7. LGBTQ+ - Engaging the Person, Not Just the Position

The Christian Statement

The Christian sexual ethic - that sex is designed by God for the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman - is consistently and explicitly stated throughout the scriptures, from Genesis 1-2 through the teaching of Jesus (Matthew 19:4-6) through Paul's letters. The position is not the product of cultural prejudice. It is the consistent witness of the entire biblical canon.

Holding this position faithfully in the current cultural moment is one of the most costly things a Christian community can do. It will cost social standing, professional relationships, and in some contexts legal protections. The disciple who holds it should hold it with full awareness of the cost and without pretending the cost is not real.

But the manner in which the position is held is the difference between a stumbling block and a signpost.

The eskenosen - the tabernacling - is the model for this engagement as well. The Word did not put on flesh to explain flesh from a distance. He entered it fully, with all its complexity and cost. The disciple who engages the LGBTQ+ person is not engaging a theological category. They are engaging a person in whom the image of God is as present as it is in any other image-bearer. The incarnation is not a rhetorical flourish in this conversation. It is the ground of it. God came to where human beings actually are - not to where they ought to be - and it is from that posture that the church must learn to engage questions of sexuality and identity. Flesh participating in light is the shape of the Gospel. The church's engagement must follow the same shape.

Wrong Approach: Leading with the doctrinal position before establishing a relationship. Making the LGBTQ+ person feel that their identity - not just their behavior but their personhood - is the target of the church's concern. Using the language of the culture war rather than the language of the Gospel. Treating LGBTQ+ people as a category rather than as individuals. Refusing to be in relationship with someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

✔ Salt and Light: Following Jesus's own pattern: engage first, love genuinely, earn the trust that makes the truth receivable. The LGBTQ+ person who has a genuine friend in a faithful Christian - someone who loves them, spends time with them, is interested in their life, and does not treat them primarily as a theological problem to be solved - is in a completely different position to hear what that Christian actually believes about sexuality, and why.

The question worth asking the LGBTQ+ person, with genuine curiosity and genuine love: "Tell me about your experience. What has your journey been like? What do you believe about yourself?" Not as a strategy for getting to the doctrinal position. As genuine interest in a human being made in the image of God.

Rosaria Butterfield, a former lesbian professor of queer theory at Syracuse University who became a Christian, describes the conversion process as involving not a confrontational encounter with the church's position but a decade of genuine friendship with a Presbyterian pastor and his wife who invited her to dinner, disagreed with her about everything, and loved her anyway. The friendship, maintained over years, was the container in which the truth could eventually be heard. Her book "The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert" is one of the most important resources the disciple can read on this question.

The church that is known as a community where LGBTQ+ people are genuinely welcomed as people - where they are loved, where their pain is acknowledged, where their humanity is honored - while the church's position is held clearly and without apology, is making the most powerful possible argument. Because it demonstrates that the position does not come from hatred or contempt but from a theology of human dignity that takes the person seriously enough to tell them the truth.

★ Disciple Tip: Read Rosaria Butterfield before having this conversation. Read Wesley Hill's "Washed and Waiting." Read Sam Allberry's "Is God Anti-Gay?" These are voices from within the orthodox Christian position who engage the question with the theological seriousness and personal warmth that this conversation requires.

SOURCE: Rosaria Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (Crown and Covenant, 2012). Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting (Zondervan, 2010). Sam Allberry, Is God Anti-Gay? (The Good Book Company, 2013).