The struggle we all face: reaching gays with the gospel

This week we are running a series of blog posts following Vaughan Roberts’ interview on how he struggles with same-sex attraction. This extract from the excellent Walking with Gay Friends (IVP) by Alex Tylee, helps us understand some of the barriers to the gospel that there are, and how we might break them down...

Having acknowledged how hard and complex it all is, what on earth are we to do when we try to communicate the gospel into all of this?

The first response is not to be put off. We probably need to witness to gay people slightly differently and perhaps more sensitively than we do to some other friends, but this does not mean that we should shy away from it completely, or that it is impossible. The gay community needs the gospel! Our gay friends need saving from a lost eternity. We cannot let fear or ignorance stop us from fulfilling the great commission with this particular lost and neglected mission field.

It is important to be mindful of the fact that a lot of gay people will be starting with an awful lot of negative prejudice. The media are constantly presenting Christians as homophobic and unloving towards gay people. There is also the sad fact that a large proportion of Christians are at best misinformed, and at worst strongly homophobic, so there will be a great many gay people who have first-hand negative experience of Christians.

Often the best place to start is to say ‘Sorry’. ‘Sorry’ on behalf of any Christian who has said hurtful and insensitive things and claimed that it is the Christian line, and to communicate that our own desire is to love and understand our gay friends in the best way possible, through listening and compassion.

Caroline, a non-Christian lesbian, told me about one particular experience she had had of Christian homophobia:

"When they showed the first civil partnership on TV, I thought, ‘These two girls, it’s their big day,’ and it was really sad that there was a far-right Christian standing with a placard saying ‘You’ll rot in Hell’. I thought, ‘Each to their own; you might have those beliefs, but why stand there and try and inflict them on someone else?’ They’re having what is, to them, a very important and special day. You wouldn’t dream of standing up at a heterosexual couple’s wedding and doing the same thing. I thought that was quite sad, actually, and reflects poorly on the Christian community, and I hope that’s not representative of Christians in general.”

We must be mindful of the fact that sad situations like this doexist. We need to take it into account and be sensitive in view of it when witnessing to our gay friends.

Because of this, and the generally sensitive nature of the issue, I am not convinced of the usefulness of addressing gay people en masse evangelistically: for example, distributing flyers in gay bars, or giving evangelistic talks aimed at the gay community. This is not to say that we should not be inviting our gay friends to general evangelistic events (I myself was converted by a series of general evangelistic talks), but I am very wary of evangelistic talks intentionally addressing the homosexuality issue.

We need to invite our gay friends to events ourselves, so that they are going with a person who loves them. Going to a gay event uninvited, with flyers listing the relevant Bible passages, is insensitive. I think that the gospel is such an offence to gay people, and such a huge lifestyle and identity challenge, that it needs to come from a known, loving source in order to get past the possible prejudice or previous negative experience of Christianity.

When my friend first told me the gospel, I was so offended that she would dare to suggest that if I were to become a Christian my sexual preference would be less valid than someone else’s. I think the only reason I even listened to her was that I knew she had already been a good and supportive friend for two years. I knew that she loved me and she was prepared to be my friend, knowing that I was gay. She at no point communicated that her love was conditional on my conversion (or that choosing celibacy was the condition on which I could become a Christian). She just said, very plainly, that I needed Jesus, just like everybody else, and talked about some of the implications for me.

It did test our friendship, but we survived it because she had already proved that she would be saying this only out of love, not out of some misguided bigotry. In fact, her solid (though, of course, imperfect) friendship made me ask myself whether there might even be some truth in what she was saying to me. It was that which started me on the path towards accepting Christ.