Sad our church turned its back on dd

[TeenLifeMum]

Dd has been to church all her life. At one point we moved to a different church that suited us more but we made lovely friends etc and dd was attending youth group until she was 15. Suddenly she was less keen but focusing on GCSEs so we didn’t push it. With clubs etc for the other dc, regular attendance dropped a bit but we were fairly relaxed.

I believe in god but have always had issues with “the church”, but put that aside to be with people of faith.

I recently learned why dd stopped going to youth - they did a full session on how they should pray for gay people in the hope of healing them. How they are so angry about people loving each other is beyond me.

dd is gay. Her girlfriend is loving, kind, polite, and caring. I want all my dc to have loving healthy relationships so have no issue and naively thought others wouldn’t care. Turns out they do. Two of her closest friends stepped away due to her being gay (parents we’d met through church) and now she understandably doesn’t want to go to church, and neither do I.

I’m angry. I hope they’re really proud of themselves from their high horses. On the off chance they’re on here - no, you’re not good Christians.

Thanks for humouring my rant.

It's difficult about abusers in churches because I don't believe for a minute that Mike Pilavacchi wouldn't have abused people if he hadn't been a Christian. I guess the point is that he would have been less protected? But charismatic abusers find power structures in all sorts of organisations, or build their own.

I very much DON'T believe that he wouldn't have felt the need to exert power over young men if the Church in general had been open and positive about same sex relationships and marriages. But hey, what if it did make a difference? Worth trying? The evidence that exiling gay sexuality is distorting and damaging seems quite strong. Worth at the very least NOT saying 'we're all sinners' with a head tilt to someone whose ability to love another adult is a gift, not a sin.

It was Paul who said that the call to Christ came to male and female, Gentile and Jew, in the same way. If a Christian marriage is analogous to Christ and the church, the sex of the participants seems irrelevant to me.

@drspouse
* that's still discrimination, isn't it? Trans fine to marry, gay not fine.*

Yes it absolutely is.

I only mentioned it because it demonstrates that things are changing in the C of E. Too slowly, with too much fuss and to a position where they should always have been, but it’s better than nothing (for gay Christians and clergy).

@CrunchyCarrot So basically what you are saying is that Christians who don't think like you are in error?
I am fairly sure I need guidance by the Holy Spirit but I also know I'm being helped with patience, tolerance, and relying more on God when dealing with people and situations I find hard.

No - how did you come up with that from what I said?

@CrunchyCarrot In the context of this thread it's very likely to start with that Christians will still have false beliefs and lack understanding. This is corrected over time by time spent reading the Word and guidance by the Holy spirit.
sounds to me a lot like "I think being in a homosexual relationship is wrong because I've learned that from the Holy Spirit, but you might not have learned that yet, but it's OK because you will learn that".

That's probably a fair analysis. I have learned it from reading the Word and the Holy Spirit. Others may not have done so. Being a Christian is a continual learning process, I have a lot to learn, so do others. This thread is helping me learn, too, which is why I put my hand up here.

Typical

I don't think the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are.

I on the other hand don't think I'm going to learn that from the Holy Spirit.
But as I say I have a lot to learn about tolerance, living with discomfort, and being calm and not angry in situations which are beyond my/the other person's control.
I particularly like the phrase "Jesus came to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable".

In order to understand the Christian perspective on this, you have to understand the Christian view of God. God is perfect, eternal, worthy of all praise and adoration, and He created man. His design for how they should behave is perfect, and leads to perfect happiness, contentment and fulfilment. Being sinners, we all fall short in some way of God’s perfect design, but we should strive to live up to it in all the ways we, as flawed beings are able to.

It is sinful to offend against another person or ourselves, which we all innately understand. We can feel in us the injustice of stealing from someone else, we can feel how it harms us to burn with envy over someone else’s possessions. And if it’s so bad to harm ourselves or someone else, that we feel the wrongness of it in our hearts, when we are flawed, sinful beings deserving of eternal damnation, then how much worse is it to offend against God himself, who is love, who is mercy, who is our creator, by going against his design for us, wilfully and obstinately? This is completely ignoring that to engage in a same-sex relationship with another person is to bring them harm, the same way encouraging someone else to steal would be. To help someone else to heap damnation upon themselves, to offend against yourself, and to sin against God, all at once.

And when Adam ate of it too, that was his choice and his responsibility.

I’m not saying your belief is flawed as such, it’s more the “facts” in the bible that the doctrine is based on that I’m talking about.

if you are interested then Bart Ehrman is a good place to start. He is a bible scholar who is trying to make the subject more accessible to people outside of academia. He has various books and a podcast called Misquoting Jesus.

But if God has designed some people to be homosexual, why is it a sin to be in a same sex relationship? Surely being in a homosexual relationship is going with His design because he designed people as homosexual?

If being in a same sex relationship is such a sin, why create gay people in the first place? It's like creating left handed people, and making it a sin to write with your left hand. Or creating straight people and making it a sin to ever have sex, even if married.

OK thanks, I will look into it!

Trans fine to marry, gay not fine.

So how does that work? If a bloke decides he's a woman, and marries a man, then it's a same sex marriage, whatever the trans bloke feels. And if he becomes she and marries a woman, then that's also a same sex marriage, unless the Church thinks he's still a man. Which at a guess I think most of us do think.

I think Christian teaching would hold that every single human being is sexually broken in some way, because of the Fall. Creation is not as it was supposed to be, it does not reflect God's perfect design. When sin entered the world, creation fell under a curse and is in a state of decay. It will continue to decay until Jesus returns and brings about the New Creation.

CoE safeguarding is, at best, a shitshow and quite possibly far more sinister.

The Pilavachi case though I think is particularly relevant to the current debate because it is surely a result of the evangelical wing of the CoE’s hateful anti gay preaching.

If Pilavachi, and those he abused, hadn’t internalised this message about being gay being sinful, there’s a good chance that this particular mess might not have happened.

Pilavachi is also a very good example of why the ‘it’s fine to be gay, but just be celibate’ line pedalled by some PPs is so toxic.

batt3nb3rg
"You speak about "having same-sex attraction" like it's some kind of affliction."
If you are a Christian, then it is. It's a sin.

Hmmm. Apart from original sin, sin is something you personally choose to do, isn't it? Like, worship the "wrong" God (or perhaps the wrong aspect of the right God?), or worship a graven image, or swear blasphemously (like ever saying "oh God" or "Jesus H Christ"), or go shopping on a Sunday, or realise that your father or mother is abusive and be unable to honour them as a result, or kill someone unlawfully, or have sex with someone else's spouse or someone not your own spouse, or steal, or lie about someone, or want something that belongs to someone else. These are all things that you do of your own volition, right? But being attracted to people of your own sex is not something you choose to do, any more than someone born blind chooses not to be able to see. You might as well say that it is a sin to be blue-eyed, or a sin to have freckles. Or a sin to like music, which I think some sects of Islam seem to believe, instead of being completely tone-deaf.

Being born homosexual is only a sin insofar as being born at all is a sin. And none of us chooses to be born, as far as I know.

I'm not sure attempting a way through by saying that ALL sex is broken and sinful (except for the minimum amount needed to procreate? Or is even that a sin?) is going to cut it these days tbh. You're going to end up where I am, by deciding that the distance of theology from reality is too great to keep a faith.

It happened around the same time. I went with vague timelines because this is a chat forum and the key detail was that I found out about the youth group lesson recently. You can spend your energy picking holes if you like. In youth they generally had doughnut eating competitions and treasure hunts ending at a chip shop etc so it wasn’t lesson focused, maybe a new leader came in that week. They didn’t advertise is as being homophobic and the events schedule didn’t give any clues.

How on earth does two women in a married, consensual, monogamous, loving, sexual relationship harm ANYONE, least of all "those around me"?! 🤯🤯

This.

If God creates people who are gay, then tells them that sex outside marriage is sinful, and that marriage is only for opposite sex couples,ergo if you are gay then you must be celibate and God made you that way intentionally... then God is a sociopath.

In youth they generally had doughnut eating competitions and treasure hunts ending at a chip shop etc so it wasn’t lesson focused, maybe a new leader came in that week. They didn’t advertise is as being homophobic and the events schedule didn’t give any clues.

Yes, this is how churches suck young people in, doughnuts first, intolerant views later once you’re immersed and trusting. Boiling frog effect.

Sounds like it worked on you too OP, you’ve enjoyed the community aspects of church (understandable) without examining the underlying views too closely.

Well said @batt3nb3rg