Episode 20 - LGBTQ

=== [NOTE: already transcribed elsewhere - please work on editing a different transcript - keeping this automatically generated transcript here for reference until the fully edited one, which already exists, is published] === hey everybody michael here today's episode is one we've been working on and talking about for a while now and i personally am a bit terrified to do it i can't really think of anything more hotly controversial in our culture right now than the lgbtq conversation and while we here at the liturgists are not shock jocks and have no interest in just creating controversy for controversy's sake we are also committed to open honest conversation because at the center of what we believe is that the table is big enough for all of us questions doubts beliefs and all so here's how we've decided to tackle this conversation we're gonna play you some stories stories of people who have longed to stay true to their faith and their sexual orientation stories of people who have compassion for people of other sexual orientations than themselves and either change their perspective or decide that they cannot in good conscience reinterpret the scriptures that for them so clearly teach that homosexuality is sin also to be clear from the top of this we would like to acknowledge that the people who contribute to the work of the liturgists are not all homogeneous on this subject we don't all agree about this and where we land on it is on a spectrum so rather than turn this into a debate or a preaching to the choir of either side episode we hope that these stories can give a little flesh and blood to both sides of a potentially very heated and charged discussion right now so that we may be able to at least hear one another clearly and think through an issue in a way that is a little more human and a little less issue if that makes any sense to start this episode off i want to introduce you to a guy named jj jj and i met three no you always say that we've known each other a long time we've known each other but little over a year that is not it is very true you always go oh we've been friends a long time about two years ago jj is a 39 year old evangelical christian minister he has his master's degree in theology and he's working on his phd from a relatively conservative christian academic institution jj is also a virgin that's right 39 year old virgin oh and jj is gay jj's the kind of guy you meet him you feel like he's been in your life a long time yeah so the deal is jj books me to speak at this school in uh california that's our friend don miller by the way he's the the dean of student slash chaplain and he he books me to speak at kind of retreat i go i speak at this retreat he's an unbelievably dynamic guy the students are crazy about him christian school with a little bit of a pentecostal leaning i grew up baptist so we grew up believing you guys were evil so that was a little weird a lot of little bit of dancing a little bit of tambourines anyway everybody loves jj we stay friends he's kind of trying to do some story stuff he's got some history channel wants them for something discovery channel wants them for something background and kind of acting in improv theater anyway my kind of guy the guy you sit around you talk about story and narrative that with we kept in touch jj comes to one of my conferences i don't know months later a few months later and i i finally get over to him jj how you doing how how the last few months been you know that's been really tough i came out of the closet and this is my introduction oh i didn't even realize that you were gay and he tells me the story now he's a dean of students at a christian school very conservative school and he comes out of the closet all sorts of open loops all sorts of story questions yeah and uh and jj and i have just stayed in touch ever since and we've had some amazing interactions can't fully talk about some of that stuff because it's a little bit behind the scenes but some leaders asked me to come in and kind of talk about the issue i don't know anything about the issue i just said can i bring jj he knows a lot about the issue jj comes in and in in into a secret meeting with some conservative leaders and some liberal leaders and he just tells his story and it's so beautiful and so moving and it humanized an issue for a lot of christians who are quite distant from the issue and maybe don't know anybody who's who grew up gay or who has that inclination and so jj and i have stayed in touch amazingly we're friends and we never talk about the issue because that's just not we i don't know just that never come up like i never i never go i'm a heterosexual and i had a baked potato for lunch and it was so good and as a heterosexual i really like a lot of vinegar in my barbecue sauce so we don't ever talk about it but you know we're on a podcast and you guys are trying to get ratings so here we go yeah i'm more of a chipotle guy as a gay man i love gaming chipotle barbecue yeah it's a the sweet and sour it's kind of the juxtaposition it's clear in leviticus sweet and sour is an abomination yeah it's a okay it's like barbecue sauce is straight vinegar yeah mixed fiber mixed fiber mixed barbecue sauce both the same thing yeah yeah i'm with you on that so what do you want to know i am yeah uh i'm an open book ish when did you know when did i know uh like five i can actually people have asked me that a lot since i uh began the process of coming out which was just a little over a year ago i told my parents last january i can remember very distinct moments where i had fear and those are the moments i can point back to that i can say i remember i knew then i mean i can talk about stories like when i was five and six but really when i fully kind of understood it was the first time was probably in the sixth grade when i was at the beach with my parents my mom i was doing something where i was kind of prancing or you know cocking my wrist or being you know talking kind of valley girl-ish or something and my mom grabbed me by the arm and pulled me aside and just said quit acting gay or people are gonna think you are and i remember being terrified that my mother knew and so that was like one moment and then my freshman year in high school there was a guy who had moved to our town from spain and his name was julio and he came out of the closet he was a junior i was a freshman and students in our school collected money to have him killed uh because he was gay and um and they collected a few hundred dollars and the police got involved and arrested the guy who had put out a hit essentially on julio and i remember it became the phrase people didn't say you know oh quit being a fag or something like that they said quit being a julio like that was the phrase that the derogatory phrase for effeminate qualities are to mock masculinity and um i remember being terrified at that moment so as a freshman in high school going i can never come out because my closest friends contributed money to have this guy killed and if if i came out then they would do the same thing for me there are definite like moments that are burned into my memory where i was terrified i was gonna be found out and i can remember at least back to sixth grade but i know that there's moments before that i could tell you things stories from when i was five that i just knew i was different it wasn't a sexual thing it wasn't like i was at five years old attracted to other boys or other men it was just there was something different about me and that i knew i had to hide do you identify as christian 100 100 i don't just i would say i don't just identify as christian i i identify as evangelical evangelical so you're evangelical yes and you start to realize somehow you have this orientation thing yeah take me through how that feels what happens in your brain well you know a lot of people the the polite christian way to talk about it is that i struggled with it i wouldn't say i ever struggled with it in the sense that i just never thought i really was i thought that i was in the process of changing so that if i if i confessed it to somebody else which i never told anybody if i acted on it which i never did that there would i was giving up essentially my faith in that god was a transformative god that he had the ability to transform me and so i just kept waiting for that prayer for that moment to date a pretty enough girl to date the right girl to serve god in a way that i would eventually be transformed i read if i read the right book or called the right hotline or something you know i i called the focus on the family hotline and you know talked to an anonymous counselor about being gay and those kind of things of where it was all there was always something there was always hope that at some point i would be transformed and no longer be gay so even though i knew i i would never say i identified as gay it just was something that like holy crap i hope they don't find out until i can change um but it was very hard you know i mean even remember i remember telling my mom in like the eighth grade she would ask me are there any girls in your life and i remember telling my mom please don't ever ask me that question again and she thought it was because i didn't want her to be nosy and it was because i was so ashamed that i didn't like girls so i and i didn't really know how much that hit my mom until i was in college and i had a girlfriend and my mom went and talked to my girlfriend and she said i'm not allowed to ask jj about you he told me in the eighth grade i'm not allowed to ask about girls and so she asked my girlfriend who eventually became my fiance about our relationship and so yeah i just it just kind of was something like i was always ashamed of and i always thought something is very very wrong with me and if i just did the right things or waited long enough that it would change and what changed that what made you finally like decide to come out i ended up in the hospital i was finishing my phd at an incredibly conservative evangelical institution which to be honest i may get kicked out of for doing this podcast so that's still on the edge i'll talk about that later but i was i was a professor i was a dean of students at a college and um i ended up in the hospital with heart problems i actually kind of collapsed when i was teaching a class so i go to the hospital and they hook up all the machines to me and all the wires are in me and everything and the doctor eventually comes back in the room and says um says yeah actually you didn't have a heart attack you didn't have a stroke nothing is physically wrong with you um you it's probably just anxiety and anxiety often mimics heart attacks and so we just kind of sat there and he talked to me for a little bit he gave me a number of a counselor and then kind of left and as he left i kind of just lost it i started to break down and cry and it wasn't because of relief or anything like that it was because i was disappointed that i wasn't dying i saw this as my opportunity for an out it wasn't i never became suicidal i never actually moved to a place of where i was going to intentionally harm myself but there were many times that i prayed that i wouldn't wake up the next morning in fact i had told my family and most people in my life that i didn't think i would live past 40 i just you know and i spoke of it almost like a prophecy or like that it was a premonition that i'm not going to live past 40 which gave me a great excuse to not get married in the evangelical world it was kind of like oh he has a calling and he has this other thing so and he thinks he's going to die early so that's why he's not going to get married but it wasn't really a premonition or a prophecy it was more of a prayer and it wasn't i really basically kind of tried to make a deal with god and i said okay i'm going to give you everything everything that i have all my into my life my being just don't make me live past 40. don't make me do it a loving god would not make me live past 40 in this kind of understanding of who i am and and i was 38 when i ended up in the hospital so it was i think it was a combination of being close to 40 it was a combination of all the stress that was going on in my life and when i realized that i had come to a point of saying i would rather die than live i knew something was wrong i knew that i knew enough to know that that was not right and that something needed to change and so i kind of began the process of figuring out and laying the foundation for how i was going to come out and so i didn't come out at the school i didn't come out and then get fired to leave the school i left the school so that it wouldn't be a big kind of ordeal or scandal or anything i stepped down from my position and kind of couched it as that i was pursuing my tv career um in order to kind of make it not a big deal why didn't you want it to be a big deal one i wasn't sure where i stood on things and the act alone of kind of bearing your soul to your family and friends and essentially telling them that you've been lying your whole life is quite a bit to bear on top of then like a scandal and uh disappointing i come from a very pastoral background my my dad's a pastor i was a pastor i'm an ordained pastor still my brothers are both pastors and my sister is an ordained pastor so um within my like just my cousins i think there's my cousins and aunts and uncles are somewhere around 13 ordained ministers um or professional pastors so it's kind of the family business and i don't mean that negatively um it just was not i knew that that was going to be a heavy thing to walk through um and all the people that i've pastored and ministered to over the years so creating some kind of scandal which i knew it would be i wasn't i couldn't carry that too okay so you get the picture jj's quite the christian better christian than i am yet there are a lot of christians that would say that jj is a sinner a pervert who needs to repent who needs to get his mind straight i know this because that's sort of how i thought when i was a young evangelical christian i grew up in a tiny town in wisconsin and i didn't really know anybody that was gay there was this one guy that i barely knew in high school and uh he ended up coming out of the closet and then he ended up dying of aids and in my world being gay it was it was like this perversion of the natural order of things right and sure some people might have a propensity towards being gay just like other people had the propensity towards alcoholism or being violent or something but that certainly did not justify homosexual behavior the bible clearly forbade homosexuality so that was the end of the conversation love the sinner hate the sin i pretty much thought that gay people had to just overcome being gay like i had to overcome you know my short temper so science mike give us a little science here about this issue will you what's the science of sexuality is it just like overcoming any other sin like greed or lying or is this issue more complex than that whenever we consider the gay debate we think about gender and most people think about gender as a binary you have male and female you have boys and girls you have men and you have women and then it gets in the question of whether you know people are born with an orientation or whether it's a choice and what's natural science starts to blow all those ideas apart pretty quickly gender is an interesting construct but it's also uniquely human there are asexual animals in fact in evolution a sexual reproduction far predates sexual reproduction sex was invented effectively to help multicellular organisms compete with the much more rapid mutation and evolution rate for microbial life um it helped deal with infection by increasing the entropy rate of our dna replication it's kind of the the evolutionary onus for sex um and when we look at gender in the animal kingdom there are plenty of animals which are both male and female are there even animals that can spontaneously change their gender from male to female so if you think about clownfish for example which are vertebrates and complex animals they're all born male and the most dominant male turns into a female to allow breeding that's is that a gay clownfish no of course not when we look at sexual dimorphism in humans who are much more complex than clownfish we see a very complex picture emerge so humans are pretty much without gender for the first six or seven weeks after conception we start with a genetic potential for gender in our chromosomes but that doesn't start to actually have any effect on our physiology for six to seven weeks at seven weeks or so you start to have sexual dimorphism and our tissues start to differentiate right now all human fetuses in fact all mammal fetuses will develop into females unless there are these critical moments where dna interacts with hormones and the base tissues to create a male if these interactions occur properly as they do in the vast majority of developing infants and embryos then you get a boy or a girl but you're talking about the same base tissue that becomes either labia or a scrotum ovaries or testicles a clitoris or a penis and in most cases you get a baby boy or a baby girl in a way that appears to fit a gender binary but that doesn't always happen sometimes the penis didn't get enough hormones and it stays nearly the size of a clitoris and you have micropenis or you have a female clitoris that got a lot of male hormones and suddenly very large and penis like you can have a child born with micro penis and internal testicles and in fact about one in a thousand children born are gender ambiguous it means modern trained scientists and medical professionals with all the equipment we have today cannot make a clear determination of whether that child is male or female now you can also have children which appear to be obviously one or the other but as the child goes on uh the wrong or no secondary sex characteristics appear and this is often based on genetics there are boys who have two x chromosomes which is what you associate with women and there are girls who have an x and a y chromosome which is what you associate with men and when you have uh you can even have women who have two x chromosomes plus a y chromosome and these women make up a disproportionate percentage of women in female prison populations so what we think of as this simple dichotomy is in fact remarkably complex and this ladders up into something where not only is gender complex but so is orientation strict sexual preference and orientation is a somewhat uniquely human phenomenon most animals in the animal kingdom exhibit same-sex sexual interaction the vast majority including primates including mammals including dolphins you know elephants other large brain complex mammals exhibit these behaviors but you know if we talk about specifically humans and the issue of choice and gender and orientation there are some pretty interesting things to look at first of all if our gender is somewhat ambiguous if someone is possesses both sexual organs or it's not clear which set of sexual organs that they have how do they decide who their wired orientation is what if they're attracted to both genders or neither genders how do we determine what would be straight for them or what about boys that have normal penises but never get any secondary sex characteristics associated with men or boys who naturally grow breasts that happens what if you look at people that actually report orientations which is the sociological phenomenon that we kind of construct on top of our biological genders and we find that in blind studies gay men and straight women report being attracted to the same sense on t-shirts of people they can't see they're both attracted to men even if they can't identify which sense consciously are male and female they they their preferences that correlate with females or the fact that the structures in gay men's brains uh some structures can be remarkably like the structures in uh straight women's brains and different than straight males brains that starts to undermine this choice paradigm the thing is scientifically speaking sexual attraction is really complicated we have all these cognitive factors at play where we identify if a stimulus is sexual or not then we decide whether it's a sexual stimulus we're attracted to and and then we get to an arousal state cognitively there's a completely separate process that's in our physiology that involves our heart rate and the our genital activation our sweat glands all these physical reactions and the fact is in studies those two things aren't always related our bodies respond much like any other animal in the animal kingdom to visual or any other form of sexual stimulus but the cognition in humans regarding gender and orientation is remarkably complex and poorly poorly understood but the fact is biologically speaking these clear categories of male or female or straight and gay they don't exist they are human constructs projected onto the science i certainly identify as completely male and completely straight and i'm not saying that most of us don't easily feel like we fit into this binary but the fact is the scientific picture backs up the ones we marginalize the most the people who don't fit into the majority position biology neuroscience even dna reinforces the idea that our popular conceptions of gender and orientation are simplistic at best and outright harmful to some people at worst i want to introduce you to somebody else this is tabitha i would have to preface that my story is mine the stories are very varied across the spectrum i'm a transsexual or trans um i was born male female now i transitioned in 2006 when i started hormones and i went full time with a name change in 2007 but one particular thing that i've noticed is everyone's story is so varied with uh how they approach faith there's many that are trans and they're often very active in church and then they're kicked out of church and a lot of times they become very strong opponents against church and so that's one thing that has been unique to my story is i've stayed very involved with church even though i was stealth at many of the churches and i never told them my full story mostly because i didn't see it that it mattered for me i'm even though i am a trans woman it doesn't define who i am and so i found that if people didn't know they couldn't judge and then they would just treat me like a normal human because that's who i am so today you're a straight woman with the right to marry who you choose right but your road to that freedom was much more difficult than someone who was physically born a straight woman right could you tell us something about that journey when i was growing up i really felt like i was a weird guy i realized i was very different than everyone like people said um go hang out with the boys you keep hanging out with the girls i prefer playing hopscotch and and all that stuff and it just felt normal like i didn't realize there was anything like i loved playing with my sister's dollhouse more than they liked playing it and and so people started having to talk with me teachers my mom and and dad they would like be like well boys don't do that like i wanted to play dress-up you know i was like i loved being the princess um and so because i thought it was normal it just seems so natural that um but it was squashed because you know like boys do this so i tried playing sports and that didn't work out at all i was like i don't want to hurt myself i'm with you there actually yeah but i held it in i got in trouble for cross-dressing a few times when i was uh as a teenager but i learned to hide very very well why'd you learn to hide because it it wasn't good to be a guy that liked to wear girl clothes how did you know that from what my mom told me actually she took me to therapy at 13 because i i was yelling at her and wanted sense saying like you don't love me i was like you um and i didn't feel loved and i didn't understand love because i didn't love myself because every time i did what was natural like how i held my hands how i stood i was constantly told by my mom that i was acting like a girl like and i had a very high voice growing up so my mom would like when i'm on the phone she would like do this with like her hand she'll lower it telling me to drop my voice because she's like it sounds like a girl and i'm just like i'm just talking you know i'm not trying to do anything different but at 19 i moved down to nashville and uh i told myself that i was gonna be a good christian man and uh i get married have family and as and so i actually made a covenant with god saying that this is um this is my moment that i'm gonna do the right thing i'm gonna put my sin behind me i'm a new place and all that so it lasted about three weeks before i'm at goodwill buying clothes again and i'm just like really i can't what's wrong with me and i was just so depressed because i'm like i can't shake this it's just so natural so just to be clear you tried to choose a more traditional gender path to will yourself into it absolutely like who in their right mind would choose to to want to be another gender and risk everything in their life but i did and uh and i came out to my mom and my roommate at the time who worked in the church as a worship leader and they both talked me out of it i believed it was a sin so i wait until i was 23 and i was in such deep depression that all i could think about was killing myself and so um i i went home uh 2005 for the last time for the holidays um that was the last christmas that i ever had um and uh then in january right for my birthday i was told i was gonna be an uncle well that really shook me up because i don't want to be an uncle i don't know how to be an uncle but i can be annie and and and so that turned into such deep depression that i started planning my funeral i started playing what songs and what verses to use and i had it in such details like this is scaring me actually like i'm really gonna do this and uh the day i was gonna go out to buy bullets i just went home and uh and just bawling my eyes out and i was like i know what i need to do and so i ordered at the time i ordered hormones online and then a week later i took my first pill and i never stopped from that day on but throughout transition i lost lost my job that i had for four and a half years because he was a southern baptist deacon and uh he he said that it was immoral for someone to change genders i lost most of my family my mom told me that she would rather have that i killed myself and i would um that she would have her son at least to barry than than me as her daughter as she continually likes to remind me that she has two daughters and one son not three three daughters there's a lot of depth to all that that a lot of a lot of pain because everybody every child wants their family to be involved my dad took me out of the will and i said that uh he said well if you're not going to be my son anymore then you know i'm taking you out of my my will and a lot of my family like my sisters won't talk to me at all they uh they'll never they never asked any questions they never gave me a chance to say anything i've actually run into them out in public before and uh they just turn and walk the other direction and the reason my mom has said that i'm not allowed at that at christmas is because there's kids there and she said that she doesn't want them to turn out gay and i was like how i don't understand how my presence can turn a child gay but that's what they're afraid of and so i was told multiple times that um all my my sisters having kids that they will never know that i ever existed and so it's hard to keep faith when like you receive that kind of comments and trauma like verbal trauma i assume your family is religious they are i was actually the most religious in the family but oddly enough i was the one that pleaded to go to church well it had that has to be so because i was introduced to you as a a faithful member of this church and the person who does one of the most difficult and thankless jobs in the church which is running the lyrics in powerpoint which you it's that horrible combination of requires constant attention but not that engaging and if you miss a beat the entire building knows so people only notice if you mess up and yet you who so many churches would reject choose to invest in that role and in the community of faith why yes good question i've loved doing that i've i've done powerpoint since windows 3.1 um i've always enjoyed it it's it's fun uh it's actually how i feel like i worship like i feel weird when i sit in the uh and the pews or seats you know for weeks on end i'm just like because like while i'm singing i'm like hitting the like at my fingers bouncing and all that stuff it's just i i've loved doing it but for many many years i've had to not tell the church you know about my story and just kind of just do it because i love you know being able to worship with all these people but at the same time i've had emotional disconnect i've been afraid to actually meet people like on a real basis because i always feel like if i have to leave in a hurry like you know it's like a board mission it's like the the words out and all that that um i'd you know be kicked out and so that would hurt me more and i've had so much hurt you can't be hated for something that they don't know this is preston sprinkle he's the author of a new book coming out about this subject and preston is an interesting guy because he's quite liberal on some issues he's actually like a pacifist you know he's anti-war into violence he's a annihilationist which basically means he doesn't believe in a traditional evangelical view of hell but while he has gay friends and while their stories keep him up at night he says he can't bring himself to be in the affirming camp for lgbt folks and he's written a book on the issue entitled people to be loved why homosexuality is more than an issue and he was kind enough to sit down and talk with us on the phone okay cool so preston thank you for being part of this conversation with us thanks michael and mike for having me on this is going to be i think important good conversation to me it it the heart of this question or this debate is that this is about people and many of these people are my my friends my good friends and so i just in no way do i am i simply interacting with words on a page or political junk going on in the media like this is about um you know matt leslie west friends of mine that are wrestling with faith and sexuality so that's that's kind of my overall kind of entry into this discussion so with the friends has has your position on this evolved when thinking about this subject of sexuality do you see this any differently than you did 10 years ago or is it i mean where where are you at right now so if you when i started to dig into like researching homosexuality you know i began just by reading a bunch of books and something happened a few months into my quote-unquote research is i said you know what i'm going to actually spend 50 percent of my time reading books and reading blogs and then 50 of my time talking to gay and lesbian transgender people and so i i literally have kept that over the years and it absolutely wrecked me i used to sleep like a like a baby i used to sleep like mike's dog right now on the floor and you know i don't sleep well anymore i i'm haunted by this topic i'm haunted by the pain the cut the church has caused gay and lesbian people i'm sickened by the almost unanimous testimony of gay and lesbian people who were raised in the church were dehumanized and therefore have searched for love and compassion and community elsewhere and that that's just absolutely insane it's so contrary to the way of christ and um i know some people may be scratching their heads wait a minute wait a minute are you still on the non-affirming side and yeah i actually am but i don't think that that at all should hinder interrupt you know the church's absolute radical one-way compassion and acceptance towards all humanity so my take is a little bit strange but i think interacting with people and just shutting my mouth and listening to story after story after story and becoming friends with so many beautiful people made in god's image has caused me to interact with this issue much differently and i i truly came before god and said look if if the church has misunderstood what your word has said then i will not only change my traditional view that i've inherited really but i will be a prophet and and stand up and proclaim a affirmation of same-sex relations now and and some people say well you can't do that look nobody can read the text unbiasedly everybody has a lens that they read it through that's true you know i think that that's we all bring baggage to the text but you know i've tried to look at all the evidence as fairly as i can so from a biblical standpoint i do think i do still still embrace and affirm a well affirm a non-affirming position um but i don't even like that phrase because my position is radically affirming of of people and is very much against the dehumanization that is still rampant in the church first of all i want to say like i appreciate like one of the reasons i excited for you to come on the show is there's become such a binary view on this issue in the culture including the religious culture that if you don't accept same-sex marriages you are bigoted you're whatever and even though i'm like just radically affirming like way way way out there it's always grieved me because you kind of typified your position as unusual but i actually think the way you approach this is more common to the average evangelical in the pew than what the leadership talks about what i experience with people i actually know is they may not be for same-sex marriage or same-sex relationships but it's an issue they struggle with it they they are grieved by the dehumanization and so i thought it was really really great actually to hear you give voice to something i think many quote non-affirming unquote people look at this issue in your opinion as someone who obviously studies the bible more than i do um is do you think the bible is clear on the morality of monogamous same-sex relationships you know i think clarity is a spectrum through the lens of fallible human interpretation everything has a measure of unclarity i mean i wouldn't read the bible and come up with the trinity really i mean that that comes through you know a lot of discussion and hammering out and trying to you know correlate one god with three persons that are being labeled god and so on and so forth so i mean i yeah i don't even know how to answer that question i think that uh here's what i would say i would say that it is less clear than some of the fundamentals of the faith justification by grace through faith alone deity of christ you know the existence of god okay but i would say i still think it is more clear than some of the disputables uh end time systems um uh you know you know some people compare it to like the dietary laws you know in the first century you have jewish christians who held to the dietary laws of the old testament you have gentiles who didn't and it's kind of like up for grabs and i just don't i do see it as not that uh ambiguous i mean for one we have clear scriptural reasons for saying that the dietary laws have ended we just don't see anything in the new testament that seems to reverse the same-sex laws in the old testament in fact we see some precedent for maintaining those loss so yeah i don't know i mean 85 percent i don't know the degree of clarity but so what would you do with the arguments for example that orientation is a construct today didn't exist at the time scripture was written or that the words we used to translate to the term homosexual is not analogous to a modern uh committed monogamous uh homosexual couple let me the second one i would agree there is no greek word in greek or in the new testament that's that should be translated homosexual um i mean the ancient world the roman view sexuality that they didn't they didn't think in terms of gay or straight they thought in terms of masculine and feminine you could be a you know a guy who is only having sex with other men and as long as you're the active partner nobody would say you're like gay or feminine they would say all right rock on dude you're you're in control you know and you could have you could be a guy who only has sex with women in the first century in the roman world and yet if you're kind of shaved your chest hair and dressed in soft clothes you would be considered effeminate so so the categories back then or let me say the categories now where we're identifying people in terms of sexual orientation you can't map those categories on the first century so any all that to say mike um any translation that translates like in first corinthians 6 if you see the word homosexual that that's that's a bad translation so i agree with that the bible doesn't condemn gay people it doesn't prohibit being a homosexual person i don't like the phrase homosexual actually but um but it does i believe forbid same-sex uh sexual intercourse um without using kind of these categories of sex like sexual identity that we have today um to your first question i i would actually disagree with um you know some people said the idea of sexual orientation didn't exist back then there's actually evidence that it that it did of course well let me say this not well i mean i meant orientation then and orientation now are viewed dissimilarly right okay yeah i would say that there's some dissimilar there is evidence and this is actually there's a really good book written by a lesbian scholar bernadette bruton and she has showed evidence that there was an idea in the first century around the first century that some people are born with a fixed desire a fixed desire to have sexual relations with people the same sex especially among women you see this so i don't think i mean the argument that it didn't exist at all back then therefore the new testament writers could have been aware of it i think that doesn't can't really stand historically but i wouldn't even question whether or not a christian worldview determines um whether or not a behavior is prohibited or not based on the internal desires so i don't even think i i still think that even if they are not aware of what we now call sexual orientation and by the way our understanding of sexual orientations it's not like we have it all nailed down either you know i agree and sexuality is a spectrum it's not like a black and white thing so but even if the new testament writers were aware that some people are born with a fixed orientation i just don't think a christian worldview would allow for them to say oh okay well if that's the case and the behavior would therefore be allowed like that just doesn't fit the we're born with all sorts of fixed desires that go against god's will but what does that say about god it says that we're born into a fallen world and we have birth defects we have people born with brains on the outside of their heads that the fact that people are born with a desire that i believe a desire for a behavior that is contrary to god's will that doesn't my view you know christian world but that doesn't conflict with that at all so i spent some time in atheist land um and atheist land is is actually a better theme park than most people think you know they charge me twice as much the lines are very efficient and all the rides have evidence that they're fun you know it's a good place and when i look at how we describe sin and creation from a christian perspective i have to admit it seems kind of kooky okay um because we say things like well just because you know because of sin because of a fallen nature we're born with all sorts of desires that are sinful well one there's not a human being alive who chose to be born doesn't exist and there's not a human being alive including the supposed adam and eve who would have been responsible for their propensities prior to their creation an american court of law if a manufacturer who is human designed a product that then was faulty and had some undesired behavior that manufacturer is legally liable and so i have a little trouble like just saying well you know because of the fall or because of sin or whatever these things now it's okay to judge this activity unethical or immoral because a person through no action of their own suddenly is unable to experience and express love and romance in the way that i am simply because i have some minor biochemical differences as a result of nature and nurture conflating together sure um and that i've never been able to come to a peace with that so i'll admit like contrary to maybe matthew vines or some other christian scholars i think paul probably would have been against uh modern um same-sex attraction i just think paul would have been wrong well there i i yeah that's fair man i i appreciate your honesty and man there's i i will go even further i think there's all sorts of stuff in scripture doesn't make sense i mean when jesus said love your enemies forget that that doesn't make any why why would i love my enemies somebody comes unbeaten on me or like trying to harm me or take my stuff like what you know but the outcome the fruit for example of love your enemy um two things one that love can inspire a reciprocity of love and an end of a cycle of violence so it has this outcome that is beautiful and if i dare go a little hebraic increase his shalom in the world and if you um if your enemy doesn't respond if your enemy responds in hate for example as the state of alabama did to the reverend martin luther king suddenly that violence is all the more disgusting as a result of christ-like behavior so as as somewhat of a christian moral pragmatist when i look at scripture i don't just look at the hermeneutic i don't just look at the exit jesus i also look kind of like a secularist at the outcome of the behavior and from that perspective i just have a really difficult time lumping in two men or women who want to spend their life together with someone who murders or someone who is even prideful even a much less major sin than you know killing someone because if i look at the outcome of this union to me it see it seems like it can be done in a way that's compatible with making the kingdom of god present on earth no that's good i would say that most christian virtues or acts of moral good do have identifiable positive outcomes but not all i i think that i mean if i light if i light a candle and burn incense to some little deity in my house that's not hurting anybody you know i mean i could do it maybe i don't invite my kids into something i do privately or just because there's not some clear destruction that's harming creation hardening other people doesn't mean that the moral act or doesn't in and of itself determine whether or not the moral act is good and i do think we have to console and here's where my funding roots are going to come out i guess but i do think that we do have to consult scriptural revelation for ultimate and further guidance on what is the creator's moral will well to me i this was one you know as i've wrestled through this issue through the years it seems to only come to scriptural argument and when you're talking about a tricky ethical issue it would be helpful to speak especially for in terms of people that don't care about the bible if you're going to talk about morality talk about ethics there should be other ways of talking about it than just arguing about what the bible says because the you know paul didn't have uh paul too you know paul didn't have the the new testament to rely on when he's thinking about issues like that there's got to be other ways of as human beings how do we wrestle with moral and ethical issues i can teach my daughter that stealing is wrong without quoting any bible verses at her i can and that's pretty much any major moral stance that i have i can talk about it in a way without quoting scripture um this would be the only issue that i can think of personally that when you talk about the morality of it how do you can you talk about it in any way other than just the bible or you know a religious tradition how about divorce how about two couples or two couples two people they get married they love each other they don't have any kids for five years and also once they just slowly kind of fall out of love like they actually they they're friends they they enjoy each other but they just like i just really don't want to be married to you anymore in fact i found somebody else that i haven't touched the other person no emotional involvement but i i really would rather be with this other person and the spouse says that is so cool because i actually found somebody too that is i think would be better for me you know like i again no disrespect i enjoy as a friend would maintain friends there's no like i don't see why that would not only that that wouldn't be a positive thing even like like why would they have to stay together there's no kids there's no hard feeling there's no bitterness anger um and maybe you would say in that case they should but um again i would at least and i'm very i'm a big fan of you know using tradition and reason and experience alongside scripture i still and maybe we would disagree on this and that's fine i still would say that those other three means of determining morality should be submitted to scripture and and really to me and we i don't know if we want to go off on what is scripture and all that but i mean i mean if there is a creator god who knows better than creation and if he did reveal his will through written scripture that i i just i don't want to and i understand the abuses of people using scripture to beat people with their heads and and you know that i think there may be some reaction to that in the church but either scripture does capture god's will or it doesn't i'm curious as i've known you you have a relationship with the bible that seems more conservative than somebody in your position i mean you know realizing you're gay you would have to almost kind of re-understand the way you interpret the bible a lot of people would say you would lean more to the left dismiss some of it yeah as i hear you talk about the bible it's actually kind of a conservative view of scripture yeah talk to me about the fact that you're dean of students at a christian school yeah they're all basically studying the bible you're seeing the bible the same way they're seeing the bible and yet this bible is according to conservative understanding the bible rejecting you yeah and dismissing you yeah talk to me just about the bible well um you know i would say first off that there's many days that i wonder if i'm wrong i think that's where i start from you're wrong about your interpretation of the bible or your sexuality is wrong uh both that that's not it's not a given for me i would say that i don't walk in this place of where i say everybody else's people on the conservative side are absolutely wrong and i'm absolutely right um in my understanding of scripture i walk through a lot of things and i can explain all that i can debate both sides of the issue till i'm blue in the face my master's is in theology you know i can do this um i teach debate for a living but so much of this topic is nuanced and so much of it is based on issues that involve allowing for gray and i live in the gray a lot but i hold fast to the fact that there is a god who loves me and who created me and who actually longs for me to be in relationship with others in authenticity and so when i look at actual scripture there's you know i can look at the individual scriptures that talk about um you know homosexuality in particular and i can come to a conclusion that like you know much of the individual scriptures can be interpreted differently can also be contextually understood differently as part of a holiness code or in reference to idol worship or not even interpreted as homosexuality more pedophilia i understand those arguments i actually believe and this may be an interesting thing but i actually believe if you went back and asked paul at the time that he wrote the scriptures which he didn't have an understanding for what we can't contextually now understand homosexuality if you went back and asked paul do you believe that a male with a male relationship is okay i believe he probably would have said no and so to actually debate the individual verbiage of the strict scripture to me is not a strong argument um i move towards so i can debate both sides and i can kind of move them one way or the other but there's a lot of other scriptures that let's say we do land black and white on the issues homosexuality there's a lot of other issues in scripture that we'd land black and white on that we have moved and offered grace for um for instance divorce is kind of the classic one that people bring up it's pretty clear how scripture lands on divorce but the way we actually contextualize that in christian community is very different than we do homosexuality so let's say they're both black and white well for some reason divorce we don't quite treat contextually the same as homosexuality there's some gray on our interpretation of what it what homosexuality is referred to in scripture but even if you land black and white on those scriptures we kind of go to the next level of interpretation of scripture and we take context and we take cultural context and we understand that i think that there are some things that were landed on black and white like divorce that then we have made room for in the church and said well this is what the bible says but this is actually how we're going to treat people who are divorced and remarried and so i think there's room for grace even if we land on black and white on the issue of homosexuality there's room for grace contextually for how to walk that out relationally but let's say we even land black and white on that and we say that homosexuality is different than divorce it's black and white it's absolutely against god's word contextually so scripturally and then contextually i then kind of look at the overall arc of the story of god and i see a god who constantly is moving towards his people and constantly making room for relationship and engaging people in sometimes areas that were not necessarily his perfect will so we even have paul saying that like if it was my choice you would not be married you should not be married you should stay single so god's almost perfect will according to paul is that everybody would stay single and yet there's a move towards marriage that allows to redeem the sexual sin of lust in the context of paul talking to the people he says you should stay single you should 100 stay single if you add my will you should be like me and so god's perfect will according to paul's singleness but if you burn with lust then you should get married so there is a moment of movement towards away from god's perfect will towards the movement of redemption through relationship that allows people to enter back into relationship with god and be redeemed and that's kind of the overall arc of the story of god from the beginning to the end is this god who continually moves towards a loving accepting grace-filled relationship with people who consistently fall short of what his perfect will is and ultimately he sent his son to kind of cover all of that and that does not mean that then we should go sin more but it means that there it's not quite as black and white as everybody wants to make it and so i tend to go if i see that there is gray in the actual scripture there's in scriptural interpretation of the words if there's some gray in the contextual understanding and then there's some gray in the overall arc of the story of god i begin to say okay god i'm walking in this into a relationship potentially dating somebody of the same sex not out of arrogance but in humility and saying god i'm seeking your heart for me and maybe the transformation that i was looking for where god was trying i wanted god to make me more christ-like by not being gay anymore maybe the transformation of becoming more christ-like actually comes by entering into a committed relationship with somebody else who makes me better that's amazing i remember sitting in you not very many months ago in a room full of leaders on an extremely conservative side and a arguably liberal side a beautiful conversation i think you and i both would agree yeah and a woman was given space in that time and she had a very conservative position and she opened up about this conservative position taught about the conservative position basically saying you were a sinner and we've got to make a stand on this issue and i remember privately thinking the bible that you're using to make this stand forbids you as a woman teaching men anything and you need to go to your husband so that he can teach you what the bible actually says so you have a very contextual view yeah that benefits you where you're saying well no let's lean left on the issue of women teaching and going to our husbands to help us interpret the bible let's just ignore that but have a very conservative view about my friend jj i remember just going this is driving me crazy how you have such a gracious walk in within these issues is unbelievable to me let me ask you this you struggled with this you thought it might be a sin you wanted to obey god and you had an inclination to a man you had never kissed a guy before but there was a guy in your life you began to see him a little bit and uh his sister got sick yeah and he needed you to be a pastor in the life of his family yeah and you decided not to do it and yet i think something really meaningful and beautiful in a teaching moment happen in your life will you tell us what happened yeah this was actually after i so after i came out i went on a 40-day journey intentionally where i actually spent a lot of time in silence and solitude and monasteries and i really sought god in everything and so i would spend a week i actually called it fasting and feasting and so i went to a monastery for a week of silence and solitude other than the only non-silence was with vespers with um priests and then um i went to vegas for three days and it wasn't like uh you know the the debauche debauchery kind of vegas i sat by a pool you just went for the buffet yeah yeah and trust me yeah yeah yeah yeah speaking you can make that happen yeah gluttony so and then i went to another monastery for a few days and then i went on a wine tour and i really was trying to seek god in all of this and um i came out of that hoping for like specific answers and really what i got from god is i love you you have people who love you and you're gonna be okay and i kind of flipped my birds to the heavens and said um thanks i already know that but i didn't and so it kind of began the process of trying to figure out okay so this is what god's given me i love you you have people who love you you're gonna be okay and you need to figure out how to walk in your context with christ in all of this act justly love mercy and walk humbly and um and so i actually began the process of kind of going on i met a guy and we went out and um and we we met a couple times we met at lunch and then we had dinner and he was from new zealand and his uh sister was dying of cancer so he was here taking care of his sister and uh we ended up making out one night and the next day he called me and he said my sister is dying and she doesn't have anybody who will come give her last rites she was catholic and she said well you he said will you come pray with her and my family and my first response was i don't do that anymore that's what i said to him i don't do that anymore and he said please i can't get anybody to come pray with me and i said i i don't feel comfortable doing that anymore i and his family actually didn't know that he was out and i just kept saying i don't do that anymore i don't do it anymore and some of it was that i didn't have the desire to and then there was part of me that felt like i just made out with a guy i'm not sure i can walk in there in the name of jesus and speak on his behalf anymore without being struck by lightning i'm kind of the person who takes a lot of time to process through things so it's like oh i made out with this guy now i'm going to take a moment and it was the first guy he'd ever kissed right yeah so this is not a habit but it's not something you know no it's the first time how old were you do you mind me asking 38 i think maybe 39 at the time i don't know it's one of those and um so anyway so by the way i'm sorry but i don't know any heterosexuals that have that sort of discipline statistically there are a lot of folks who say that premarital sex is wrong but indulge in yeah a lot yeah at the christian theology of school yeah i've taken many of their confessions and not really so so yeah so finally he actually convinced me to come in and pray with his sister so i go into the hospital and um she is on her last breath literally she has tubes in her nose there's blood coming out of her nose her arms are about the size of her wrist and she's covered in bruises and she's very drugged up and there's a monitor that's monitoring her blood pressure and her oxygen rate in her blood and i stood probably about 10 feet away from her when i walked in the room i really did not feel that i was able to do this i didn't feel like i had the right or the ability or even the permission truthfully to step into this context so i stood away from her for a while and i was talking with her brother and her husband and her and as we were talking she started to tell me how she knew she was going to die and what that would feel like if her oxygen level dropped below there was a number and it was like around 90 and she said if it dropped below 88 that they were gonna have to intubate and if they intubated they'd already signed a do not resuscitate order which meant that she was not going to live and if her oxygen level dropped that low it meant that she was drowning in her own lung fluids and so she's talking to me and she's crying and she's telling me how she knows how she's going to die she knows what it feels like to drown in her own liquid and it scares her and she's terrified of this dying and as she's explaining it to me because she's kind of on drugs and she has to talk she keeps removing the oxygen tubes from her nose and it makes her oxygen level drop so her oxygen they're telling me the nurse is saying if it drops below 88 we're intubating so i'm watching it drop 8 90 89 88 87 and the nurses come in because the alarms are going off and they're saying you have to put your tubes back in but she's crying and she wants me so badly to know what she's going through and she wants to know she's okay with god and so i kind of see the moment as it's like dropping below and i just walk over and i and the nurse puts her oxygen tube back in i just kind of put my hand on her leg and i start to recite every verse that i can think about about peace and i talk about how god is the god of peace and shalom peace and what that means and that he's the prince of peace and his peace passes all understanding and and i just start talking about how you know about the prayer shawl and just something to kind of calm her down and as i'm doing this her heart rate is dropping and her auction level is kind of rising and and i say to her you know do you have you accepted jesus as your lord and savior and she said yes and i said you know he's forgiven you and you're fine because she kind of lived a wild life and i said you're gonna see him and i said and you no matter what happens you need to have that peace no matter what happens from here on out have the peace of god and so i said you know may i pray for you and so i kind of prayed free form for a bit and then i kind of closed with the rabbinical blessing of may the lord bless you and keep you may turn his face towards you and be gracious to you and shine his face towards you and give you his shalom peace and i talked about shalom peace before that and i looked around the room and her brother is crying her husband's crying the nurses are behind me and they're crying and then i just hugged them all and i left and the nurses came out and just talked about the experience and how they hadn't experienced something like that before and then that afternoon i got a picture of her walking around the hospital she died a few days later and i really believe you know i'm a little bit of a mystic in some things and i really believe kind of god allowed me to experience that because i was so ready to walk away from who god had called me to be in the sense of loving people and bringing them into the presence of jesus and um and i was like i kissed a guy i'm done and basically the next day god was like get back in there and i think if he would have given if i would have had a week or a month i'm not sure i would have done it but the next day it's like all right you know and it felt to me like when you know peter comes back to jesus and and and you know they're standing on the shore after he's risen and jesus says hey peter do you love me and he goes yeah i love you he goes all right feed my sheep and i could imagine peter just kind of going what but i just didn't go ah do you love me feed my lambs but i just i did not do you love me yeah all right feed my sheep and i felt like that's what jesus was kind of saying to me was like do you love me and i was like yeah but i just kissed a guy and he goes no no huh do you love me yeah i do but i d ah we got work to do and i felt like that was that moment of jesus just saying do you love me yes or no i said yes okay we got work to do so shut up get over yourself for a little bit and get back in the game and that didn't mean that i was like i had everything figured out and that everything was going to be okay but it meant kind of coming back to that place of understanding god loves me i have people who love me and i'm going to be okay and i'm i'm the same person i'm the same person who trained pastors in india i'm the same person who is a bible college professor i'm the same person who you know one of the things i've said is in many ways i'm i was a pharisee of pharisees and i don't mean that negatively i mean that in the positive sense that kind of paul would talk about it in the sense of i came from the right tribe all of my family or pastors i had the right teachers i went to bible college i have a bible college degree i have a seminary degree my degree is in theology i'm getting a phd that involves theology in it as well i've been a pastor at a church of a very influential mega church one of the fastest growing churches in the country i've spoken in front of thousands and thousands of people across the united states and africa and south america and canada i'm that same person but after i kissed the guy i felt like well maybe i'm not anymore and that was that i mean that was something i had to kind of process through and i think that moment in the hospital was jesus kind of looking at me and saying do you love me all right we got work to do i was walking home to my dorm which is like half an hour away this is matthew vines best-selling author of the book god and the gay christian and i stopped in this convenience store to get toothpaste somehow i had built up these like emotional walls very very high for years preventing myself from thinking or asking these questions because i couldn't deal with the fallout of them and i just sort of stupidly um took down all the walls at once for about you know two minutes and i just sort of asked myself for the first time ever like am i gay and it was very obvious and i realized oh i'm definitely gay i felt like these two feelings at the same time one was this kind of wave of relief because finally all of these things about my life that didn't make sense made sense but that lasted for about three seconds and then i felt a wave of terror um and the best way that i can describe it is it felt like all of the foundations that i didn't even realize were holding me up in life were kind of like pulled out from under me you don't realize until it's possible for it to be taken away from you like just how dependent you are on so many people in your life and my parents are lovely wonderful people who have been fantastic parents and continue to be but they did not understand this topic i saw how they had felt about our friend being gay and just not knowing if they because i had met friends at school whose parents were so awesome and then they came out and their parents have not talked to them since and their parents are still so awesome to their two other kids right and there's there's this one issue where they you can just have perfectly like delightful people and then this one thing comes up and it's like a switch is flipped and you just have no way of predicting whether or not someone will become a completely different person when when you tell them that you're gay and so you just don't know and that's just a really really scary feeling kind of like you're about to step into some abyss so that weekend accomplished nothing i felt so so sick i could not even like stay still i just like was like shaking um for hours and hours part of me thought that being gay was a compromise for some reason in that i am a rather idealistic individual and don't want to ever make like compromises in terms of how i'm living my life and for some reason i felt like it was a compromise but then i spent a while thinking through that and realizing i didn't actually have any good argument for why it was it was just kind of embedded in me from growing up and i i only came out just a tiny handful of people on campus i was just it was i tried to sort of put on the shelf for a while my parents came to visit me at school a few weeks later and we went out to dinner and i just made them talk about christianity and gay people the entire time and my and they also by the way when i came out to them a month and a half later were stunned and they had no idea and they were just like well matthew you care about lots of people like we had no idea that that was like wow um and and i remember i i when i started the conversation because my parents just want to talk about school and i was like okay here's what i want to talk about i said what do you think that christianity is asking of gay people and they just sort of and i was like okay well here's what i think your understanding of that is i think that how you understand it what christianity is saying to gay people is you come from a family but you will never form a family of your own and you can fall in love with someone who means the world to you and you could build a life with them and a home with them and a family with them but you can't and so you'll watch your friends fall in love get married have children and you need to go sit in the corner and if you do fall in love with someone you need to walk away from that and you need to break your heart every time that you feel too much for someone else i got a bit emotional when i was describing it and then my dad sort of chimes in and he says well matthew like that's really nice but here's the problem you're assuming that being gay is permanent oh i said yes dad i am assuming that because i'm pretty sure that it is and he said well i'm not sure that at all and because i you know i've heard of people who changed and that is about as far as the conversation got for 90 minutes when i came out to him a month and a half later uh actually the day that i came home from college having resolved to come out um he comes to me and he says hey matthew i've been doing some reading on what we discussed when we visited you he said yeah i got all the books from our church library on homosexuality and there were all these ex-gay books about like men and women who found freedom in christ and i looked at them and i said dad like i don't mean to be offensive but these seem backwards to me i'm not going to read a book about why women can't do science and math i'm not going to read a book about why black people have inferior genes because that seems so antiquated and repugnant i'm not and he said well matthew like you know that is offensive like it's not the same thing and you're you don't sound very open-minded right now and i was like okay like i guess i don't sound open-minded right now but okay uh and so then i came out to him a week and a half later and he i came to my mom first i ruined her new years it was a new year's eve she was gonna go to new year's party and i destroyed her evening uh i kind of came out accidentally i wasn't really planning on it and i there was a part of me that thought when i was gonna go home like all right i know they're not the same place but you know what like whether they like it or not this is just how it is and i'm just gonna be you know bold and just say it but of course then you start to to tell your mother and you just like start weeping right and you feel like very fragile and um it was it was really hard to say but you know she gave me a hug and she told me that she loved me and she said that she accepted me now what she meant by that then was actually much more tepid form of acceptance than what she would mean by that now but she then could not really eat for the next three days until i told my dad and i didn't want to tell my dad very soon because i was so nervous about how we'd respond and so one strategy that a lot of gay people have when coming out to their christian parents is to do it over college break and to wait till the last day before you go back to school so that if things really hit the fan you just leave and there was a part of me that wanted to do that because i had no idea how it would go over and i was really nervous about it but i ended up deciding i didn't want my mom to go to the icu because i was gay um and so she needed to start eating again therefore i needed to start i needed to tell my dad and i told him i decided to go into his room at like 12 30 in the morning on a saturday night um we were gonna go to church in the morning and sit on his bed for like two hours just like shaking um telling him that i am gay and then defining that for him just in case he didn't get it um and just talking just keep just trying to keep talking um and he told me that he loved me that he was glad that i told him that he knew it must have been hard for me um but he did not sleep at all that night and he told me later unfortunately he didn't tell me that day but he told me later after he came to a much more supportive place that that was the worst day of his life i mean his sister had died six months before then um fairly young and but this was the worst day of his life why do you think that was the worst day of his life if you had to guess um well he said admittedly he said i'm really happy you didn't come home and say you're not a christian anymore because he said that would be worse um but the two gay people he had known he only found out they were gay when they died of aids um that was a while before my time he had never seen any precedent of support for someone coming out from a church he'd never seen a gay person live a life that did not end with dying from aids and so he i think just felt like all of these dreams and hopes that he had had for me were shattered and he also thought that it was wrong and that being gay was not okay and was not acceptable to god and all of those things and he doesn't i mean he does not think that anymore he has completely changed his his thinking as has my mom um and they could not be more supportive today but that was sort of the i ended up then taking off a whole semester from school to work through this with my parents and that helped them so much and to study scripture with my dad because that was a big concern of his so i want to go back to something in your story because of the way you viewed god and the way you viewed the bible and your sense of social identity you tried to manufacture crushes on girls when you were younger which as a straight person like i can't even it was always for me it was like i was trying to not have so many crushes you know what i mean great and so that's such a different thing but so without even before you even come to terms with your own identity and maybe what's happening biologically you're already sort of trying to normalize yourself and i think so many people who are gay and evangelical that construct continues farther than it did with you what do you think would have happened if you convinced yourself that you were in love with a woman and got married well i mean that couldn't have happened for me because of how old i am and the friends that i had and the place where i was in terms of i could not actively delude myself to that extent when every day there are examples in your immediate circles of like gay people living out their lives in normal well-adjusted ways i think typically when people do that it's when they're living in communities that are like the church that i grew up in and they don't ever get to go anywhere else right um and so what would have happened then um probably because i know if i had been born 30 years earlier 40 years earlier i would not have come out at the age of 19 absolutely not because that would have been shattering to me and i would not have been able to pick up the pieces from that and like find my way again so i probably would have tried to marry a woman and then you just sort of i remember at one time thinking okay i'm not attracted to girls i'm definitely attracted to guys but like maybe that's actually what everyone experiences because i don't know i've never been anyone else and so maybe that's what being straight is and everyone is actually just like really working on it you know like it you don't know and you've never been to anyone else what part of my internal monologue is everyone else is that's true this is why it is possible as a gay man to marry a woman and think well i sure don't really feel attracted to her this doesn't really seem to be working but maybe this is just what marriage is right marriage is hard i probably would have you know if if there would have been a willing candidate back in the 70s or something gotten married and we would have had multiple children and i probably never even would have acknowledged to myself i would have kept up this compartmentalization in terms of okay yep i'm definitely only attracted to men but you know maybe that's just normal and i'm not going to mention it in case it's not you know like and i have a particular constitution where i don't think i would have been having like furtive sexual encounters with strangers but i would have at a core level been like shutting down like so much of my relational capacities and i can't imagine i i can't imagine how that would have been a healthy thing i mean you can some some people cannot do it some people can do it but even if you can it's like you know how deeply can you cut into your skin without you know hitting particular arteries or something well you know you can do it but it doesn't really mean it's a good thing to do like you may still be alive but you've pretty severely cut out some core parts of of just what it means to be a human being and so actually one and one other thing is so i've been out for five and a half years now and i have never still have never been in a relationship partly because i just when i first came out i really wanted to hit the pause button on life and i knew that my family and our so many of our friends were not where i was on this and i wanted to try to meet them where they were at learn from them and their concerns and see if i could build a path forward that other people could walk with me so it's only in recent years i mean months not years recent months that i've even been open to actually like hitting the play button again in terms of possibly like dating a relationship something like that in that five and a half year span i have only like it was kind of an accident it was definitely not intentional um been in love with one person who and he did not love me back and it was very painful and it was so i kind of feel like so far even though i came out i've only gotten kind of the the bad side of things and i still would vastly prefer to only ever experience the really painful unrequited aspects of love than to experience nothing at all because i feel like at least i feel like a real human being now and i can identify with so much more of other people's lives and struggles and experiences and i feel like i'm living a three-dimensional life now obviously would it be nice to actually experience some of the positive sides of love and not just the really painful ones yeah that would be great but i still just feel so much better adjusted and so much more of a whole person by virtue of not trying to shut down my sexual orientation because sexual orientation is not just like sexual attraction it is the linchpin of how you relationally bond and connect with other people and to say we want you to basically erase that or to obliterate that and to assume that that's not going to have destructive consequences for your ability to relate with well everyone is to misunderstand what sexuality is okay so i'm sitting here in the studio with my dad pastor ed gunger who's been a pastor well since before i was born how long have you been pastor now 150 years i think he offers some interesting perspective i actually just played him some of these stories that you've been hearing and uh he had some perspectives i thought might be worth throwing into the to the ring here as well so dad share some of your thoughts of how do you deal with this as a pastor what are some of your thoughts about the issue well i think the most powerful part of what i've heard from the stories that you've listed out here is just the humanizing aspect of actually listening to people the more you hear the stories of people the more the less you're likely to just try to categorize them in real overly simplistic ways and yet as a pastor you know one of the things you're always doing and wrestling with the thinking okay we we want to follow god's standard we believe that there's the right and wrong issues or something outside of ourselves and so it's easy to get very very black and white but in historical study the more you look at how the church is wrestled with things uh that seemed black and white at the beginnings like simple things like the issue of slavery that was so pervasive how it began to be rethought you can't own people and the humanization of that you start realizing that there's some issues as you talk about them are just not as black and white as you had hoped uh what i think the role the role who deals with that of the people that i think are like prophetic people is one of my favorite writers these days who talks about the prophets who he says they face they're kind of like on the edges of the church the hinterlands of the church because they kind of go in and outside of the church looking at what's happening how the church should be responding to what's happening and this gentleman claims that jesus being the door is not only the door into things but the door outside of things to be able to look at things from different kinds of ways and i think it's the prophets the prophetic people among us who have been the ones to call the church to be relevant and understand how we should bring the gospel to bear based on the contingencies of the lives that we're leading in the place we are in history and so the prophets need to speak to these things and i i love that but yet most of us aren't prophetic most of us realize that there's a huge part of our lives we're very busy we're not thinking through everything really deeply things are so nuanced that sometimes we have to trust those that are leaders among us and and most of us are sort of oriented to the notion that we're part of this communion of saints that that it isn't just something our opinions aren't the thing that should rule the day but how has the church historically dealt with various issues and and how has it seen scripture et cetera et cetera so when the tension of that um you can see how people can get polarized real easily where people feel threatened and when the prophet suggests anything and then the prophets can get mean spirit and end up you know it just can create very very kind of almost toxic environment can you tell us a little bit about what you've seen as a pastor and some of the the complexity and the nuance of people that wrestle with this yeah i mean when you read the statistics like one out of three young evangelical kids that wrestle with either being gay or with some of these issues you're talking about gender issues that one in three of them consider suicide or actually start moving toward that in some way you just got to stop saying no there's no way that sexuality is more important than that person's life i mean if it was one of my kids that was saying to me that they were gay and they were wrestling with suicide i said listen i don't think god cares more about the gay thing than he does about your life your life matters and so when i hear the stories and you hear about people that that that are all they're doing the right thing they're saying yes in their hearts and i sit down we have gay couples in our context that don't aren't real publicly gay but i've talked to them you've got some of them that are trying to be in as have fidelity and be committed to each other some of them have been married in other contexts because in our state we haven't allowed that up till recently but you hear their story and you talk with them and i'll ask them questions i don't understand it i say how do you work with this and you hear their story and i go okay they've come to a place where they love god and they seem to it seems to be making sense to them and then i meet others who are totally convinced that they're gay in their orientation they don't believe that's a sin and i agree with that well so i know some gay guys that and gals actually that they have come to the place where they totally embrace the fact this is who they are but they have decided not to participate in actual expression of sexual activity that that is consistent with that and it's you know when i talk with them it's not like they're being repressive some just really believe that this is what they need to do i actually have a couple in our context the two ladies older ladies who love each other as close as they possibly best friends in the world and they're lesbians and they um they do not have any physical relationship precisely because of their conviction this so i i don't i think everybody kind of processes this differently and i i think that because it's so nuanced and and filled with a lot of complexity and so new in the conversation the last you know 30 years or whatever i think that as the church moves on as we continue to be faithful to what we understand and be open to thinking through things differently and being honest about what these things are about the nuances of them i believe the church will land in a healthier place but we're not there yet so it's going to be messy so we're here in nashville tennessee at grace point church and everybody we've got a couple of friends we'd like to introduce to you as we talk about and wrestle with this topic uh would you like to say hello to our audience so they'll know your voices by name hey this is melissa green and i am stan mitchell thanks for coming on the program guys absolutely we're glad to be here so grace points made some news recently so they didn't notice yeah and the words evangelical and inclusive were in the headlines how did that come about oh well recently uh january 18th 11 11 thank you we made the statement to our church that we were going to become fully inclusive um and that was a a big change to some people and an exciting thing for others and so we've been on an interesting journey the past couple of months but it took about it was about three summers ago this coming summer will be three summers that we started an official process to talk about these things and begin dialoguing about it and simply by even wanting to entertain the dialogue was enough for some people to walk away they thought it was simply black and white and there's no gray area here and we saw otherwise and so we began taking the church on a journey not just on homosexuality and the bible it's it was really on scripture in general and how we interpret how we view how we hear scripture and um so after three years we felt very peaceful as a leadership to go ahead and make the turn as a church community so here we are what has it been like so far painful and exciting we all the time say it feels like we've got a hospice bed we're in a hospice wing of a hospital with a birthing unit in the same room wow um it's it's a the conflict of emotions is um almost it's almost more than the human heart can bear for us it's mind numbing we had about 2 200 active members and we've lost you know the majority of those folk in the process of discernment and and probably some of the stuff we did wrong i mean i i don't know we didn't have a manual on how to roll an evangelical church through this so these aren't it's not like you've got the bad people on one side and the good people on the other side we've lost some of the dearest people in our life um hopefully not as friends but certainly as parishioners so at the same time in the last six weeks we've probably gotten between us a couple of thousand emails from people treating us almost like messianic figures you know just for giving them the right to breathe almost which is all is really to some degree embarrassing that they have to thank us that much so it is a conflict of emotions for sure and what i i see looking back and i think this is probably the most important thing for us to talk about from a pastoral level because we're not systematic theologians we're pastoral theologians we're incarnate theologians is um that all of the arguing all of the discussion about arsenal coitai and malaquoi and what's romans 1 really mean and where does pederasty fit into that and how do you frame sodom gomorrah in genesis 19. that stuff is important but that's not really that's not really where the debate is settled it's settled in the fleshly lives and stories of people it's it's the dad that texts me yesterday and says that his six-year-old boy is sitting in his lap and says dad i've always wanted to be a girl and in the silence a long pause the little boy he's not a systematic theologian and he's also not an abomination he's a little six-year-old boy precious and he pauses and he says wistfully dead do you think god ever makes mistakes see he's never heard of theodicy he doesn't know what pederasty is this is a wonderful family there's been no abuse so eventually those kinds of stories in a pastoral setting accumulate this is not black letters on a white page this is flesh tones and it finally drives you back and you begin thinking you know for what mel said a moment ago um you know we love the text and we have a high view of the text we just think the text needs to be properly handled and in the sermon on the mount jesus five times said you heard it say he didn't even say it said well one time he did say it said but five times he said you heard it say but i say unto you and everybody was up in arms saying you're trying to destroy moses he said actually i'm trying to salvage the guy it's what you heard and we finally begin to figure out the bible doesn't say it hears it reads and enough human experiences finally drive you back to the text with the question have we read this right and so it's not all of those experiences like the dad yesterday with a little boy they don't cause you to jettison the text and they don't cause you to run roughshod over it or look at it and say well it's a barbaric piece of anachronistic literature you don't do that but you at least with some hermeneutic humility go back to the text and say i think the christian church has a long history of not always getting it right and having to correct itself there is a developing unfolding of the text in our life so so what can you talk a little bit about when you guys changed your minds or when you started even asking the questions how did that feel for you as you were starting to like change the way you think about it and was there something that really kind of finally flipped the switch to change or it was living alongside a lot of people that were gay honestly um i grew up in the arts and in theater and music and went to college for arts and had just example after example of watching people and i grew up in a christian home a very conservative christian setting in the college as well and so watching my friends struggle with who they were what did god think of them how should they now live um what are they allowed to do and not allowed to do should i be able to love someone do i have to pretend like i want to marry a woman so on and so forth and so it was probably by the fourth relationship that i had with a friend and i watched him choose to um remain celibate and not be able to be involved in christian music anymore because people found out that he was gay and i've watched him live a life of depression and sadness and i just watched his life it was becoming lesser and lesser and finally step into a church and get great information and have start having conversations with these people where you look them in the eyes and i'm thinking what does god honor here what does god have for him god what does god want for him and then we have other situations where there's a lesbian couple in our church who's amazing and they've served in the background as long as they've been here they've been here to set up for vbs and tear down for vbs and provide all the food for vbs and one of them is a superintendent assistant superintendent in town another is a family lawyer they're just great members great humans in our community in our church and yet we were having to say to them you can do all these things but you can't teach sunday school you can't technically lead there's there's you can only do so much we can only give you so much but you keep helping us you keep cleaning up you keep doing the things and it was story after story we're like this isn't right we can't we did a three-fifths compromise in terms of you know what we would take for them and the three-fifths that we would take certainly included their money and their grunt work but when an assistant superintendent over a large school district who's dedicated her whole life to kids can't even be an assistant teacher in the fourth grade class you know finally the question you know the church has kind of gone through a phase now i mean for years we were just totally ignorant to this and then when it began to come to the 4 in the 50s and 60s we immediately categorized it as an abomination and i remember those days it was just this incredible creepy abomination and then the 80s hit and that really reinforced the whole abomination language because now all of a sudden we understand romans 1 that they are receiving in themselves the rec king james language receiving and i'm sorry everybody thinks everybody thinks i'm a great theologian because i know so much scripture it's from bible story and so i'm up here quoting it has nothing to do with seminary and divinity school it's all the stuff i memorized so it's all king james which belies the fact that it's not done in an academic setting but when they when they started you know when the aids crisis hit it was romans 1 receiving in themselves the recompense of their reward which was meat or which was justified they're getting what they deserved and so it reinforced but then the church was driven into the humanity of these people and we started hearing their stories and then all of a sudden it was our closeted cousins and children and brothers and sisters and we started living with them and they're dying and it was i and i remember those days we started living with them and they're dying and they're dying humanize them and then heterosexuals begin to also find themselves hiv hiv positive and it began to spread through blood transfusions and and and that kind of jerked us a little bit out of the abomination language and so we went into the 90s where all of a sudden we started this language of well they've got their sin and we shouldn't categorize sin so they have their sin we have our sin we're at least going to be friendly and welcome and yes gay people can come to our church because sinners are always welcome and that really pushed the envelope because these people amazingly they took that offer they had had so little that even that degrading demeaning patronizing offer they took it they were the syrophoenician woman that said i'm not even asking to sit at the table i'll take the crumbs and we gave them we gave them the damn crumbs and they ate because they were starving and we patronized them and they set here the most moving part of this discernment process that we've gone through as a church is not watching heterosexual move people move on the issue it's it's the lgbtq people who stayed here they stayed here and respected the process and lived in second class citizenry everyone's like no we treated them no no we know it's more blessed to give than receive and we wouldn't let them give in ways that were meaningful to their giftings and and talents so we just we gave them our crumbs but it forced us to live with them and we watched them bear fruit in every way possible often better than we and it was just their bedroom that we couldn't figure out their sexuality we couldn't figure out and ultimately we we got down to the point in you know the early part of this millennia that we shifted even from well you know we don't need to categorize sin to we're not policing sin which isn't true because we do i mean if if one of our sunday school teachers is serially or not serially if she's cheating on her husband yeah she's not going to teach a second grade class we have standards we can't say that we don't police things of course we do we have moral standards so that began to wear thin and we finally came to the conclusion we can't we can't keep taking this mediated patronage of giving them crumbs we have to figure out is god okay with this or not and i i had somebody call me from north carolina yesterday and say i'm so happy for what you guys are doing at the church but are you still teaching that it's sin and i have not been able to respond to the avalanche of emails and phone calls that i've received the last month or so but i immediately called them back and said no no and i think that's important to say no we are saying these people are accepted and god does not frown upon people who are born with same sex or other than heterosexual attraction and their relationship and their life can be blessed in the same bounds of monogamous faithful relationship that we live in and that they have their sin but it's not that yeah and i love that one of our couples here married 18 years with a little daughter somebody said you know we have our sin you have our your sin they were like yeah we sure do but this isn't it the most beautiful part of our life our daughter's parents that's that's not our sin i think for everyone too it's different to figure out what it is that finally changed our mind on it because i think for me growing up again in a christian conservative context and a studyer of scripture i mean i went to bible college i was someone who has been known for being in the word who had a high view of scripture my heart because of all those relationships my heart was open um but the last thing that i was clinging to i remember 10 years ago i was just saying a dear friend of mine today he came out to me in my living room 10 years ago and i remember saying i love you but what is script what is god thus scripture what does scripture thus god actually say like that's all i had left because my heart was open so i think humanity and the relationships open you up but it did drive us back to the text to figure out okay not just what does this word say but it has been a journey with the bible in general how do we view this and how do we handle this and so it opens it's not just about lgbtq that we are saying over and over that's a beautiful byproduct of what we actually believe the gospel to be it's not the whole point but it we're thankful to be screaming from the mountaintops that it's a part of it that has been the most profound thing for me in this trip and talking to people in and around grace point the fact that as you've gone through this journey it has not been related to a change in your standard of what the bible means so for me i went to lgbt inclusion via the road of secularism and atheism and i picked up that value and then when i came back to god i held on to that secular value and so the last thing i thought about was the bible and so what's so amazing for me um and truly spectacular and and challenging to me in the way that i have a tendency to to view the bible is how you have found this path to greater love and expansion of the gospel while holding on to the bible as sacred and special and holy um uh it just it amazes me i think i think that's an incredibly important point i went through a time where i thought okay now am i really seeing this stuff in the text what you just call beautiful is that really beautiful or am i just sentimentally nostalgically connected to something and i'm trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear here you know am i trying to gerrymander this and redeem something because i don't have the guts to let go of it and i went through that phase it's a deconstructive phase and i don't think so i think the text actually says this stuff if the text is treated properly the text has always been an unfolding progressive revelation the nature of the text has always been that it's a time release capsule that unfolds over time human consciousness grows in its capacity to hear things god didn't change his mind on slavery between the 14th and 19th century our consciousness grew to such a capacity that we could finally hear the text and i told you guys the other night when we were just hanging out the story that i heard on a reel to reel of martin luther king jr who at 26 years old found himself a baptist pastor and you know he said i was a i was a nepotistic son and grandson of two very successful pastors who did believe but i'd gone through boston university my mind had been stretched i had seen too much pain and i read the text and i thought my god i'm not a christian i don't believe and you even remember letters from birmingham jail him saying that it was at that table in his kitchen that he finally came to faith and heard from god but he said as a young man a preacher wrestling with a text he said you tell me how i was supposed to read first peter 2 you know when anybody says to me well the text is plain okay i'll give you a plain text first peter 2 king said i would read that text and it made me hate the bible first peter 2 slaves be submissive to your masters even if they beat you without cause for to this you were called for christ left us an example now i have sympathy for how that text could be read on the surface i have sympathy for the fact that it took a growing consciousness to finally be able to read that differently but king said one day i was about ready to throw the bible through the wall as i had read that text again and he said something inside of me said keep reading martin and he said i now believe that something to be the holy spirit and i continued to read be submissive to your masters even if they beat you without cause for to this you recall for christ left us an example when reviled he reviled not again but entrusted himself into the hands of him who judges righteously and all we like sheep were going astray but had been brought home by the shepherd of our souls and he said it hit me this text was no more a defense of slavery than it was a defense of the crucifixion of god but it was simply saying in a world where dastardly diabolical things like slavery and crucifixions happen god is so utilitarian economic and redemptive that he can even take the vilest thing and turn it to an act of grace and mercy by which he redeems and it was that that then emboldened him to call his friends and say bring even your children to the march of selma knowing that the dogs would be on their arms and the water cannons because they would bear in their body the sufferings of christ which were incomplete it's that kind of a reading of the text that finally gets beneath this thing that we've been saying well the bible plainly says the jewish people taught us to do midrash with the text which is to wrestle with it and when people ask me how do you read paul the way you read him i'll tell you how he taught me how because paul wasn't writing scripture in his mind he was a jewish rabbi following jesus who was treating scripture the way it's supposed to be treated and and that is wrestle with it so the way i read paul is the way paul read moses paul didn't just give us fixed and final propositional truth he gave us the methods of wrestling by which we do our bible reading i'm sorry to go into a theological thing here but it's that process that's what caused us to go back and say okay we've got all this incarnational embodiment of lies and these people deserve us to go back to the text and say have i read this wrong and dug on it we believe we have and we're trying to read it right now and that's why we're treating the lgbtq community differently we're trying to be faithful to the text tabitha last question if your sisters were listening to the program what do you tell them wow i wish there was some way to let them know that i love them i pray for them i pray for my whole family i pray that someday that they'll understand i pray for good things to happen you know as like as much ill has been wished upon me and i i don't wish it upon them they don't know what they don't know um and they may not even want to know but you gotta love them anyways thanks for joining us you're welcome what would you say to the person listening right now who loves god and is a member of a church that believes and preaches that um loving someone of the same biological gender is sin or an abomination and is wrestling with that in their heart right now what would you say to them i'm gonna i'm gonna say what i'm gonna say but i also want to just kind of bring it back to context that so i'm gonna i'm in my phd program right now i've finished all my coursework i'm i'm going i'm in the process of deciding if i'm going to take my qualifying exams and finish my dissertation um when i came out to them i was told if you don't make a big deal about this you can stay if you make a big deal about this you we have to kick you out and what they mean by that is if i take a stand and advocate so by what i'm about to say could be seen as advocating for something that potentially has the ability for me to lose the last four years and hundred thousand dollars of my phd but here's the thing is that for people out there who are walking through this and belong to something and feel stuck i would say one god loves you you have people who love you you're gonna be okay and this is probably the hardest thing you're ever gonna do and i i would never call somebody to come out before they were ready to if i i couldn't have done it before i was 38 truthfully but i would say to the people out there who might be listening who belong to a conservative church i was just with somebody a couple weeks ago who's actually been through shock therapy and um exorcisms because he's 55 years old and he's finally come to the point of where he's accepted his sexuality after 20 years of reparative therapy including electroshock and exorcisms um i would say that if you're in a context that that is kind of what is being taught as the only version of what biblical truth is that there's something more out there that there's another version of interpretation of scripture another understanding of who god is another understanding of who you are that is i'm gonna say at the risk now of being kicked out of my program more valid than what you've been told and has more truth to it and you're not alone you're so not alone in this and there's so many people who have begun to walk this process ahead of you but will come alongside you and hold your hand as you walk this and it will be the hardest thing you will ever do in your life but it doesn't mean it's wrong and it's okay to say god loves me just as i am with us is so those are the conversations we've been having lately we hope that they were as interesting and moving for you as they were for us and please let me say just one more time not everybody that contributes to the work of the liturgists agrees about this issue and whether or not lgbt sexual activity is sinful or not but we do all believe that every human being is beautiful and sacred and that christians have not always done the best job living that out with people who are different than us we recognize that there are people on both sides of this debate that are intelligent that sincerely love lgbtq individuals and love the scriptures and the tradition of the church that has almost uniformly prohibited sexual activity outside of a traditional monogamous heterosexual relationship for nearly two thousand years and this tension has created a lot of pain and anxiety and many of us who want to follow christ by living holy and pure lives but who also want to follow christ by following his commandments to love our neighbor so how can we learn to love our lgbt neighbors better and that's a question for all of us regardless of our current place in the theological spectrum on this issue regardless of whether you think biblical commands about homosexuality or more culturally situated like meat slavery divorce or women in ministry and that those scriptures need to be reinterpreted or whether you think these commands and traditions are necessary to keep that they're necessary for love and godliness we hope that these stories have inspired something in you to put some skin and bone on an issue in your mind because that is the approach that we think is kind of the most christian way that we could think of to approach an issue like this i thought it might be nice to close this episode today with some scripture this is a scripture that i read with lisa in the hospital a year ago when our daughter lucette was born with lots of medical issues and we were freaked out and the way that society determines what is normal made us feel like we didn't have a normal baby that we were somehow the victim of some sort of uh tragedy but just this last week we celebrated lucette's first birthday and if we've learned anything this year we've learned that life is a gift in all of its branches and turns and unexpected surprises lucette is incredibly beautiful and incredibly sacred to us her life is precious and it's perfect and so i want to read these words that actually sort of started a healing process in lisa and i and an inspiration to see how precious every single life is so i want to read this scripture that we read in the hospital with lucette i want to read it though to tabitha and to jj and to anybody out there who might feel less than who might feel that the way you are is some sort of an abomination to god if you feel like there's something about who you are as a person existentially that is not beautiful i want you to listen to these words and maybe these words could become the very word of god for you may these words become your prayer and something that you can actually believe this is psalm 139 for you created my inmost being you knit me together in my mother's womb i praise you because i am fearfully and wonderfully made your works are wonderful i know that full well my frame was not hidden from you when i was made in the secret place when i was woven together in the depths of the earth your eyes saw my unformed body all of the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be how precious to me are your thoughts oh god how vast is the sum of them were i to count them they would outnumber the grains of sand well thank you for listening everybody and thanks to all those who were willing to have this conversation with us tabitha jj matthew vines donald miller and folks at grace point and preston sprinkle thank you guys for being honest and open and willing to have this conversation if you want to talk more about this subject you can leave comments and have discussion at our website liturgists.compodcast we're on facebook or twitter the liturgists and we hope that this inspires some good conversation keep it healthy keep it loving keep it friendly check that out on our website we'll see you next time thanks for listening everybody you