Christians have made God's wisdom unconvincing

Before Thanksgiving I had the privilege of training teachers at a K-12 Christian school in Quito, Ecuador to offer their students God's love and wisdom for gay people. The same question (understandably) came up over and over again:

How can we make a historic sexual ethic convincing for non-Christians and marginally-Christian gay people?

My answer: You can't.

At least not anytime soon.

Currently, it either takes a miracle or willingness on the part of a gay Christian to follow Jesus no matter the cost.

When there's no miracle, the gay person isn't a Christian, or the gay person isn't willing to lose everything to follow Jesus, God's wisdom won't be convincing.

Gay people really are called to something functionally harder than straight people. Gay people will have to be more faithful to hold onto their faith. Some straight people will be less sold-out-for-Jesus than a gay peer, yet they'll persist while the gay Christian gives up.

That's the double burden of gay Christians.

There's good news: that's not how God intended it to be. He intended for fullness of life on this side of heaven to be just as accessible to gay people as straight people.

But it's not. Why?

Because the Church has consistently been unfaithful in ways that made it harder for gay people to know and follow Jesus.

In the past Christians have pushed gay people into pray-the-gay-away ministries, declared that merely experiencing same-sex attraction is a sin, and barred faithful gay Christians from ministry.

Today, many churches are silent about God's love and wisdom for gay people, leading kids to make sense of their sexuality alone in the closet.

Then too many churches today hold gay Christians to a higher standard of sexual stewardship than straight Christians and do little to support those called to lifetime celibacy.

So what can we do?

In the short term, pray for a miracles of faith.

And then fight like hell to fix the church.

The eternal lives of out children depend on it.