It’s time.
When I was a young whipper snapper, still at school, the Labor Party launched what has been immortalized as possibly the most successful ad campaign in Australian history. It launched Gough Whitlam into power and formed a platform for change (some good some not so good). Yes. It was time.
Whenever it’s time for us, we know it. I mean, when it really is time. Time to begin. Time to move. Time to move on. We know it intrinsically. Sometimes we follow the instinct. Sometimes we don’t. But whether we do or do not, we still know it’s time.
In 1979 it was time for me. It was time to move on from the Assemblies of God in Flinders Park – we were the black sheep of the AOG in Adelaide. Needless to say that Klemzig AOG (later called Paradise, though for reason only that it lay in a suburb of the same name) were the white sheep. They had it all.
I came to the conclusion that I didn’t have it all. You see, I was gay. I knew it. I knew it since still too young to walk the street without my mother’s holding hand. I was gay and I loved the Lord. I loved Jesus more than life itself. But I couldn’t have both. I couldn’t be His person and be my own person in the same walk. Well, not according to the church.
I was devastated. Like so many others, my life, now divorced from its formerly steadfast direction, was empty. I stumbled into the gay scene, hooked by the disco lights of the seventies and eighties.
So began a walk alone. I moved from Adelaide to Melbourne and, as you do, fell in love. I fell in love and yet I was still alone. Inside I knew – I always knew – that I belonged to God and His anointing.
I thought I had a new direction. But my life was interrupted by God on the first day of January, 2006. I discovered Freedom To Be and a number of other websites including The Potters House International in Florida, USA (not to be confused with TD Jakes’ Potters House in Texas).
Well you can imagine the joy and emotion when I finally saw – in the original tongues of Biblical Hebrew and Greek – God is not anti gay. God is not anti me!
So the trek began and it was back to the calling.
I enrolled in an AOG Bible college. Now that that’s over, I’m seeking credentials with an American affirming Apostolic Pentecostal organization.
It’s time to move to the next stage in God’s calling and the responsibility I feel to be true to His word. It’s time to reach all the people with all the gospel.
If anyone else that has a calling on their life wants to get together as a family of Pentecostals with a conviction and mission to reach everyone – including the GLBTIQQ community – under the banner of Affirming Pentecostals, please pm me. (I’m not proposing a “denomination”, just a fellowship of those of us called to the gospel.)
It’s time.
Robert Oster.
Melbourne.
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