The month of June is here and with it comes a lot of noise, thoughts, and opinions about Pride Month. As we tackle issues of sex and sexuality from a biblical perspective, so many people ask, "What should the Christian response to Pride Month actually look like?"
Gender confusion and questioning has massively increased in each successive generation with some reports stating 30% of Gen-Z identifying as LGBTQ. Why is this? What can we understand with it? How do we make a shift?
LGBT-identifying people today are caught in a perfect storm. Though homosexual behavior is ancient, it has never before been normalized. Why now? I wish to propose that it has everything to do with the tech revolution.
Cole Zick sits down with Ken Williams to have an honest conversation about the topic of gender disruption in today's culture. Ken vulnerably shares his story about what it looks like to walk in a changed lifestyle out of the realm of homosexuality and into the lifestyle Jesus called him into. His new book "The Journey Out" goes into even greater depth and is available today!
Following Christ is not a “gay to straight” journey (both are false constructs.) Discipleship is a matter of changing one’s mind and worldview to believe we are all simply human beings. Together. That path requires real repentance (a change of mind) and an environment that can facilitate life in Christ alongside self-knowledge, understanding of our past, perspective on our gifts or strengths, honor, dignity, transformation, hope… essentially, it requires the kingdom of God.
Churches are becoming afraid to offer us support since any approach suggesting emotional healing or restoration in one’s sexuality could be called “conversion therapy,” or worse, anti-LGBTQ hate. We Christians who have experienced LGBTQ, whether openly gay or closeted in our churches, wrestle with our public response to Christ. The uproar over so-called “conversion therapy” reveals the painful challenge of that pursuit.
Let’s start talking about it. A lot. The world is talking about LGBTQ everywhere we look--so why aren’t we? Let’s talk about God’s design for family with our kids. Let’s talk about His heart for those within the LGBTQ community when our kids are young--before they ever meet a gay-identified person.
We should not conflate a condition with an identity. California’s 2019 Assembly Bill 201 makes precisely that type of error in section 2295(a)(2): “Intersex people are a part of the fabric of our state’s diversity to be celebrated, rather than an aberration to be corrected.” That is both a straw argument and misdirection because a medical condition is something one has, not who one is. Celebrate the person, yes, and recognize that person’s disorder of sex development, which may or may not need correcting.
“Do not identify your self with your desires. Letting desires define us is the most abject form of slavery. Self-mastery is true freedom.” He also said, “We can have reasons for wanting to do this or that; but wanting to do something is not a reason for doing it. Desires are not reasons.” My point is that “gay” and “straight,” along with “heterosexual” and “homosexual,” are ideological terms, and false ones. They don’t exist. There is no straight or gay.
Gay people have a perfectly normal human genotype; they are not genetically distinct from all other human beings in any meaningful sense. Consequently, the development of sexual orientation and choice of partners cannot consist primarily in the elaboration of some controlling genetic disposition but, to a much greater degree, consist instead in the development and expression of personal autonomy regarding one’s own sexual possibilities.
Over centuries the stigma and shame associated with sex has caused a lot of destruction inside and outside churches. From abortion to divorce to gender transition, shame around sexuality has impacted America. Our self-made effort to bring resolution, the Sexual Revolution, has hardly been the salve we had hoped. Its fruit is the whole-scale breakdown of family and sexual accountability that we see today in our Tinder and porn driven culture. Yet the silver lining of the Sexual Revolution may very well be our willingness to see and say all things sexual utterly shamelessly. In the end, our ability to be transparent and vulnerable about our sexuality and its formation could very well be an answer to prayer.
You’re sitting in a new small group circle when you look across and see an attractive woman. You notice her hair, her posture, her demeanor and then suddenly there’s the pull. No one else takes your attention, but you feel from deep within this drawing. There’s a stirring inside. You quickly look away. What is going on? Are you having an experience of same sex attraction? Could it be that you are really a lesbian after all?