Hi all at Freedom 2 b(e). This is my first posting and I am excited about the new forum for Heterosexual Friends, Family and Supporters.
I hope that lot’s of heterosexual pentecostal supporters of gay and lesbian Christians will join this forum and share about your experiences and journey that have helped you look past the hard line teaching of the church to understand a much more loving and caring attitude toward this persecuted group of people. Or maybe there are others who haven’t found a way past such hard line teaching and would like to find out more.
My personal story is that my older sister is lesbian and my younger brother is gay. We were brought up in a Christian family in the Methodist church and my parents moved over to the charismatic/pentecostal denominations after being rejected by their own church for being filled with the Holy Spirit. My sister was interested in the church when she was young but in her teens started to question all that she had been taught and eventually rejected the church and its teachings and now considers herself to be an atheist. My younger brother was never interested in the things of God so was probably always an atheist. They have both been married and had two children each (my brother’s second daughter died of SIDS) and have since left their marriage partners to live freely as homosexual.
My parents had terrible struggles with this and my mother especially could not reconcile with my sister in her new orientation, because of her understanding of the Bible. This caused my sister enormous heartache, especially because my mother had a massive stroke just as she was starting to come to some form of acceptance, and died without there being a proper reconciliation between them.
I had also believed what my parents believed, that homosexuality was an abomination before God because of what we were taught from the pulpit and from our surface reading of the particular scriptures that are used against homosexuality.
After our mother died my sister and I began to renew our relationship that had waned over the years because of careers, marriages and bringing up kids etc. As a result of this renewed friendship I began to question why I believed what I did and whether it was truth or not. I had to face the fact that I had blindly believed so much of what I had been taught, never checking it out as the Bereans did to see if it was truth. I then began a long and sometimes painful journey to discover what the truth really was.
I learnt the hard way that you don’t share too loudly or freely with your Christian friends, who suddenly look at you warily, as if you have some how been contaminated with the same disease as ‘those perverts’. I have experienced in a very small measure what so many Christian homosexuals have experienced in their struggle with their sexual orientation compared to the doctrines of their church.
Many times I have told God I don’t want to walk down this path any more because it is too hard to deal with, but I just can’t turn my back on the fact that thousands of homosexual Christians are being rejected, persecuted and traumatised beyond belief by the very people who should be loving them as Jesus loves them. It wasn’t until I read Anthony Venn-Brown’s book “A Life of Unlearning – a journey to find the truth”, that I realised the agony of years of struggle, self hatred, secrecy and brokenness that are a part of the life of a person who longs to follow and serve God, but has a different sexual orientation to the status quo. If anyone could have succeeded in overcoming this ‘disease’ through sheer determination it would have been Anthony. No matter how many times he struggled and ‘failed’, he just kept getting up and trying twice as hard the next time. He was determined to beat this thing if it killed him, and it very nearly did several times, until he finally gave up trying to fit the proper pattern determined by the church and allowed himself to be who he really is and always was. Could it be that God was in all of that, to bring Anthony to where he is today ‘for such a time as this’?
I would love to hear from others who are in the same place as I am, trying to reconcile with the hard line teaching of the church they love and with the knowledge that thousands of people are being kept out of those churches because they don’t fit the ‘correct pattern’. I would love to hear your story, how you have come to the place you are at now, and what you have or haven’t been able to do in your church to change the unloving attitude of homophobia.
Cairo
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