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The False Choice Between Faith & Sexuality
Like so many other kids, leaving home for the first time offered the opportunity to reinvent myself. Granted, being only seventeen at the time, “reinvent” might seem like something of an overstatement. However, given that I had just come out as “mostly gay” (as I still had no working conception of bisexuality) in a non-affirming, rural Christian community, this was my chance to make a fresh start.
Leaving home for the first time, I headed off to attend a 5-month-long discipleship program with Youth With A Mission (YWAM), one of the world’s largest evangelical missions organizations. The Discipleship Training School (DTS) seemed like the perfect opportunity to recenter myself and my identity around my faith, having spent the previous few years using it as a means to mask my struggling sexuality. My faith was genuine but that pretense poisoned the well. I wasn’t the kind of Christian I wanted to be and I hoped this was my chance to work on it.
It would be hard to overstate the positive impact my time at the DTS had on me. Even looking back over 25 years later, I am grateful for the genuine and profound change effected in me over those months. It was far from easy but I faced the challenges with a new confidence in a God characterized by genuine parental love and not moral judgment. My emotions, which had been in lockdown for months, broke open and…