A Different Response To Same-Sex Attraction Than You May Have Heard Before

I’d like to encourage you to read this blog post from my friend and colleague Tim Habecker, director of missions/Outreach at Hope EPC here in Spotsylvania County.  It gives important first-hand perspective on matters of homosexuality, same-sex attraction and the Christian faith.

Perhaps you listened to NPR’s Weekend Edition this past Sunday morning. If you did you were introduced to a pastor and his wife from western Pennsylvania. What you likely had no way of knowing is that there is just one degree of separation between you and Allan Edwards…and it is me.  Click Here to read Tim’s entire blog post. 

Click Here to listen to the NPR interview with Tim’s friend Allan.  It is titled “Attracted to Men, Pastor Feels Called To Marriage With A Woman.”

This post also brought to mind an experience of my own in a previous century – the mid-1990’s.  I was leading Mt Pleasant Community Church, an EPC church just off the campus of Central Michigan University.  We supported the on-campus ministry of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and its staff worker Dave Collins.  Dave invited his friend and fellow IV staff Joel Perry to address the CMU chapter sharing his experience as a person with what we now call Same-Sex Attraction who had chosen to live a celibate life.  It was a story similar to Tim’s friend Alan, though it never led to marriage.  Joel eventually moved overseas and died as a missionary in a hostile setting.

To my mind, the conversation on homosexuality in our culture has ceased to be a conversation.  Instead, it feels like a red-hot political dividing line: “Are you for or against?”  God’s grace announced in the Gospel seems to give me different categories to face this subject though.  Allan and Leann’s story; Joel Perry’s story; several others that I have known or pastored over the years embody a different option than our culture’s “for or against.”  It’s an option that helps me see others differently because I see myself differently.  I’m finding power to love and listen to people different than me, because Jesus has first loved me – and He shows me that I’m less different from those others than I realized.

Another resource that I have found helpful in sorting through these issues and seeing the hope of the Gospel can be found at http://www.livingout.org/.  Give it a look and listen to the stories there.