a step in the right direction

(I've posted this in a couple of other communities and someone suggested that I share this here)

The church I attend with my mother has been doing a series called "Confessions of a Sinful Church." Basically, they have been apologizing for areas where the Church has fallen short. Today's sermon was called "We're sorry for shutting out homosexuals." To be honest, I was veryyyy nervous about how this was going to go and wasn't quite sure what they were going to say. However, I ended up being pleasantly surprised. The entire sermon was incredibly respectful and as a gay person, I felt very comfortable the entire time.

While the pastor acknowledged that the church believes that all sex outside of a marriage between a man and a woman is a sin, he also really took steps to own up to the fact that the church often treats being gay as a worse sin than all the other sins. He said "we say that we love the sinner but hate the sin, but our actions often show that we hate the sin and hate the sinner as well."

They showed a short video clip with one of the other pastors interviewing a man who talked about how he became active in the gay rights movement after his boyfriend was murdered and the prosecutor told him that they weren't going to look into it since 'he was just a gay man' (I have no idea what year this happened). They also showed a clip from the film For the Bible Tells Me So where a mother talked about vandalism against their property all because her son was gay.

The pastor talked about being on an AIDS ride and as the riders were heading back to the camp, someone was handing out pamphlets stating that gay people were all going to hell and that AIDS was a punishment from God against homosexuality. As he was talking with the other riders, many of whom were gay themselves, he was shocked because they did not seem to be as bothered by it as he was. When he asked one of them about it, the person's reply was "You don't get it. We hear this sort of thing all the time. After a while, you learn to get used to it." The pastor said that he laid awake that night feeling so distressed that people around him not only were dealing with that sort of hatred, but that they experienced it so frequently that it didn't even shock them anymore.

The pastor also really took steps to own up to the fact that he had not always treated gay people kindly or fairly. He mentioned one incident where a celibate gay man wanted to volunteer at the church, was open about his struggles with homosexuality, and was pretty much told by the church that he wasn't welcome. He also talked about how he felt so guilty because there were people in his life that he had pushed away because they were gay, and that he was trying to repair those relationships.

Most positive for me though, was the fact that he spoke about what the church could do.

1)He spoke about how (straight) Christians need to stop treating gay people as if they are worse sinners than everyone else. He pointed out that in recent years the Church has been harsher towards gay people than it has towards heterosexual Christians who have struggled with areas of sexual sin in their lives.

2)He spoke of how Christians need to speak up when gay people are being treated unfairly, or when people are using anti-gay slurs. He said that the church was taking efforts to keep language like "That's so gay!" out of the church, and to speak up when staff members made anti-gay jokes/comments.

3)Most importantly to me, he spoke about how Christians need to listen to gay people. So often these sorts of discussions turn into shouting matches and people rush to condemn before they know a person's story.

[On a more personal note, I think that many Christians do not realize the hurt that gay people have felt over the Church's rejection of us. I grew up in a religious home and thought that being gay was one of the worst things I could be. It reached the point where in 2002, I swallowed a bottle of Tylenol PMs in an attempt to take my own life. I never would have felt comfortable seeking help from the church I was attending at that time, both because of how I feared I would be treated, but also how my family members would be judged. I spent nights in bed sobbing and praying to God to make me straight, and that was something I could never, ever share with many of the Christians I knew at that time.

There are still people I know, and care deeply about including members of my own family, with whom I could never share some of these things because I know it would destroy our relationship.]