Christians today as it relates to LGBT issues. In general, evangelical Christians lack a clear vision of what the abundant life that Christ promises his followers might look like for gay people. I’m sure there are several ways we could address this lack of vision, but I’m going to focus on a specific solution to the vision problem in the chapters that follow: the spiritual life of a local church.

The essence of our corporate Christian hope lies in the future purification of the church, when God will present his church as a spotless bride to his Son. But there’s a small problem: the church itself is not spotless, at least the church as it exists today within human history. Yes, it is special. Yes, it is destined for glory. But it is not sinless. And because the church is filled with struggling sinners, some churches are not lifegiving places for gay people who are in need of gospel community.

This doesn’t mean that churches always fail at the task of loving gay people well. It’s possible not to fully understand all the shapes and contours of nonstraight experience and still demonstrate love and compassion to gay people in your church family. But I would still suggest this is the bare minimum of Christian obedience we are called to embody in relation to gay people. We need to discover new practices that can prepare us cognitively to accommodate some new ideas about gay people and the way they experience the world around them.⁹ To be clear, I’m not saying that we need to embrace new ideas about the morality of sexual behavior between two men or between two women. I’m referring to engaging in relationships and practices that help us better understand how gay people experience their orientation and their Christian calling.

But a second aspect of the vision problem is just as damaging as a failure to cultivate loving, mutually fulfilling relationships with gay people in our churches. It is the problem of hypocrisy and of singling out the sin of homosexuality, and it cripples many Christians’ efforts to love gay people. Many gay people sense a double standard when Christian leaders routinely (and loudly) denounce same-gender sex while quietly ignoring morally lax attitudes toward other areas of sexual ethics. In an era when pornography and serial monogamy are both common occurrences, some gay people in conservative churches feel hurt, misunderstood, and judged when Christian leaders harp instead on the evils of the gay agenda.¹⁰

This double standard is perhaps even more obvious when Christian communities show signs of being soft on other, more socially acceptable sins. In his book People to Be Loved, Preston Sprinkle points out that the Bible mentions the sin of greed far more often than the sin of same-gender sexual behavior.¹¹ Considering the likelihood that more people in an average North American congregation probably struggle with greed than with same-gender lust, this seems to be a sign of imbalance. It is deeply ironic that the apostle Paul condemns greed in the same breath as same-gender sexual behavior in 1 Corinthians 6:9–10.¹²

Our lack of ability or willingness to be the hands and feet of Christ for sexual minorities within the walls of our churches combined with our sinful double standards both result in a third casualty of the vision problem: our witness. To put it bluntly, many gay people don’t see the church of Jesus Christ as the shining city on a hill that it is supposed to be (Matt. 5:14). Some of these divine-image bearers left Christianity because they did not sense that the grace of God could reach them as long as their orientation remained the same.¹³ And others who were never part of a Christian community in the first place have seen these effects secondhand in the lives of those who have.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not the slightest bit interested in trashing the beautiful bride of Christ whom he loves and for whom he died. I’m simply pointing out a real and earthly reality: that nobody experiences the beautiful and precious bride as a perfectly pure and holy bride.

And that’s why it’s so important that we identify the vision problem and its related difficulties. The vision problem wreaks the most havoc when it lulls Christians in conservative churches into believing that their primary responsibility is simply to tell gay people to abstain from gay sex. This shortcut ethic prevents straight people from piecing together their own end of the solution instead of simply shifting attention to the sexual behavior and obedience of gay people. To be a community of faith means that we all—straight and gay alike—bear a measure of corporate responsibility to embody the sanctification that Christ purchased for his church.

AN IDEA PROBLEM

In addition to a vision problem, evangelical Christians also have an idea problem. Western evangelical theological discussions about gender and sexuality typically start with clearcut propositions about marriage and sexual ethics that are balanced on a flimsy tripod named discipleship. But in recent years, discussions about sexual orientation have gathered a bit of steam and propelled Christian conversation forward in a variety of helpful directions, particularly in the field of Christian psychology.¹⁴ Moreover, theologians and biblical studies scholars have begun the arduous process of incorporating the observations and conclusions of these experts into more systematic accounts of doctrine and Christian ethics.

Behavior, Desire, Identity

One way Christians have approached the topic of homosexuality is to divide it into three components: behavior, desire and attraction, and identity.¹⁵ Many evangelicals have adopted this approach. Prominent evangelical ethicist Dennis Hollinger follows this pattern in his book The Meaning of Sex, although he is far from alone.¹⁶ In this approach, homosexuality is first considered as sexual behavior between members of the same gender. Evangelical Christians who believe in the final authority of the Bible as God’s divine revelation know that this is the primary way Scripture talks about homosexuality. The explicit prohibitions in Scripture about homosexuality all refer to sexual behavior between members of the same gender (Leviticus 18; Leviticus 20; 1 Corinthians 6; 1 Timothy 1). Other texts in Scripture that mention homosexuality also refer to desire, but they still seem to emphasize sexual behavior (Genesis 19; Romans 1).

The second group of terms in this approach frames homosexuality in the language of desire and attraction, sometimes lumped together in the term orientation. Most people have at least a working understanding of the basic concepts of desire and attraction, but the notion of a sexual orientation is a bit more difficult to grasp. We’ll examine this in more detail in part 2, but for now we can note that Christian psychologists often describe same-sex attractions that are strong, durable, and persistent as constituting a homosexual orientation.¹⁷

The final term in this approach reflects the common practice of using identity labels for orientation. These identities (homosexual, heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and so on—more often referred to as sexual identities) function in a variety of ways, depending on their context. Positively, they can become the basis of a shared group identity, which sometimes has its own set of group benefits and privileges. Sexual identities can also help individuals make sense of various other aspects of their experience as gendered and sexual beings.

For example, if you ask a roomful of straight men for two or three answers to the question, How do you know you’re a man? some of them might mention something related to their attraction to women. (I’ve done this many times, and that answer is almost always one of the top three responses.) This reflects a widespread, though generally subconscious, assumption in some forms of Western culture that being attracted to women is an essential part of being a man. Contemporary gender theory gives this the clumsy label of heteronormativity, which we’ll discuss in part 3 of this book. For now, I’ll just point out that this sets up a cultural expectation that results in an identity crisis for a teenage boy, for example, with an emerging gay orientation: If I’m not attracted to women, what kind of man am I?¹⁸ When a different identity pinch-hits in situations in which one’s gender identity is vaguely inadequate, it can serve as a layer of gender identity in addition to being simply a man or a woman. An answer now exists to the question: "I’m a gay man."

But sexual identities can also be harmful. Some communities use sexual identities to enable cultural forces to disempower and marginalize individuals who are unable to live up to cultural gender expectations. The LGBT population is a statistical minority of the overall population, so perhaps it should not surprise us that their experience historically parallels in some ways the experiences of other minorities who have been marginalized or mistreated at various points in human history. It can be quite easy for majority groups to create societal structures that tend to stack the deck against individuals who do not, and can never, overcome the barriers to membership in the majority group (become straight). This can happen in the broader culture, but it can also happen in Christian organizations, churches, and even in the hearts of LGBT people to the extent that they begin to believe the lie that they are less valuable to society (or their church, their family, their circle of friends) because they are gay.

Unclear Distinctions

We should note that there is some slippage between the categories in this approach, particularly in how they are presented in Scripture and in how they relate to the day-to-day experience of gay people. Consider the reality that, in a sense, we are what we do. Someone who counts funds in order to give an account of a financial situation is called an accountant. Being an accountant is part of that individual’s identity. Among other things, this cultural practice of assigning an identity to an individual’s habitual behavior forms the conceptual foundation for texts in Scripture that attribute guilt on the basis of wrongdoing. Sinful behavior designates one as a certain type of person—a sinner—because actions inform one’s identity. One only needs to lie once before one becomes, at least in a technical sense, a liar. Thus, the line between behavior and identity becomes contested territory.

This blurred boundary is also apparent when we consider Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5, Jesus expands the notion of guilt and culpability so that it broadly encompasses both physical and mental actions, and he explicitly includes some kinds of sexual desire. Jesus said that if a man looks at a woman in order to desire her, then he has already committed adultery (behavior) with her—he is already an adulterer (identity). Here we have blurred boundaries between behavior, desire, and identity.¹⁹

The distinction between external behavior and internal desire seems unhelpful for at least two reasons. First, both external behavior and internal desire can be described as actions of sorts. The activities they describe simply occur in different places. Futhermore, the fact that we can refer to some bodily behaviors and mental processes as actions in this way points to an even deeper philosophical dilemma: the nature of the relationship between the mind and the body. Consider the frequently heard refrain Love the sinner, hate the sin. Any discussion about homosexuality that rigidly distinguishes between an individual gay person’s behavior and the nature of the desires that might have led him or her to engage in that behavior has not adequately wrestled with these blurred boundaries. The result is that many gay people feel as though Christians really do hate them because Christians who believe that nothing about the orientation of gay people is redeemable don’t exactly sound loving.

The danger of ignoring the blurred boundaries becomes especially real when we try to answer the question, What is it about being gay that is sin or sinful? If practicing homosexuality (as the TNIV translates 1 Cor. 6:9) is sinful, what exactly does that refer to? Is a gay man practicing homosexuality when he buys tickets to his favorite Broadway show? Or when he hugs his partner? Or hugs a guy who is a good friend? Or holds his partner’s hand? If one but not the other, why? Are displays of physical affection sinful only if they’re accompanied by lustful thoughts? Sexual arousal? Or just attraction? Is there a morally significant difference between sexual and nonsexual attraction? What is nonsexual attraction? If gay women are capable of experiencing nonsexual attractions to other women, are they still technically homosexual attractions? Do nonsexual attractions that gay men have toward other men differ from nonsexual attractions that straight men have toward other men? Why or why not?

My point is not to sow confusion. I simply want to point out that answers to these questions are complex, not simplistic. We can’t even begin to answer these questions in a way that helps us understand the experience of gay people if we don’t first clear away some fog. Far too many discussions of these matters reveal only our false assumptions, assumptions we have about complex issues related to love, beauty, and relationships, about the moral significance of both erotic and nonerotic desire, and about the similarities and differences between intimacy and sexuality. All of these assumptions about how Christians should address the topic of homosexuality are related to what I am calling the idea problem.

Solving the Problems

These two problems—the vision problem and the idea problem—are the key challenges that Christians face today as they seek to relate to, understand, and love gay people. I hope this book will shed some light on how we can resolve them, and I present them in this order because I believe this is the order in which the problems ultimately will be resolved. And the best thing we can do to begin solving the vision problem is to focus our efforts on helping the church to be a place where gay and lesbian men and women can discover the abundant life that the gospel promises them.

Once we begin taking steps toward resolving the vision problem among bodies of believers, we can pursue a deeper understanding of the concepts and experiences that gay people have used to understand themselves. Then we must wrestle with these new perspectives and learn how to make sense of the lived experience of gay people in ways that are faithful to Scripture but also are meaningful to them. We will deepen our awareness of how the gospel addresses gay and lesbian people and their specific needs when we are more familiar with the shape of nonstraight experience. And this deeper awareness of how the gospel relates to nonstraight experience can fuel a more gracious—and still truthful—compassion for gay people in our churches.

Finally, as we take steps to care for those in our faith communities, and as we learn more about how gay people experience the world we inhabit together, we can set our sights on our witness to that world with greater boldness. We will have a more winsome and informed witness to the gay community after we’ve walked alongside individual gay people in our spiritual families. This final step of the solution is the most important, but for many it’s also the most costly. Bearing the burdens of gay people inside our churches is one thing, but it takes real courage and strength to venture out of the comfort zone of our churches and their cultural preconceptions about the mainstream LGBT community.²⁰

1. I’ll use a variety of words and phrases throughout this book to refer to people who don’t have an opposite-sex orientation. Often I’ll simply use the term gay for the sake of brevity, particularly when I’m referring specifically to orientation. Other times I’ll try to use the admittedly rather cumbersome phrases gender and sexual minorities or nonstraight when it’s appropriate to refer to a broader spectrum of people than simply those who have desires exclusively for the same gender. This more inclusive phrase reflects the important reality that an enormous degree of diversity exists in the LGBTQ community, including people who experience desire for both genders (bisexual), people who experience gender dysphoria (transgender), and others who feel that their individual experience as gendered and/or sexual persons puts them somewhere on the margins of these definitions (queer).

2. Try this little exercise. Find out the average number of people who attend your church each Sunday, and then calculate how many of them might be gender or sexual minorities according to this statistic. I’ve watched countless pastors do this, and then experience the realization that gay people are not just out there but are sitting in their pews.

3. Andrew Marin, Us versus Us: The Untold Story of Religion and the LGBT Community (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2016), 1.

4. On this note, one particular observation you might make as you read this book is that I frequently make explicit, and sometimes blanket, statements about gay people and about straight people. I might say something like, The biblical teaching of the Christian’s union with Christ can be a uniquely meaningful bit of doctrine for gay people or Our current cultural environment presents straight Christians with several important opportunities. This might lead you to believe that I think it’s a good thing to interact with the people around us according to sharply divided categories like gay and straight, as though people’s orientation were the most meaningful thing about them. There’s a difference, however, between statements that are overly general and inclusive, and more measured statements that are based on observations of a group of people and their collective experiences. This book will have plenty of the latter, and hopefully none of the former.

5. Eve Tushnet, Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2014), 60–69.

6. For a good introduction to the ways scholars interpret the biblical texts that mention same-gender sexuality, see Preston Sprinkle, People to Be Loved: Why Homosexuality Is Not Just an Issue (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015). The most exhaustive technical discussion on these texts from a conservative perspective is Robert Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002).

7. Stanton L. Jones and Mark A. Yarhouse, Anthropology, Sexuality, and Sexual Ethics: The Challenge of Psychology, in Personal Identity in Theological Perspective, ed. Richard Lints, Michael S. Horton, Mark R. Talbot (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 129.

8. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2009), 65–71.

9. See Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 66–67, for a wonderful discussion about this relational dynamic between . . . understanding and practice can help us imagine new ways of thinking about the world around us, perhaps especially in ways that are uniquely meaningful to people whose perspectives sometimes differ from our own.

10. It’s worth pointing out that many gay people go about their lives with no apparent agenda.

11. [T]he misuse of wealth [is] condemned in more than two thousand passages in God’s inspired Word. Preston Sprinkle, People to Be Loved: Why Homosexuality Is Not Just an Issue (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015), 121.

12. It’s interesting that many pastors who do venture into the territory of personal finance tend to address the topic from the much more safe and manageable perspective of financial stewardship. Of course, it’s one thing to point out the necessity of exercising financial stewardship. But that’s an altogether different, safer approach to personal finance than naming and calling out the sin of greed as a dominant form of spiritual darkness in Western Christianity. This soft approach to the sin of hoarding one’s personal resources also contributes to the decreased moral authority of Western Christians to point gay people in our culture to a more biblical approach to sexual ethics.

13. See Marin, Us Versus Us, 31–64. According to Marin, LGBT people are more likely than the general population (54 percent and 27 percent, respectively) to leave their religious community after the age of eighteen.

14. Christian psychologist Mark Yarhouse perhaps has contributed more to our understanding of nonstraight sexual orientations than any other Christian scholar. See Stanton L. Jones and Mark A. Yarhouse, Homosexuality: The Use of Scientific Research in the Church’s Moral Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2000); Mark A. Yarhouse and Lori A. Burkett, Sexual Identity: A Guide to Living in the Time between the Times (Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America, 2003); Stanton L. Jones and Mark A. Yarhouse, Ex-Gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Motivated Change in Sexual Orientation (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007); Mark A. Yarhouse, Homosexuality and the Christian: A Guide for Parents, Pastors, and Friends (Bloomington, MN: Bethany, 2010); and Mark A. Yarhouse and Wesley Hill, Understanding Sexual Identity: A Resource for Youth Ministry (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013).

15. Mark Yarhouse addresses the interplay between these three key players in Homosexuality and the Christian, 38–41.

16. Dennis Hollinger, The Meaning of Sex: Christian Ethics and the Moral Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2009). Many authors who are at least loosely associated with the ex-gay movement use this approach as well. See Alan Medinger, Growth into Manhood: Resuming the Journey (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook, 2000), 13–14.

17. According to Mark Yarhouse, when "people talk about having a homosexual orientation, they are essentially saying that they experience a same-sex attraction that is strong enough, durable enough, and persistent enough for them to feel that they are oriented toward the same sex" (Homosexuality and the Christian, 41, emphasis original).

18. See Marin, Us versus Us, 133–43 for a thought-provoking discussion about the unique ways that adolescent LGBT people experience the cultural debate about homosexuality. In this section, Marin pulls the curtain back on the dynamics that contribute to the intersection of LGBT issues and church youth groups.

19. If we apply these observations to historical studies about homosexuality and gay people in the past, some interesting parallels emerge. For example, we know that until relatively recently, most cultures and societies used certain words to refer to the acts (sodomy, buggery) of same-sex intercourse, while also using other forms of those same words to refer to those who engaged in that behavior (sodomist, bugger). This perhaps further illustrates a blurred boundary between behavior and identity.

20. Mark Yarhouse refers to the mainstream LGBT community as a way of signaling that the LGBT community is diverse and animated by a variety of values and goals. See Yarhouse, Understanding Sexual Identity: A Resource for Youth Ministry (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 24.

PART 1

The Vision Problem

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In the following three chapters, we’re going to break down our approach to solving the vision problem into three tasks. These tasks are processes that overlap with each other quite a bit and can even occur simultaneously. Examining them individually, however, will help us understand their unique challenges as well as why they are each important endeavors to pursue. And the reason they’re all important is because each of these tasks can be traced to the same basic reality: the call of Christ to make disciples.

The Greek word for disciple is a member of a group of words that often denote a vocation of some sort. And this is appropriate because being a disciple is the bread and butter of what it means to be a Christian. Being a disciple means following Jesus into our world and doing the kinds of things he did to represent the kingdom and its king.

But to be a disciple, we have to know what we’re being discipled to. The first task we’ll look at requires us to examine a few key truths about the church to ensure that our renewed vision conforms to the pattern of life found in the Word of God. This is a necessary step to take because communities produce disciples that reflect their values, and spiritual communities (churches) are no different. And disciples who are not committed to reconciling straight and nonstraight people to each other will build a subgospel spiritual community that has no vision for how gay people might flourish alongside straight people within the boundaries of a traditional understanding of marriage and sexuality.

The central goal of the second task is to reform our big-picture vision of the world around us, particularly as it relates to gay people and their shared experience. As we’ll see, this is itself a communal effort, which means that Christians must already be committed to the first task of conforming their own spiritual communities after the biblical pattern. This gospel-community-centered footing is an essential starting place because the reforming task draws on kingdom realities that uniquely characterize communities of kingdom disciples. Reforming the vision is a possibility when disciples exercise a communal imagination to arrive at a contextualized understanding of the barriers preventing reconciliation, and then embody communal habits that promote this reconciliation.

After we’ve explored the conforming and reforming tasks involved in solving the vision problem, we’ll end with an extended reflection on what it might look like to perform the vision of incorporating gay people into the body life of churches. While the goal of conforming our vision is a reconciling faith and the goal of reforming our vision is a contextualized faith, the goal of performing the vision is a domestic faith. If a domicile is a place that is inhabited by people, then our churches must be spiritual homes where gay people and straight people alike can truly find an abundant life together.

CHAPTER 2

Conforming the Vision

A Reconciling Faith

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The goal of this chapter is simple: to convince readers that conservative churches and nonstraight people need to be reconciled with each other. I admit this is a tall order, and many may not even be happy with the way I’ve framed it. Reconciliation, after all, implies that wrongdoing has occurred, and this may be a pill too big for some to swallow—in both groups. It admits legitimacy to the ambiguous forces of give and take that characterize relationships, even while one or both of the parties continue to feel vulnerable. Yet reconciliation is where we must order all our most sincere and devoted efforts. Christians not only need to remove all cause for those outside the church to believe that they don’t like gay people, but our churches need to become the havens of grace, love, and truth they are called to be. The gospel requires nothing less.

To chart a course forward, let’s focus on three themes that Scripture uses to describe the church: the church as an upside-down community, the church as a living organism, and the church as a sacred kinship. These obviously are not the only themes in the Bible that should inform our understanding of the church.¹ I chose them because in my judgment they are often missing in conservative conversations about gay people and the Christian faith, despite the fact that they are uniquely relevant. Grasping these three themes is an essential starting point in our journey forward. As we set out on this journey, let’s fire up the GPS and look for the blinking blue dot so we can see where we are and what we’re standing on.

Church as Upside-Down Community

From the beginning, the story of the Christian faith has sounded rather odd. The apostle Paul even refers to it in a moment of honest audacity as foolishness (1 Cor. 1:18). It takes eyes of faith to discern the beauty of a slaughtered lamb who redeems broken creation, and without these eyes, one can hardly recognize order and purpose in the twists and turns of the storyline of Scripture. Perhaps one of the most remarkable of these truly foolish aspects of the Christian faith is the upside-down, inside-out shape of the church.

THE FIRST