A Letter To Church Leaders Regarding LGBTQ Youth
If you’re using the Bible to proof-text yourself into feeling justified for discriminating against someone else — you’re probably doing religion and the Bible wrong — and you’re definitely doing Love wrong.
Dear Church Leaders,
Over the past two decades, I’ve been a pastor to students. It has been the greatest joy of my life to be allowed into the trenches of young people’s lives: to have access to their stories and share proximity to their pain. I’ve sat with and listened to thousands of LGBTQ young people, and I’ve had a front-row seat to the violence the Church has manufactured and to the depression, self-harm, and isolation it breeds.
It’s the thing that grieves me, perhaps more than anything else I encounter in this work: that vast resources and energy are expended by Christians continually fighting a battle that bears no redemptive fruit, that actually exacerbates people’s marginalization, that generates unnecessary pain — a war that Jesus isn’t asking us to wage in the first place.
In the totality of the Gospels, Jesus never once condemns or reprimands or excludes anyone for their gender identity or…
