Christians and the LGBTQ Conversation: A Powerful Story of Redemption.

hey friends we are so thrilled that you are joining us today since reading her book born again this way and meeting rachel gilson i've been looking forward to having her on the program i have probably read 10 or 12 dozen books if not more on lgbtq relationships because the class i teach at biola because of my speaking some of the debates i've done and this book is just outstanding in terms of being gospel focused and thoughtful so i want to commend it to you but first off rachel thanks so much for coming on the show yeah it's my pleasure to be here well your story really intrigued me because you and i come from such different backgrounds now you work on crew campus crusade staff and my dad's been on crew for and my mom i think four or five decades he is he's been around a long time so i understand kind of what you do in the ministry there from growing up in it but you came to this conversation crew from a very different background that that i did will you share just your journey to faith a little bit with us to start and then just for the audience so you know we're going to get into the book born again this way and we're going to talk about some of the toughest thorniest questions around the lgbtq conversation today and we will be taking questions and comments throughout if they're related to the topic of course and by the way if you're new make sure you hit subscribe because we have some other interviews coming up you are not going to want to miss unapologetic types of uh types of issues so rachel tell us your journey an unsuspecting journey kind of to faith yeah well i grew up in california in a super non-church-going household so like we didn't even do christmas and easter so by the time i was in high school you know i'm trying to figure out what the world is and i i really realized two major things about myself one was that i loved the world of ideas like i just wanted to figure out what was true what was real um and you know public high school education isn't always giving you the best answers to those things so i was digging around sure but the other thing that i really realized about myself was oh the way that my female friends feel about other guys um i think that's how i feel about other girls and you know this was so i was in high school this was 2001. you know i like to joke this was when will and grace was still edgy not nostalgic you know so yeah right yeah it's a different world and so when i was kind of making this realization i remember thinking is there anything wrong with this i kind of had a vague understanding that maybe it wasn't approved of for women to have relationships with other women but as since i wasn't in the church and i didn't have a strong moral upbringing i kind of opened up my moral junk drawers that were rifled around in there and said well i don't i don't see anything in here that would say it would be wrong this was before the phrase love is love was part of the popular currency but that's really what i came to and so i decided well gosh i'm just going to pursue it and one of the things that was really prominent for me from both of those was that i grew up in a place that had a lot of cultural christianity and a lot of real christians too but a lot of just sort of church going type vibe and i ended up with the impression as i was heading off to college that christians were people who didn't want to think for themselves and they were also people who hated gay people you know bigots like really i thought of christians as stupid bigots you know so i was like that's a pretty rough characterization that we've probably earned sometimes and what was you know when i think about it i was never mistreated by a christian so the fact that i thought that without even experiencing it personally communicates to me now like gosh it was really part of the part of the environment i was in i think which is depressing so i moved off to yale college because really excited to go to new england i didn't realize that it actually meant being cold most of the year and really quickly those two parts of my identity that i mentioned came under direct attack so one going to a world-class university from a very small under-resourced public high school meant that my image of myself as this intellectual giant got battered and bruised immediately i was like oh not only am i not the smartest person here i'm like middle of the back of the pack like wow over overwhelmed by the kind of people that i was encountering on that campus um and then also during my freshman year i got broken up with with the girl i was dating at the time and you know teenage breakups they're always very dramatic and i really just felt at sea you know these pieces of my identity seemed unstable and it was like well where am i gonna where am i gonna go you know i was like well maybe i could write for the school newspaper except i'm not smart enough for that or maybe i could go to the gym more except i'm very lazy i really was kind of having an identity crisis but there wasn't a point where i was like oh i'm gonna turn to jesus because you know i didn't believe in jesus that wasn't that wasn't a thing for me but probably didn't even cross your mind huh wasn't on your radar at all no yeah it wasn't yeah it just wasn't an option but i happened to be so after christmas break you know come back and it was cold and i'm still sort of in this crummy place and i happened to be in a lecture uh for one of my philosophy classes and we were talking about rene descartes you know he's the guy who invented i think therefore i am yeah and how he builds a whole proof for the existence of god off of that little phrase you know and i remember sitting in the auditorium thinking that is a really stupid proof for the existence of god which i still basically think but as i was sitting there kind of processing it i remember wondering well you know what if there's a or if there's a better proof for the existence of god but kind of even that thought maybe sort of snapped to attention like no we don't think that way that's not for good atheists you know that's that's for stupid bigots but then i was also like well you haven't thought about it intentionally in a while like what if there's a really good argument you don't know and you know i need to learn how to you know combat it like maybe that's maybe that's the angle i just couldn't you know when you can't shake a thought so sure you know i'm an older millennial so i decided to ask the internet like that's what i did you know so i would just go into my room open up my gigantic dell laptop and just fire religious search terms into the computer um which is like why would you ever do that to find out the most important questions but it turns out it's more common than i even knew actually and so over time i kept coming back to reading again and again about jesus which was sort of surprising to me because i had had a character in my mind of who he was you know if this this was 2004 i considered myself fairly politically liberal and so i kind of figured jesus was like an ancient george w bush wrapped in a toga or something you know just it wasn't an attractive image for me okay but i was actually reading stories about him i was confronted with this character who was really tender but also really sharp i remember being particularly the stories where people would really come up and try to trick him and he would just shut them down i was like oh that's really appealing which probably tells you more about my personality than now but i remember sort of feeling drawn to jesus as a character not even saying like oh i want to give my life to him but just so this is interesting but i just felt like you know my sexuality was a barrier i was like okay maybe i just broke up with my girlfriend but i want to marry a woman someday and you know it just it just become legal in massachusetts so i knew the future is with me and i just feel like this is i'm not even allowed to be interested in jesus as a character but the only two people i knew at yale who identified as christians were these two girls who were dating each other and one of them was training to be a lutheran minister i met them in the marching band because i am not cool and i remember thinking well maybe they know something i don't know you know so i went to them okay how do you work this out because to me it seems contradictory i remember these sweet girls i remember them being like oh yeah you know it's all been a bit misunderstanding like the bible actually supports monogamous same-sex relationships they probably didn't call them that right you said probably a different word but i remember thinking oh really like that's so interesting and um you know they gave me a packet of information that was going to tell me how to correctly interpret these bible verses and i love a packet you know so i took that thing back to my room and i was ripping through it and i remember finding it really persuasive like the arguments that the packet was making clicked for me and i it made me excited but i also thought well you know maybe i should actually read some of the bible verses like that they're talking about i don't know much about the bible i didn't own a bible so i just had to pull them up on my computer yeah and as i was you know reading them on my computer screen and then looking down at the packet and kind of going back and forth i just ended up with this sinking feeling of like oh i don't think this actually works with the original texts it's not like i was a bible scholar um but i ended up i was a history major yeah one of the number one things you learn is you respect the texts and as i was making that jump i was like oh i mean these girls are sweet but i don't think this is what it was and i kind of felt duped you know like that was stupid to think so i just i was like you know i'm just this is a dumb hobby like i need to stop reading about this i start doing my homework you know actually focusing on things i never really did start doing my homework that year unfortunately but i did happen to be in the room of an acquaintance a little while after that probably i don't know like a week or so and she was a non-practicing catholic and i'm pretty sure this was the only time that year i was in her room but i was standing in her dorm way door my doorway and she was getting something like putting stuff in her bag near her bed and she had a bookshelf right inside her doorway and one of my favorite hobbies is to look at people's bookshelves and judge them like yours is a little too small behind you for me to really dig in and examine but yep if i were in your house and my face would be like right up in there and i remember she had a book on her shelf uh it's the spine said mere christianity by c.s lewis okay so i have clearly since learned that this is a famous and important book at the time i didn't know what the heck it was but the title really appealed to me and i thought oh i want to read this book you know i've only been reading the internet but this is a book the thing is i was too embarrassed to ask her like to borrow it because i didn't want people to know that i was interested it seemed weak you know and foolish so i just stole the book like i just pulled it off the shelf put it in my bag like i had no moral compass and it's not that hard to hide oh my goodness hang on a minute i'm dying inside because his whole argument he begins with the moral law and you stole the copy of mere christianity i see where this is going keep going i love it so i'm working my way through this book and finding it super interesting and i remember being in the library one day in between classes and i don't remember where i was like which chapter or things like this but i was i was suddenly sitting there in the library reading this book and realizing oh not only does god exist like a generic store brand zeus kind of thing but the god who made me exists like the holy god exists i didn't know the vocabulary word holy in terms of what it meant but that sense of his transcendence and his perfection you know the fact and the fact that i was going to owe him an account suddenly became very real to me and honestly i was afraid a lot of curse words running through the mind wow you know because i knew that i was arrogant that i lied that i cheated that i was sexually immoral i was selfish i was reading a stolen book you know it's sort of like just push all the chips into the guilty category i did not have a lot of redeeming features about me and so i sat there like feeling honestly afraid but really quickly with that i also realized that part of the reason jesus had come was to place himself as a barrier between god's wrath and me and that the only way to be safe was to run towards him not away from him wow so i was sitting there thinking i don't want to become a christian that's really lame is exceedingly lame and there's all kinds of things in my life that i want to be true that i am real sure will not be true if i say yes to this but i also realized i can't pretend the gospel isn't true just because it's inconvenient for my life like that's the height of stupidity like i'm not going to get a better deal than this i need to i need to take it see i didn't have like a nice crew campus minister with me there you go there you go you're a prayer but i kind of knew i was like okay i need to pray so i just sort of shut my eyes i was like fine i'll be a christian then i went to then i went to my just like that wow well let that second a half years ago how long ago was that say that again sixteen and a half years sixteen and a half years ago okay so you you became a christian you still had this component in your life in terms of the same sex attraction you write about some of that in your book what was that journey like moving forward given that you didn't buy that scripture said this is okay and compatible with following jesus yeah so it was interesting because immediately in my discipleship i knew that what the bible said was no to same-sex lust and sexual romantic relationships i knew that and since i've learned greek and hebrew and it turns out the bible still says no fine but what i really struggled with early on was why do you say no god like what could possibly be wrong with this it's not hurting anybody and i kind of felt you know like in bargaining with god like if you would just tell me why you say these things then i would obey with perfect joy and execution you know right which is ridiculous of course but as i processed this with the lord and with my you know fellow friends i realized um hey maybe maybe i'm asking the wrong question really the lord confronted me i think kind of pressing on me you know what if the most important question isn't why do i say something what if the more important question is can you trust the one who's asking because if i'm only willing to obey when i both understand and agree how am i not making myself god that's it seems like i'm shifting the place of obedience to myself and really the lord brought me back again and again to what we see in the garden of eden it's a really interesting scenario to me early in genesis because you know he he creates these people puts them in a beautiful wonderful place gives them this grand vision and only one prohibition and we could understand you know if the prohibition was a little more obvious like hey y'all here's your rule don't murder each other because like we know intuitively that murder is wrong if you don't know intuitively that murder is wrong like we we seek to get you medical help you know what i mean right and um instead the prohibition was don't eat this fruit that's related to the knowledge of good and evil like even vegans eat fruit you know what i mean like there's nothing within the rule itself that would lead you to believe to not do that the only thing you have is god's word saying the day you eat it you're going to die and so you have this prohibition that doesn't actually make sense necessarily based on just your own data and you have god's word and that's exactly where the serpent got eve you know he gets her to he gets her to doubt god's word he gets her to look at the fruit and she realizes it's delightful to look at it's going to be good to eat it's desirous to make her wise that's right god must be holding out on her why would he not want her to have this good thing so i think even before sin enters the world it turns out god wants us to live by faith not just by sight she had all the evidence in the world to know that he was for her but still in that place she looked at his word and she said no i can't trust that you know so she ate adam ate we all lived downstream of that bad decision but it really felt like i was again and again doing the same thing with sexuality according to all my data i was like i don't get it i don't get it this looks good but i had god's word saying like if you do this you're gonna die and so he was really asking me like can you can you trust me even with this most vulnerable part of yourself like have i proven myself trustworthy and it it taught me something so helpful for my own discipleship which was if we ever try to base ethics on anything that isn't first and foundationally the character of god we're gonna go adrift somewhere like is he good is he good to us can we actually trust him with our whole lives and it doesn't you know we still need to study ethics we still need to know what he says but at the core is this character and i saw in christ like his dying for us i mean that alone that sunday school answer like yeah it makes him trustworthy but even before he died i mean the fact that he was willing to come at all like he didn't owe us that he was under no obligation to come and save us he could have justly condemned us and we standing there would have been like yeah god you have to do this we're evil and so i think it it was so helpful for me to have that at the beginning of my discipleship again and again having to come back to christ and honestly the early the early couple years of my christian walk were like an open dumpster fire like if i were mine if i were my 35 campus minister self meeting with my 19 year old self i would be like this girl is not gonna make it you know constantly ping pong between bad old patterns and new christian patterns and just trying to figure it out but what brought me back again and again was that the love of christ is better now you described that very honestly in your book born again this way i mean it's a very frank honest account of your story which which i appreciate now you have you have a line i want to read to you on uh obviously you know because you wrote it but on page 75 you said without the beauty of jesus we won't leave the safety of our lgbt family now i'm curious if you'd unpacked that because and let me frame it this way you've been talking about how part of your discipleship was trusting jesus so what about somebody who says i don't trust that this is god's word and i'm not asking for apologetic for the bible i don't think jesus is god how can you tell me homosexual behavior is wrong do you a challenge that ethic or b just say you know what let me take you to jesus or see some other option i haven't even thought of well i do think i think there's probably a number of valid ways but for me what i found most helpful is talking because i mean i've done i do campus ministry in new england we are extremely unchurched you know it's not definitely the opposite of the bible belt so most of the students i'm interacting you know they're coming from non-religious backgrounds that kind of thing and so this question does come up and i've honestly found it most useful i think most helpful for the person i'm talking to because the questions about sexuality are legitimate right at their legitimate questions like what god says about our bodies is really important and so i always try to affirm that those are important questions and explain like hey i don't think what god says about how we use our bodies makes any sense if you don't know him so i think what he says about the body is going to make best sense if i tell you some background things about who christians understand him to be and i think if we work in that direction even if you don't believe me by the end i think at least my world view will be more intelligible to you and i've had a great amount of success with that because i'm trying to show them that i respect them that i respect their question that i respect their ability to think for themselves you know i'm not i'm a big believer that you can't argue somebody into the kingdom even though i think good good arguments are an excellent resource for uh kingdom work and so i i always want to anchor it in who jesus is because i just think well and i think the reason for that to give a potentially longer answer is sometimes the way the church has framed questions of sexuality has been a little bit like screaming the word no over and over again that's right yeah and that's it's not really helpful nor is it how god designed sexuality to be experienced god is mostly about yes not mostly about no and so sometimes when we talk about ethics in a way that's cut off from god's character we end up emphasizing the no's here's what not to do or we can even emphasize what we should do in a way that's kind of sterile and cut off from his k character so like one answer could be well the bible teaches that marriage is one man one woman for life which is you know fine that's a fine definition but i actually think if we start with the character of god we start to see how who god is shapes what marriage is so therefore marriage isn't a thing that's i mean it has a lot of flexibility frankly between cultures some of the ways we do things are different and that's totally fine but some of the backbone of marriage has to remain the same because it's saying something about who god is in relationship to his people and so for an order in order for it to tell the truth it has to actually work as he's designed it so for me sexual ethics immediately and intimately connected to the gospel so if i haven't shared the gospel it's functionally going to be unintelligible so essentially the heart of the question is what kind of universe do we live in is this a materialistic universe in which there's no design and ethics rests upon us or is there a a god who cares about us designed to be in a relationship with him and trust him even when things don't perfectly make sense is that the heart of it that i capture absolutely and i was 100 a materialist before i became a christian and so i think because i still feel the logic of that world view like i get it if there's no god to me materialism makes the most sense of the world i think because that still resonates with me in certain ways um i want to take it seriously you know i think it fails as a world view but i but i also understand where it's coming from in a lot of ways that's that's super helpful um so you are married to a man you have a six-year-old six-year-old daughter she would want me to say six and a half oh good job my son's birthday was yesterday and he's been counting the days for half a year so i he turned eight i know the drill that's right talk to me a little bit about what that was like for you given your past given the assumptions you had about marriage what was that transition like because there's a lot of people that say you shouldn't exist or don't exist or your marriage is by definition dysfunctional and that's not true no in fact i think my marriage is like shockingly functional so one of the things that's really important to say at the front end of this conversation is that i am married to a lovely man named andrew but i still experience same-sex attraction one of the difficulties uh that the church faced in the 80s 90s it sounds like a radio station 80s 90s and today right we had this period where the way we tried as a church to grapple with same-sex attraction was to make people straight yeah they thought that would that that's the goal and so some people were encouraged to enter into opposite sex marriages encouraged as being light some people were strongly pressured into entering opposite sex marriages because they were basically promised that that would cure them right that that would make them straight and that did a lot of damage to a lot of people it did damage to the same sex attracted people it did damage to the people that they were married to it created a lot of brokenness and so i just i want to be clear and i do this in my book but i think it's just helpful even at the front to say marriage is possible but it's not the preference and it's not it's not about performance you know marriage isn't something you enter into to prove that you believe god's sexual ethic and so i think when when andrew started expressing interest in me it did sort of um uh i was like what am i supposed to do with this you know because i was like this isn't but this isn't exactly uh wasn't my plan a and what it did honestly was force me back to the text because i should say as i got to know him i was like gosh i do think there's so many ways we're compatible and i do see that i'm attracted to him but it almost felt like this little flame you know that you kind of have to cup your hands around it unless the wind blows it out you know it seemed like this thing it was real whereas some of my relationships with women had been these you know big fireworks butterflies in the stomach kind of like the thing that you see in romance in our culture i was like wasn't that what you're supposed to face marriage on not this like culture tells me one thing and i'm starting to feel confused so i went back to the text and really as i studied i came away with understanding okay here's a couple here's a couple things there's nothing in the bible telling me that i have to be straight i want i want to clarify that i i do understand that my same-sex attraction is fallen it is a result of the fall and is not how god would have designed me to be however i'm not responsible for removing myself but i there's nothing i can do to change those temptations god can remove them if he wants to but he hasn't my response instead is to be faithful in the midst of them and every single believer is called to either be faithfully married or faithfully single and actually you can do either of those callings no matter your attractional pattern if you're attracted to men or women or both or neither or potted plants you know what i mean it's like it sort of doesn't matter god will give us through his word and his spirit and his people exactly what we need to fulfill our calling and so if god were calling me to marriage well he would only need to give me attraction to this one man i don't need to be attracted to every man to be faithfully married to this one guy in fact sometimes it's convenient not to be that's true and so and then as i looked at the text and examined what marriage is i was like well well goodness marriage is about the gospel like marriage is called to be lifelong faithfulness because god's relationship with his people is faithful marriage is the place of procreation and household building like through adoption because god's relationship with his people builds households and creates newness of life it's fruitful marriage is supposed to be the place of sexual pleasure because god's relationship with his people is deeply intimate and deeply pleasurable but also god's relationship with his people requires male and female like because everywhere in scripture um god is represented by the male partner and his people are represented by the female partner because marriage is supposed to this picture of the the difference the love across difference that's created uh when god is united to his people through jesus christ and of course some people are like well well couldn't you just marry different like personality types you know so people are into enneagram like shouldn't just like an eight marry a two something you're like well or or like even ethnic difference you know like you could have an asian american who marries a white like that's different and like sure like there's a lot of beautiful and valuable differences between humans of all kinds of types but there's something about male and female that is a deep like it's cellular level difference and you know we read in genesis about male and female we are equal fully human equally fully image bearers equally and yet different like actually different and so that picture of what marriage is reflects the gospel so well and i was like gosh so i see that marriage you need to be able to have a sexual relationship in marriage um that's an important part of it but it's really not all of it and honestly romance doesn't have to be the main ingredient like if you have it fine but this is a this is a decades-long you know building project this isn't an i think i use the metaphor in my book like it's not a weekend staining your deck you know it's like yeah it's building cathedral and i thought no i think i can do that gospel work with andrew like he is we love the same things i think we'll be better together than we are apart and honestly i married him because i thought that's what god was calling me to do i loved it so people want to hear you know when you're working with college students they're like oh tell us your story and i'm like well it's not totally a typical love story but you know we've been we just celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary last year and you know i've there's been so i still experience same-sex attraction but oh no we are reconnecting here with rachel hang on i think we might have lost her right in the middle of the live stream uh oh you're back did i get you yeah am i here we lost you for about 15 seconds that's no problem i was gonna say my internet just died all i was saying is am i here we got it i'm so sorry we got it it's okay you're great there's way that there's been healing in my marriage that i just didn't even expect but there were other broken ways i was relating to sexuality that the stability of marriage confronted me and also encouraged me so it's been a gift but i think also it's just really important to say we need to do a better job of supporting single people in the church because most sex attracted disciples are not going to end up in opposite sex marriages and this doesn't and honestly there are a lot of people who are opposite sex attracted who also end up single in the church and we're designed for intimate love and so if we're not forming deep relationships with each other and being family to each other then we're not loving with the love of christ when people look at our churches they should be seeing single people and families and married people thriving together i think that's going to be the best apologetic for what biblical sexuality is amen i love it by the way in your book one of the things you said that i thought was so interesting you said going into a marriage with same-sex attraction you didn't carry some of the same illusions that other people may have and you were aware that it was going to take effort and it gave an advantage and i thought that's such a smart way to think about it shedding some of those cultural illusions and getting down what is marriage about what's it going to take what's the gospel focus for it i think it's beautiful we have a great question here uh sean redford thanks for watching and for weighing in he says hey rachel love your book uh question it is often christians that construct a god who affirms lgbt values who are hardest converse with on this topic amen what what are some practical tips for these conversations yeah i mean i couldn't i agree i would like a hundred times more rather talk to an atheist sometimes than wow affirmative christians um okay i do i think it's a harder conversation and usually and usually it's a harder conversation because we don't see scripture the same um so one of the things i want to do when i'm talking and it depends on the relationship too right like if i've got a good friend then i've got some a different approach like i i really did i got an email from a good friend of mine last week because she was saying like hey um i really think that god supports same-sex relationships and i just can't i can't reconcile with what you're teaching right like a good friend of mine and so she and i are beginning a conversation that's really different than like you know someone i'm meeting quickly after a q a or whatever but i do think one of them important questions is okay so tell me what you think the bible is like let's walk through together i'll tell you what i think it is you tell me what because that's gonna help me because if we're if we have a really different view of scripture then it's going to be pretty hard for me to move forward with that conversation now i'm not interested in being salvation police as it were like deciding you know like you're not a christian or whatever but i at the end of the day um i think it's also wise you know to pick our to pick our battles now someone who does take scripture seriously that could be a different that can be a different conversation and i think what's so helpful to recognize is that most people from my experience most christians who have a high view of the scripture and either take an affirming view or are leaning affirming do so because they deeply care about lgbt people because they deeply care that lgbt people experience love and joy family and intimacy and if i don't take that seriously if i don't want those things as much as they do then it doesn't matter how many bible verses i can quote i need to be able to match that kind of love and so i think one of the things that could be helpful is talking through what does the bible actually say leads to joy because somewhere in there it can easily slip in that what god wants for us is to be happy which is hard to argue actually biblically but it's drenched american christianity and the way to be happy is through a romantic partnership sometimes we talk about it as if it's only sex but it's not just that it's the desire for a romantic relationship kind of everywhere in our culture you're not a real person you haven't really arrived until you have a romantic sexual relationship and so people see their gay friends like well i want them to be happy i think hey man i want them to be happy too i just um i just don't think romance is all there is it it can be a beautiful gift but it's a terrible savior i think that helps us talk through um where is joy because american well it's not just american but we are trafficking deeply in the way for me to really be free is to obey my desires and that's part of what buddhism reacts to right they say like desires are all lies we need to run in the opposite direction deny them i think instead what we see in the bible is god himself is a desire he desires us so it's not that our possessing desires is bad is that we're broken compasses i have to have him tell me what's good i don't know it on my own when i line up with him it's usually accidental so i want to say like again and again my desires don't care about me they lie to me they're not gonna they're not gonna wipe away my tears they're not to be for me be there for me when i get old and i'm dying they don't own me jesus owns me and the difficulty of the affirming conversation is sometimes it it is actually playing a tape that's saying a different place of where joy and meaning is found the biblical christianity and i think if we can have that conversation out in the open it can help each other right because um what do we what do we see you know the most abused bible verse i think matthew 7 1 judge not lest you be judged and people like so i can't say anything you're like it's literally in the sermon on the mount he's taking the law and making it tighter right because judge can mean two things it can mean discern or it can be pronounced guilty or innocent jesus isn't telling you to not be discerning he's telling you you don't have the ability to pronounce whether someone's guilty or innocent because later in that paragraph he says hey why are you so worried about the law in your eye or why is it worried about your brother's speck when you've got a giant log in your eye and sometimes people want to say what he should have said next was take the log out of your eye and sit down and shut up actually what he says is take the log out of your eye so that you can help your brother with his speck so if someone identifies as a christian i want to at least in good faith come together over the text together and see like what does the lord say and sometimes we're not going to get anywhere and we need to cut our losses but other times especially with deep relationships i think it's worth it to hang in there and have conversations together that's a really helpful way i love that you didn't start by just saying let's go to romans 1 or 1st corinthians 6 or leviticus 18. let's ask the question what kind of book is the bible is it a book that's holy that comes from god i should submit myself to or is it a different kind of text it's ultimately a question of biblical authority and where does joy come from so i think the way you frame that uh is is fantastic i see a question if you have questions for rachel go ahead and put them in uh in the box and we'll get to as many as we can if you're joining us give us a little thumbs up help spread the word on uh youtube matrix here's a question from k stevenson says this is a hard question but what does intimacy look like i have lifelong friends since my teenage years my friends know about my same-sex attraction these relationships are intimate but no one asks how i'm doing yeah that is a heart yeah it's this really interesting i really appreciate that you asked that there can be this strange tension for the same sex attracted disciple where in some contexts it's all your christian friends want to talk about i i'm gonna ask you like how are you doing how you doing how you doing because they kind of worry that your same sex attraction must be this giant problem for you all the time and sometimes like any of us dealing with sexual temptation um it is a big deal and we do need to ask be asked about it a lot but sometimes there can be this thing where people don't want to ask about it either because they assume we're fine or maybe because they don't know how to talk about it they feel afraid of offending us um i hadn't i had a single friend actually a straight single friend who realized as she was getting older and she was unmarried that people were stopping asking her about if there was any you know boys in her life and she was like oh are they kind of giving up on me in a way like what does this mean because she longed for marriage yeah and so i do think it's important for us this is really hard to do but i think it's important for us for those friends who are at the closest level to let them know that sometimes we do need to be asked you know if we're not being and that can feel really vulnerable because you're you know any time sometimes those conversations feel weird when you're just bringing them up but i think if we're able to communicate and say like you know you i i'm not married you are my family in so many ways and i think it would help me feel seen and known if just every once in a while you ask how my heart is doing in relationship to this like it doesn't have to be all the time but you know sometimes sometimes we really want to be seen just seen but um we need to we need to ask for what we want and it's hard because we're broken centers and sometimes we ask for what we want and we don't get it people let us down we let other people down right it's it's super messy on the ground but i think intimacy the best intimacy from the lord is that we are fully known and fully loved and in our close relationships we move closer towards that approximation of being more and more known and not being rejected actually being affirmed and accepted and maybe you know the places where we're obnoxious and sinful being being corrected but sure but still taken in you know so we have to ask for those things i think that's that's a great response that sometimes letting people know what we need rather than assuming it is one step closer to getting those me those needs met okay thank you for having the courage to ask that that question you're certainly not the only only one we have a question he says is there a biological basis and i know i'm going to butcher your name rajesh kharan that is the best i can do is there a biological basis for same-sex attraction or for gender issues well if science had an answer so the difficulty is you know sometimes we want to know what where does this come from right the question of origins but the thing is for as much money has been dumped into studying these questions scientifically it is so complex that we really in some places just don't know where it comes from there seem there are studies that suggest that there are some biological bases for these but it's not as easy as like my parents both had brown eyes so i had brown eyes you know it's like it's a super complicated pathway and even less is known about gender dysphoria because the science on that is so young which also i think helps us to say little as we wait to see what we know but i think the helpful thing for christians is that what we know from our understanding of the bible that not everything i experience naturally is a good thing so whether i experience same-sex attraction out of the blue seems to arise spontaneously or whether i kind of know hey there were some experiences that shaped me this way either way i know what i'm supposed to do in response to temptation so i think sometimes there's been in the church this hunt for origins as if uh if we could identify it then we could you know nip it in the bud i think usually that's a wild goose chase and it distracts from useful energy in discipleship of saying you know what no matter where this comes from jesus is going to give me the resources through the holy spirit to say yes to him and notice him and i don't i just most of the time find it unhelpful in the day-to-day living as a believer yeah that's fair that's that's a very helpful response i've seen the apa consistently say there's probably some nature probably some nurture but we don't really know there could be a range of pathways and causes um you you have pretty strong uh convictions about reparative therapy in fact you call it a false gospel could you tell us your thoughts on that well and you know i had a an acquaintance of mine very gently rebuke me okay for lumping too many things under the reparative therapy umbrella and i was like okay that's a good word because the difficulty with the way that word is used like in media is that it can cover so many it can cover all the way over on someone just wanting to talk through their unwanted same-sex attractions over to this extreme end of people getting attached to electrocution to try to shock the gay out of them right so we do want to be careful whenever reparative therapy comes up that we know what's being talked about i have several friends who've been through various types of reparative therapy the best case scenarios were that people actually had a place to talk about their same-sex attraction in the church for a while it was kind of the only spot to do that and they got maybe some help in saying no to their desires but in the movement there was this strong over and over drum beat that being straight was going to save you being straight was the answer that being straight was the goal of discipleship and the difficulty is i mean the success rate of that was so miserably low and it's not because people weren't trying there are people who threw themselves desperately into that program when we make promises that are not in the bible we do spiritual damage because we make god look like a liar and he's not a liar wow that's a that's a that's a strong word to keep in mind if you have other questions you can jump in here um for rachel we have a little bit time for it for a handful more one question i have is you describe in your book you walk through when you became a christian it still was a theological process for you for some time and a relational process still struggling in a relationship and you describe in the book just going one weekend back to my girlfriend and just feeling awful about that again really appreciate your honesty in the book absolutely love it i'm gonna hold up one more time those of you watching this conversation uh pick up copy of it you will not be disappointed gets my highest endorsement on a book of this kind and i don't say that lightly but what what encouragement would you give for the church to just be loving towards those who have same-sex attraction because like you said one error is to talk about all time one side is to ignore it i had christopher yuan i interviewed him maybe six or eight weeks ago and he said sometimes there's this error of like people will say to him well i don't have same sex attraction i don't understand and he's like well you're human you understand more than you think so what what advice would you give for christians just to be better at this yeah and i do i love chris's words on this because you know he does such a great job i really appreciate his last book holy sexuality and the gospel was so good um i think so i have a friend who ministers in this space his name's bill henson he runs a ministry particularly that helps families with lgbt youth kind of um walk through discipleship space and he's got these four steps that i really like so i just borrow them heavily he says there's there's four steps we can do that to love lgbt people in our life well whether they're in the church or outside the church they might look differently whether their disciples are outside but they're kind of similar pathways so one we listen you know we we listen we we just want to be able to hear we want to be trustworthy that's a form of love is listening that's great which includes like kay was saying asking we can't listen if it never comes up and we want to respect like if they're not ready to talk that's totally fine but creating an openness we want to invest we want to actually show that sometimes there are still places where lgbt people are kind of held at arm's length in the church or same-sex disciples um like i want to give one example there are still some churches who have a strong presence in their mind this stereotype that men who experience same-sex attraction are pedophiles and so they don't want men in that category to work in the children's ministry okay so this is just a really difficult real life thing the difficulty with that is that um overwhelmingly people who are pedophiles are men but they're men of every attractional pattern right so it's not not that pedophilia isn't something we should think about as we're running children's ministry it's just that it's actually ster it's actually harmfully stereotypical to assume that a same-sex attractive man is going to deal with that more than an opposite attracted man like honestly there are so many straight male predators who walk into church scenarios take the trusting environment play a certain card so that they can play on children and so i think one of the ways we can invest is to make sure that people are actually getting to use their giftings in the church or that we're seeing we're building them up and not using stereotypes to exclude them from certain things we're just going to say like no i'm going to invest in you like you're important i want to see how the lord's made you and figure that out but it goes along with protect i want to invest and protect so outside the church honestly that looks like protection from things like bullying harassment it's still true that lgbt people suffer rates of homelessness and suicidality and substance abuse in intimate partner abuse much higher than the general population right there was this a really interesting long form article i think in 2017 in huffpost you know this gay man who was sort of he was trying to figure out things have never been better in this country for gay men so why are we still so sad and he went to this clinic um this woman who worked like an aids hepatitis clinic in i think the northeast you know the northwest somewhere and she was like you know it's not that um it's not that gay men don't know how to save their lives because you're talking about why are gay men still getting aids at such a high rate because we understand what happens she's like it's not that i don't know how to save their lives it's about them knowing whether their lives are worth saving and so um we love and worship a god who's made every human in his image we understand that every single person is worthy of the blood of christ and so whether we agree with somebody's politics or not or how they use their time or not we can protect that person from harm and from harassment but also inside the church it means protecting disciples from those kinds of help unhelpful stereotypes jokes that are not funny that are homophobic uh even outdated language sometimes you know you hear things people people love to talk about like the gay lifestyle it sounds like a tampon commercial you know where you like you you know you can sort of like now you can swim and go on boat rides like what is the gay lifestyle goodness funny thing the gay lifestyle like kind of sounds amazing you know it's like according to the internet it looks you know it's sort of i think sometimes those evangelicals we chafe when people say all evangelicals x you know that's right not all evangelicals x since i think we need to think about that when we discuss who lgbt people it's like not all lgbt people anything and so invite oh invite listen protect invest we need to just invite people into our lives into our churches invite listen invest protect protect i love that that's the all four of those make a ton of sense thank you for they're all bill yeah well you you delivered them so we'll take it a couple questions for you uh one from megalos schemos that's the name that's coming through says have liberal liberal christians or lgbtq affirming people are reactive negatively to your book or your ministry what's been that feedback or dynamic like for you well i'm pretty familiar with what the liberal arguments are so the pushback i've seen to me seems like any of the pushback against what the bible teaches you know they're going to attack the bible they're going to attack well one of the things that i think actually is important people will attack my ministry because they believe that the biblical teaching is harmful to lgbt people the difficulty of course is that it's actually christians who've been harmful to lgbt people not the biblical teaching um christians are the ones who have excluded and been hypocritical you know like kind of winked at straight sin like oh guys look at pornography what can we do but then treated same-sex attraction of it as if it's like the worst possible thing you can experience hypocrisy is harmful not recognizing that every single person needs the grace and truth of christ that every single person experiences and expresses their sexuality in a way that's fallen that is harmful but god's vision for the dignity of our body isn't harmful so i think some of the criticism just helps me understand that some of the things that have attached themselves to god's actual words are like unhelpful barnacles on a ship that we need to peel off they're not biblical they're things that we've added sometimes through our ignorance sometimes through our sin and so it's a good call whenever we get criticism to feel to look at what's true here there's some there's probably something a kernel of something in what they're saying that i really do need to take seriously and so i'm working on having that be my response when those kind of things come up so it sounds like really humility trying to lead the way is trying which is nobody should not come naturally well it doesn't to me either i don't think any of us but that's that's a really good really good word of encouragement um last question i have for you is one of the one of the arguments that we hear and you kind of hit on this is that it's the non-affirming culture that is what brings harm to lgbtq people now one response that i've heard to this is to compare we'll look at say sweden and other highly affirming cultures there's no statistical difference in the number of say gay people who are sad and who are just hurting emotionally speaking so that doesn't tell us what the cause is but it seems good reason to question the narrative that culture alone is the cause do you find that point convincing anything you would add to that because that comes up all the time when i'm in conversations so you're basically hearing it's our non-affirming culture that's causing all the problems yes it's our theology yeah and so i mean honestly if you're living in a in an environment where you're constantly getting harassed i mean that's that's gonna harm you right so there are still places in america where kids are coming out to their christian parents and getting kicked out of the house and told they get no money for college right that is harmful that does not represent jesus to anybody and that's not like something that happened in 1990 that's still happening in 2020 so we want to be clear that there is harm that's happening however the fact that we see these types of things like in sweden and other places obeying our desires is never the road to fulfillment not all of our desires are bad but when we make them ultimate they're they can't give us what they sell i remember reading rosaria butterfield on this one she said your non-believing gay friend's problem biggest problem isn't that she's gay it's her unbelief if we are not connected to jesus christ it doesn't matter what we have in the world we're we are going to fill ourselves with sex or money or power or drugs like you know what i mean we can't we are not designed to create our own meaning i remember even you know reading some interview tom brady after he won his like you know 20th super bowl or whatever being like is this it yep right you're at the pinnacle people worship you and you're like is this it so it's not surprising to me that even in places where the stigma has lessened and like honestly i'm not against the stigma lessening this in the sense that it promotes the safety and well-being of all people but it's not the answer to the soul's questions christ is the answer to the souls questions i think that's beautiful i love that you keep bringing us back to the gospel and the deepest yearning that we have of the human heart i think is is fantastic uh there are a couple more questions in here and i i apologize on respect uh one more question this one's been copied a couple times uh was sent earlier sorry i missed it uh this is it i promise rachel my sister-in-law is interested in christ but has a lesbian sister and feels like she would betray her if she draws closer to god how can i encourage her meaning her sister-in-law without building any hostility is a great question thank you tyler that's a fantastic question and i think it gets to the complexity that when we're considering these topics we're never just considering them in a vacuum we're thinking about these topics because we experience same-sex attraction or because someone in our life is gay and we care about them or you know i mean there's there's hundreds i mean you me the people who are watching we probably have hundreds of stories of how this is connecting to real lives that's right and and that really matters so i think one of the ways we want to encourage people is we want to take the fact that she feels like she'd be betraying her sister who's a lesbian is really important to dig into perhaps the church has really harmed her sister maybe there are ways that she's been hurt by christians right so i think it's important like that step of listening you might not have access to the sister but like coming alongside your sister-in-law and saying like hey like do you know tell me more about why you feel that way have you experienced have you seen your sister being harmed like what is what's behind that i think there's a lot there's a lot of potential legitimate reasons that are behind that but we want to hear really well because otherwise we might provide an answer to not the question and and then once we've listened well i want to think through highlighting that the gospel is the best case scenario for all of us and that for every single one of us it's going to confront things in us there's nobody who enters the kingdom or like ha ha the gospel said i'm good to go. the gospel calls us all dead so i think if we have promoted a gospel that says gay people are problematic but i'm i'm pretty good i just need a little dusting off that's an illegitimate gospel amen so i think we need to be able to communicate a gospel that says all of us do not deserve this all of us do not merit this and the gospel is going to confront us deeply at different places but equally deeply if we're being honest in front of the lord but it's also going to affirm us equally deeply that the gospel is a threat to us in our sinful self that's why jesus says we have to take up our cross but to me more compelling even than saying we need to take up our cross which is true and as a part of the christian life is that parable he tells in matthew where he says the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field and when a man found it he went and in his joy he sold everything he bought the field the gospel sometimes means we have to sell everything but we're doing it for joy the joy of what we found makes it worth it and if um if we're not able to communicate a gospel that shows jesus as that treasure then i um i think we have places to grow rachel this is great i want to commend those listening i think you can sense uh in your voice a very pastoral loving just caring heart for people commitment to the scriptures and giving them to the gospel this is one of my favorite books on uh really just the journey to faith finding god at yale in itself is fascinating but as it ties to questions around the larger lgbtq conversation born again this way by rachel gilson just a fantastic fantastic text thanks all those for great comments great discussion people were going back and forth on stuff that we were saying a ton of people saying they appreciate your ministry and love your book uh so some really positive feedback again if you've been watching this make sure you hit subscribe because we have some interviews and videos come up you'll not want to miss in fact there's a good chance i'll have william dempsky on one of the founders of the intelligent design movement uh he's kind of retired from it but he said he'd come back because he's a co-author to give me a sense of where the movement is at and what we can learn from it so him and next week have a colleague of mine from biola greg ansel who has written one of my all-time favorite books he was one of my first like christian buddies at yale oh that makes perfect sense i don't even think about that he's a colleague of mine at biola oh his daughter served on one of my staff teams with me oh my goodness that's so much i love greg he's awesome his book our deepest desires is one of my favorite apologetics books that i would i would seriously say is a game-changing book for people how you do evangelism and think about culture it was one i put down and i've been like telling everybody about so if you're the real deal he is very smart calling him out at biola thoughtfully evangelistic heart make sure you hit subscribe you will not want to miss that next week by the way if you've ever thought about studying apologetics i teach a full class on biblical sexuality have you ever thought about getting a master's there's information below about our apologetics program or if you say i'm not ready for masters too busy we actually have a certificate program and we will send you readings videos and kind of guide you through the process and for watching this below there's actually pretty significant discount uh so you won't want to miss that thanks so much for joining us thank you to uh megan for uh doing a great job in our apologetics program moderating this and i look forward to seeing everybody next time uh rachel don't take off everybody have a great evening we'll see you soon

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 104,968

Rating: 4.8586526 out of 5

Keywords: LGBTQ, identity, same-sex attraction, God, church, faith, yale, story, testimony, Cru, relationships, gay, lesbian, conversion, religion

Id: qbO-XtchZvc

Length: 65min 30sec (3930 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020