Category Archives: Church

The Joy of Beginnings

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In today’s world, there’s little room for gray area between obsessing over perfection and seeing any sort of half-baked effort as worthy of praise. Either we insist on stark separation between successes and failures or we give everyone a participation ribbon and say that quality doesn’t matter. We fixate on outcomes: what was our race time? What grade did we receive on the project? How did the band sound at the concert? When we will earn an annual salary that allows us to live comfortably? Amid the chaos, it’s easy to lose track of the beginning and the importance of beginning well.

It’s school concert season. We’re looking forward to attending the plethora concerts at the school where Lindsey teaches. Lindsey’s dad once remarked that the true measure of a parent’s devotion is the sixth grade orchestra concert. We’re sure that any parent who has heard the squeaks, creaks, screeches, squeals, and other indescribable utterances of new strings and brass players has some sympathy for Lindsey’s dad’s position. But beginning bands and orchestras everywhere have something to tell us about the joy of beginnings.

Making beginnings is hard. Taking first steps involves a lot of falling flat on your behind. Sitting with a 3-, 4-, or 5-year-old just learning how to read can try the patience of many people. Learning to tie your shoes is hard. Trying to figure out why math suddenly has letters in it when you get to 7th, 8th, or 9th grade has never been easy. Declaring a college major can be a major cause for existential crises. Beginnings are rarely glamorous.

Sizing beginning steps for another person is even harder than determining what you need when starting something for yourself. Do you throw new language learners into the deep end of an immersion experience? Do you risk picking repertoire so easy that a musician doesn’t have to practice at all? Do you seek objective measures of “talent” before indicating that a person has potential? Do you take the attitude that everyone is constantly beginning?

Beginning anything that’s positive, godly, or holy is a joyous experience. When you get started, you expect that it’s going to be hard. There’s something about knowing just enough to make an honest attempt, however falteringly. Beginnings can be fragile. What beginner wants to continue trying when he or she is being held to an impossible standard by someone unwilling to nurture the effort? Conversely, what happens when a person’s natural aptitude and circumstances make a particular beginning relatively easy and straightforward? What about the risk of developing an entitled, “I’m invincible!” attitude?” Trying to find the balance between recognizing the effort and fostering growth is hard.

In terms of fostering spiritual growth, it’s no surprise that churches and their clergy have trouble finding the sweet spot between giving everyone a pat on the head accompanied by, “God loves you. Don’t worry about your sins,” and praising an exalted ideal that is anything but obtainable. There are Christians who are terrified of saying the word sin because they don’t want to drive others away from the church. When this happens, churches can neglect serious conversations about important subjects in the interest of trying to get along. Conversely, there are Christians who are absolutely willing to play hard ball at all times lest they become complicit with someone else’s sin. Conversations happen in these circumstances, but they’re detached from any sense of lived experience. Exclusive use of either approach fails at providing appropriate spiritual guidance. With the first approach, any spiritual growth that occurs seems to be by happenstance rather than challenge toward spiritual maturity. With the second, people often feel so much pressure to put on their “perfect Christian” masks that they fail to share life together.

Remembering that we’re all beginners at Christlikeness can do a lot to help us grow closer to God. Preparatory seasons like Advent and Lent are a great time to think about making a beginning. Even though Lindsey’s faith journey started in a church with a liturgical calendar, it took Lindsey 7 years to have any sense of personal Advent devotion. During Lindsey’s senior year of college, Lindsey felt a strong need to observe the season and fashioned dorm-friendly candles from construction paper. Each Sunday leading up to Christmas, Lindsey would tape a flame in place. Lindsey has never quite figured out why observing Advent as Advent is so important, but something keeps gnawing a bit inside every year about why preparing for Christmas matters. If someone would have given Lindsey an extended lecture about the importance of using real candles, praying exclusively from one particular prayer book, or attending services at churches that use the right rubrics for Advent, then the joy of Lindsey’s effort with construction paper would have been lost.

Beginnings can also be broadenings. Sharing our life together has given the two of us opportunities to broaden our spiritual practices. Sarah has taught Lindsey a lot about how the rosary can foster devotion to God and understands that Lindsey does not have the same kinds of experiences in praying the rosary. Sometimes a beginning remains a beginning. Other times, a beginning fosters something new. Lindsey grew up praying whatever came to mind in freely-formed prayers. When we met, Sarah didn’t exactly know what to make of Lindsey’s prayerful outbursts. Sarah was hesitant about free-formed prayer and was cautious about praying aloud. Lindsey understood where Sarah was coming from, so we spent time together discerning how free-formed prayer would be a part of our shared spiritual life. There have been many times in our life together where we have wanted different ways to share Sarah’s health needs with God. Sarah has often used periods of illness to experiment with free-formed prayer. As a consequence of using free-form prayer more regularly, Sarah’s prayer discipline has broadened to include spontaneous prayers with traditional prayers. If we were not patient with each other regarding differences in spiritual practice, both of us would feel discouraged. At the same time, if we did not challenge each other to explore new ways of connecting with God, neither of us would experience much development in our prayer lives.

Advent and school concert seasons have some things in common. In Advent, we wait. We wait for Christ who is to be fully revealed to us in the fullness of time. We have the prophesies, and we hope with big expectant hopes. Our Advent efforts are feeble and often out of tune. By observing Advent each year, we hope to get just that much better. Marking Advent creates space for celebrating the joy of beginnings, even if we know that there’s far more to the story. Christ’s incarnation is a story of meeting people where we are while simultaneously inviting us to participate in a much larger story.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Affirming the Unexpected

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Today we are delighted to host a reflection from our friend Nate Craddock. Nate is the priest of Mercy Way, a fledgling inclusive church community. Dignity and worth are two core values of the Mercy Way community where the relevant section of its values statement reads: “Every human being is made in the image of God, so we affirm dignity and worth of every human being and welcome them to worship and service in God’s family. (Yes, this means we are unapologetically inclusive and affirming of LGBTQ* folks, ethnic minorities, immigrants, and members of every economic stratum.)” Because our own experiences of interacting with inclusive communities have not been very positive, we were curious to hear Nate’s thoughts about what it means to him to offer pastoral care to an LGBT person discerning a celibate vocation. Please consider checking out more reflections on Nate’s blog or following Nate on Twitter. And as with all guest posts, the views expressed here are those of the author and may differ from our own personal beliefs.

A reflection by Nate Craddock

Two Saturdays a month I break apart spongy, honey-scented hunks of Jesus’ body. With each communicant’s name I place them in the expectant palms of those who have gathered to eat at God’s table with all the other people the Spirit has caught in her net and dumped out, flopping and glistening, onto the dock. Ah, the Church!

The church I serve is a beautiful accident—people have slipped and fallen into the shining slick of grace that oozes from the table like so much chrism. I find myself falling in it over and over again, and as I listen to the needs of the people who have come there to eat and pray, I realize to my chagrin that listening to the needs of the people I serve is vastly more important than living out any social project of inclusion and affirmation that I may have—which is precisely what I wanted it to be when I started dreaming about it. But even then, Mercy Way has spiraled into a wildly inclusive community precisely because we’re centered around the wildly inclusive Eucharistic meal.

One of the great tropes I’ve observed in the LGBTQ-inclusion movement in Christianity is that, more often than not, we’ve done a fantastic job of creating another “silo” for those people in our churches so they can feel like they have their own space. We’ve figured out how to square people’s sexual ethics with our tradition. We sign off on their relationships. We hold them up like a gleaming participation trophy from our 1st grade tee-ball league saying, “Look! I can inclusive!” as if God will pat us on the head like a benign grandparent.

Many inclusive churches do a phenomenal job at being inclusive of monogamous couples who have lived a life that’s nothing really more than a gay version of the American dream trope: an educated two-partner family in a committed relationship with 2.5 kids and a well-maintained house in the suburbs. We love this kind of arrangement—it looks great in bulletins and on parish websites and in our denominational reports. And it looks great sewn onto our sash of merit badges.

But because of our desire to be inclusive, we progressive pastors and leaders sometimes run into difficulty when a person comes into our care whose narrative doesn’t square with our ideas of “inclusivity.” The real challenge to inclusivity comes when someone who identifies as LGBT comes to us and says, in not so many words, “I feel like God is calling me to a different way of life than what you expect.”

If a person is coming to our church, we think, shouldn’t they want to be just like everyone else here? And so we chase after them screaming, “Let me affirm you! Let me help you get your hormone replacement therapy! Let me find you a partner! Let me baptize your adopted babies!”—notice a theme? Really, all that’s saying is, “Let me co-opt your narrative so I can feel good about being inclusive! I need you!”

It’s good to need each other. The danger comes when we need a relationship with a person’s label and identity over against a relationship with the person. While we’re often quick to congratulate people for living their truth, we come to an impasse when a person’s truth has led them to a place that we don’t necessarily want them to be. We need that person’s story, not to use as raw material for building our ivory tower of inclusivity, but rather as flint and fire to burn away our expectations of what another human being should be in the sight of God.

And so an LGBT person who comes to our church and says they’re discerning a call to celibacy—or worse, that they’re wrestling with the idea of a progressive sexual ethic—and we flip out. “I swear to Judith Butler,” we say, “I’ll make you believe in my narrative of the Respectable Well-Affirmed Christian Queer! Now let’s find you a partner—I’ve always loved June weddings, haven’t you?”

For me to affirm people means affirming them where they are, not where I think they should be. And so when someone I am serving comes to me and says, “I’m discerning a calling to celibacy”—in my beautiful, glittery, inclusive church, of all places!—the only appropriate response from me is, “Wonderful, tell me more. Let’s walk and discern this together. Let’s connect you with other people who are living out this vocation so that you can see if this is indeed something that God has gifted you for. Let’s pray together. And let’s eat.”

I say, “Let’s eat” because those hunks of Jesus’ flesh and sips of his tawny porto blood are the very meats that have sustained me on my journey to allowing myself to be included in the Christian community and to find my own calling as a priest, a gay man, a Christian. Such should be our response to anyone who comes to us priests and pastors with questions about their vocation.

For someone to open up to me about this, whether “I’m discerning celibacy” or “I’m discerning the priesthood” or “I think I want to marry my significant other” or “I don’t think marriage is right for us” or “I think I might be trans” or any such deep place of questioning is an invitation into a sacred trust. To be invited into someone’s journey of vocation is to be invited into a place carved out by God for God in that person’s life—it is where that person will meet God and work out their salvation, where they will find their deeper vocation to become Christs in the world. Would it be right to tread on that sacred ground by imposing our will for that person’s vocation on them? The answer should be clear.

All told, it’s not for me to choose and live a person’s vocation for them; my job as a priest is to give them food for the journey and encourage them along the way.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

When Others Judge

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Advent is a time when it makes sense to seek a bit of a new start. This past year has piled on many different challenges, each challenge establishing its own new “normal.” We’re slightly embarrassed by how hard it’s been for us to respond thoughtfully to our email. However, we refuse to dismiss any reader query even after a period of substantive delay. That said, we now attempt to answer a reader’s question that arrived several months ago:

How do you respond to being judged? How is it different when the judger is a parishioner vs. someone in authority such as a priest? Is it different when the thing you’re being judged for is something that’s true (e.g. being LGBT) vs. when it’s something false (e.g. having a sexual relationship that violates your church’s teachings)?

It’s hard to imagine a single person who likes being judged by others. We often go to such great lengths to avoid being judged by others, even when we find ourselves falling prey to the idolatry of people-pleasing. However, judgment happens because it’s an easy thing for people to do. Christ warned us all about judging the speck in our brother’s eye before seeing the plank in our own. It’s easy to tell when something is out of place in another person’s life and incredibly hard to tell when something is out of place in your own.

The two of us talk regularly about various spiritual challenges we are facing. We can’t help but note that harder spiritual challenges frequently demand more difficult, more consistent, and more persistent action. We’ve committed to the sojourn together. Discussing the various ways we fall short does not feel like a judgment from on high, but it does involve making reasoned judgment about what is best for one or both of us to grow toward Christ.

Thinking about the way we use judgment between the two of us helps us respond when we are judged by others.

  • Is the person commenting on something he or she has directly observed?
  • Is the person committed to accompanying one or both of us along our spiritual journey?
  • Is the person identifying actions that he or she must undertake directly to offer more meaningful support?
  • Has the person considered the costs associated with taking his or her recommended course of action?

We find that our response is different when all four questions get answered “No” than when there’s at least one “Yes.” Even when all four questions get answered “No” we try asking whether there’s any truth in what a person has said. It’s a lot easier to let things go when people are projecting their own stereotypes upon us.

The easiest question to answer in the affirmative is, “Is the person committed to accompanying one or both of us along our spiritual journey?” We tend to view the local church as an incredibly important spiritual community. If a person is in our local church, then we’re more likely to consider the merit something he or she has said. There are certain people who have a track record of saying assorted uncharitable things about us that aren’t true. We do our best to remember where they are coming from and to pray for them to grow spiritually themselves.

We also don’t mind talking with people when they are concerned about something they have observed directly. It’s not judgmental gossip if they have seen it themselves. Many times, incorrect judgments happen when people are unfamiliar with something. As celibate people navigating in a parish compromised of married people, we regularly encounter people who think that it’s appropriate to make an analogy between their before-marriage lives and our lives now. If they are parents, they frequently think about the relational counsel they would give their own children. We find ourselves explaining the differences between teenagers and people in their early thirties, and we’ll also share our experiences from various celibate communities. We try to remember that 1) everyone always has the potential to learn something and 2) learning occurs in communities. All people, especially the two of us, have blind spots. If someone points something out to us that they’ve observed, we consider what they’ve seen and examine our consciences.

Generally speaking, when we experience negative forms of judgment, people have not considered the third and the fourth questions at all. People rightly observe that we live together. They might decide our arrangement is scandalous. We have considered various facets of how living together spurs us both towards Christ-orientated ways of life with our spiritual directors, close friends, and each other. However, we’ve also noticed that the people who are most vocal about how living together is inappropriate are those who are completely unwilling to learn more about how we care for and support one another. Many people will use decreeing “righteous judgment” as a way to excuse themselves from the demands of being in a caring community with others.

When all four questions get answered “Yes” judgment rarely feels like judgment. Living life together in community demands that people have hard conversations together in order to help one another grow towards Christ. People work together to figure out the best ways forward that lead everyone to spiritual maturity. There’s a sense that we all are doing our best to pursue Christ together, learning along the way.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Healing from Spiritual Abuse

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The day after Thanksgiving can be difficult for many LGBT people. Holidays can bring up a flood of memories, good and bad. Reflecting on one’s year to identify places where one feels grateful can also lead to recalling some particularly painful moments. This year, we’ve been acutely aware of our own relationship with our church especially as it has developed while we’ve navigated various challenges around Sarah’s Meniere’s disease. We’ve dealt with a cascade of memories from previous pastors and churches where we’ve felt cast aside by Christians who have found us too inconvenient in one way or another. Many people of all sexual orientations and gender identities have experienced waves of sadness, despair, and despondency on the heels of spiritual mistreatment from members of their churches and/or members of their families. Because most people are off work and many are with family members who are not part of their daily lives, the day after Thanksgiving sometimes becomes a day of thinking through issues of spiritual abuse.

Let’s begin by acknowledging that spiritual abuse is a difficult topic for many. Every person’s experience is unique, both in kind and in degree. A defining feature of spiritual abuse is that a trusted spiritual guide conducts himself or herself in a way to control, coerce, and manipulate others. Depending on one’s spirituality, these guides can be formal leaders of churches, parents, older family members, or charismatic personalities. Mary DeMuth has an older post detailing 10 ways to spot spiritual abuse, and we think that her observations that purveyors of spiritual abuse distort views of respect and create a culture of fear and shame are especially on point. In today’s post, we’d like to talk about some specific ways we’ve been able to find some healing from spiritual abuse, recognizing that integrating our faith and our sexualities as LGBT Christians has been a significant part of our journeys.

Trusting our spiritual sensibilities. Spiritual abuse can be so dangerous because it’s all too easy for an abuser to cause a person to doubt his or her perceptions of the world. We’ve had to learn that despite what abusive people have told us, our spiritual sensibilities are reasonably accurate. When we find ourselves in places of wondering if something is abusive, there’s likely something to that wondering that needs further exploration.

Giving ourselves permission to take space away from abusive conversations, people, and environments. We’ve learned the importance of acknowledging toxicity. Taking some space allows us to get perspective on events, and we’ve cultivated a range of space-taking strategies. Some of our preferred space-taking strategies include changing the subject, talking with different people after services, visiting a different church within our Christian tradition, attending informal (or formal) retreats with people we trust, or choosing to stay home. Using space-taking strategies can help us get to the point where we can consider specific spiritual counsel against the broader teachings of our Christian tradition. Noticing places of contradiction and asking further questions can be a great way to deepen our own understanding of our Christian tradition while also countering possibly abusive counsel when we’re ready to reengage particular conversations.

Remembering that we have supportive friends in our communities. So many spiritually abusive people try to control situations through manipulating information and preventing people from checking in with one another. During seasons where we’ve felt as though we have been in communities that actively try to prevent friendship, we’ve learned to flee. Sometimes it’s better to end up seemingly alone for a bit than it is to continue in a place where every relationship is monitored. After feeling safe enough to lift up our heads, we’ve realized that we still have friends around us. During seasons when we feel spiritually isolated, we are so grateful to learn that we still have good friends who are willing to let us know when they are concerned about one or both of us spiritually, to talk with us about spiritual questions, and to offer counsel after we’ve asked for advice. We especially appreciate friends who can help us separate the wheat from the chaff in any given situation.

Finding therapists who respect our religious beliefs and tradition. We recognize that there’s a difference between what we can talk about with our friends and what we are better off discussing with a therapist. There’s no shame in saying, “I can’t get any perspective whatsoever in this situation, and I don’t know what to do next.” Awesome therapists are awesome because they understand the complex dynamics of abuse, guilt and shame and can help people see through the fog. When we look for therapists, we look for people who are knowledgable about our specific concerns and have capacity for building solid therapeutic relationships with us. We’ve found it more helpful to be upfront that we want therapists who respect our Christian tradition rather than seeking therapists who are part of our tradition.

Slowly relearning vulnerability. In all honesty, relearning vulnerability has been one of the hardest things to do. Spiritually abusive people seem to exploit vulnerability in just about every way possible. So many spiritually abusive environments mandate a “Tell all” approach that constantly causes people to cast pearls before swine. We’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on vulnerability and how vulnerability can draw us into relationships with others. It’s been important for both of us to take time to practice identifying our own needs and be selective with strategies to meet those needs. As we seek spiritual direction, we work actively to build relationships with potential spiritual directors where we feel confident that they understand a bit about why we feel called to our particular vocations and that they are willing to learn with us along the way.

Becoming aware that we have a role in educating others about our specific vocations. For us, a huge part of healing from spiritual abuse has involved appreciating how our experiences as LGBT Christians influence our vocational pathways. There are times when we feel strong enough and grounded enough to make a concerted effort to educate others about the relational lives of celibate LGBT Christians. We’ve accepted that many people don’t know much, if anything, about either celibate vocations or the process of discerning celibacy. We’ve also accepted that many straight Christians frequently do not know other LGBT people, even though that’s been changing rapidly. We found that reflecting regularly on celibacy and celibate partnership helps us answer questions that our spiritual directors might have about our vocations. Because of our own experience with spiritual abuse, we try hard to avoid educating other people about other vocations but we’re happy to share about our own vocations in a supportive environment.

Healing from spiritual abuse is a long-haul process. We’re still working through a number of concerns in our own lives that are both past and present. As always, we welcome any respectful discussion in our comment box!

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

On Trojan Horses, Real and Imagined

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Discussions about LGBT people in Christianity are shifting rapidly. We’ve been pleasantly surprised by different approaches to open the conversation more generously such that it includes people with seemingly disparate approaches to the questions. At other times, we shake our heads in disbelief that a potentially valuable conversation gets shut down before it has even started.

Several days ago, we caught wind of a potentially interesting conversation when Sarah found an article written by Fr. Johannes Jacobse entitled, “Fr. Robert Arida: Why Don’t You Become Episcopalian?” Intrigued, Sarah clicked the link to find a critique of an essay authored by Fr. Robert Arida that was posted on the Orthodox Church of America’s Wonder blog. In his critique, Fr. Jacobse contrasted Orthodox culture with Episcopalian culture, concluding that Fr. Arida’s approach aligns so closely with Episcopalian culture that he should leave the Orthodox Church an become Episcopalian. Fr. Jacobse organized his critique around this claim:

Not long ago the Episcopalian Church faced the dilemma that Arida wants to introduce into the Orthodox Church: Should moral legitimacy be granted to homosexual pairings that was previously reserved only for heterosexual, monogamous marriage?

Since we found Fr. Jacobse’s critique first, we assumed that Fr. Arida must have written another article about homosexuality on par with his well-known and controversial 2011 essay. Our suspicions only increased after we came across Rod Dreher’s article at The American Conservative that refers to Fr. Arida’s most recent essay as an Orthodox Trojan horse. As a celibate LGBT Christian couple, we cannot help but feel trepidation when these issues are discussed so forcefully in any Christian tradition, so we braced ourselves for reading Fr. Arida’s original essay (eventually removed from Wonder blog, but now found here) and the original comments on the article (which have also been removed by Wonder blog editors). Sarah read the article aloud as Lindsey drove us home from work the day it was published. As the article drew to a close, both of us were baffled. We wondered, “That’s it? Where’s the controversy?” Reviewing the critiques further, we noticed that those reacting with greatest hostility to Fr. Arida’s essay zoomed in on the penultimate paragraph (our emphasis added):

If the never changing Gospel who is Jesus Christ is to have a credible presence and role in our culture then the Church can no longer ignore or condemn questions and issues that are presumed to contradict or challenge its living Tradition. Among the most controversial of these issues are those related to human sexuality, the configuration of the family, the beginning and ending of human life, the economy and the care and utilization of the environment including the care, dignity and quality of all human life. If the unchanging Gospel is to be offered to the culture then the Church, in and through the Holy Spirit will have to expand the understanding of itself and the world it is called to save. That there are Orthodox Christians who misuse the never changing Christ to promote a particular political agenda and ideology or as license to verbally and physically assault those they perceive as immoral along with those who would question the status quo of the Church impose on the Church a “new and alien spirit.”

Upon realizing that this paragraph was the source of controversy, we couldn’t help but speculate that many readers focused their critiques on the author and his past theological work rather than the content of the article. When issues such as human sexuality are broached within churches, most people (at least in our experience) generally assume that the ensuing discussion will fit snuggly within that particular Christian tradition’s theology. But in this case, the commenters seemed to assume that Fr. Arida’s essay was nothing more than a deliberate backdoor attempt to argue for change in the Orthodox Church’s teachings on marriage. At this point we want to make clear that our post today is not a defense of Fr. Arida, his recent essay, or his past work. We did not agree with everything in the essay posted to Wonder blog. Nonetheless, we were disheartened to see that this entire situation, which could have sparked an interesting and edifying discussion, became a missed opportunity. We were especially sad that many of the most unkind, uncharitable, and vitriolic comments left on the original article were from those charged with providing pastoral care to the faithful.

Fr. Arida, his personal opinions, and his level of theological orthodoxy are not the topic of our post today. This controversy from last week is but one example of how any conversation about LGBT Christian issues can quickly become a battle where all civility disappears. When we try to discuss why we find these conversations difficult, people in our Christian tradition are quick to encourage us to empathize with other members who see themselves as “refugees” from Christian traditions that have become more progressive over time. However, we notice that the same people are not nearly as quick to challenge those who assert that it’s impossible for LGBT people to be faithful Christians. We can appreciate that some folks had not always been so hostile to LGBT Christians and had perhaps made honest attempts at compassion in the past. We are willing to listen when they tell us that they had felt duped after being told, “No one is trying to force this denomination to change its teachings” and later finding out that this was not the case. Regardless of one’s theological views on same sex marriage, it seems understandable to us that a person would find it distressing to be told “x isn’t happening” and learn years later that x was indeed happening all along. For the record, neither of us has ever belonged to a denomination where this has occurred. We have no personal experience of this nature and don’t feel qualified to make judgments about what did or didn’t happen in Christian traditions other than our own. We try to be compassionate to everyone, even if that person’s past experience has introduced considerable paranoia every time someone in the Church raises topics of sexuality, marriage, and family.

When people have their ears perked for any and all code words that might be used to legitimize closed-door lobbying, they see a Trojan horse on every corner. But the problem is that while some Trojan horses are real, others are imagined. They are conjured up in the minds of people who are terrified that discussing LGBT issues in the Church will lead to a meltdown of all morality, initiating an unstoppable tailspin into relativism and heresy. No doubt, some people reading this post will consider our blog a Trojan horse. While that saddens us, it doesn’t surprise us. We’ve heard it all already. We’ve been contacted by people who are certain that we are lying in wait to slip gay marriage in through the backdoor of our Christian tradition. We’ve been told by people within our tradition that there is no way we could possibly be faithful Christians…and that if we were, we would shut up, keep our sexual orientations on the down-low, and play the “don’t ask, don’t tell” game to appease the neuroses of every tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist who thinks gay people are out to overtake the world. We’ve been accused of flirting and lying about our celibacy because caregiving is an important part of our relationship and sometimes it’s necessary for us to communicate in sign language on Sarah’s low hearing days.

We offer these examples not to play the victim card, but to bear witness to a very real problem that occurs when every discussion of LGBT issues is dismissed as a Trojan horse: Christian charity gets lost in a sea of “Safeguard the tradition!” demands. Words like “welcoming,” “pastoral,” and “merciful” are seen as code for “hidden agenda.” In working so diligently to protect the historic faith, both clergy and laity can lose sight of the real people who are caught in the crossfire and wounded by arrows from both sides. Pastoral care for faithful LGBT Christians risks being reduced to, “Don’t identify as gay, and don’t have gay sex. You’re welcome here, but only because everyone is a sinner.” Requests for listening and dialogue are often met with, “There’s no need. Struggle along with the rest of us to live according to God’s expectations. We treat all people the same.” While we genuinely wish that this were true, it isn’t. As long as every LGBT person in the Church is viewed as a symbol of the “gay agenda,” it will never be true that all who seek Christ are treated the same.

If the Church is going to minister effectively to people who do not fit into the heterosexual, cisgender majority, conversations about how to accomplish that need to take place. No amount of hierarchical statements reiterating existing teaching will be sufficient to fill the gaps in pastoral care that currently exist. There is a desperate need for practical guidance on what it means to love, support, and welcome LGBT Christians, and that guidance cannot end with pat answers. No doubt, the conversations that are necessary for accomplishing this will be difficult, emotional, and painful for all involved. But they are indeed necessary and will never happen if every attempt at discussing sexual orientation is written off as the scheme of a heretic who ought to leave the Church. Even conversations initiated by heretics have the potential to result in edification. An excellent historic example of this is the Church’s conversations with iconoclasts. Discussion of what constitutes a sacred image and why these are important to the Christian faith led to detailed explanations of Christ’s incarnation and instruction as to how we should commemorate people who have imaged Christ to us.

As LGBT Christians, we don’t think we’re proposing a new teaching when we say that we are created in the image and likeness of God. After all, every person is…and doesn’t the Church strive to assist everyone as he or she shows Christ to the world? We long to see the image of God in everyone, but that’s very difficult when people look at us and see nothing but a Trojan horse.

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