This past Sunday, a bunch of us went out to the Pride Parade in downtown Chicago to serve as an alternative voice of love between the Church and the LGBT community, as so often the only Christians at these events have large megaphones, harsh words, and condemnation burning on their tongues. We wanted to be different than that, to show that more than anything, the church is a people of love, of God-fearing Christ-like love.
I’ll be honest with you that this was an eye-opening, character-stretching moment in my life. I come from a very conservative Baptist background (nothing wrong with that at all!... inherently), but I was always made to believe that the gay community was some sort of brood of evil-doers, some disgusting and unclean group of fornicating sinners. Many people where I grew up in and around would even go as far to say that homosexuality was a “special sin”, a “greater sin than others”, and that God wanted nothing to do with these people, nor should the church have any interaction with their community. All the while I had always wondered where these claims came from, what they were based on, where these ideas were found in Scripture, and if anyone back home really even knew someone who is gay, much less understood anything about their culture, their perspectives, or anything that related to the people and faces we were giving mere labels and distant finger-pointing to (while covering our eyes and blinding ourselves from being people who engage rather than enrage).
My perspective of the LGBT community and the church’s role amidst this community started to change when I became friends with several amazing guys at two consecutive places I’ve worked over the past 2 years. These people became my friends, good friends, and the LGBT community was given a face (several faces :)) in my life. I started to ask questions, have dialogue, and engage a community I had never engaged before- a community I had all the answers for but knew nothing about. It was a group of wonderful people I had ignorantly hated, avoided, and condemned before ever talking to and learning from.
Let me stop right now before I continue and say to you all that this blog in no way is meant to be pro or anti gay. If you are awaiting my conclusion on my views of homosexuality, you might as well start reading someone else’s blog. This in itself is one of the major problems creating this gap between the church and the LGBT community. We’re always trying to talk about a stance rather than talking to and listening to people with honest opinions and genuine perspectives. This is what distracts us. People always want to talk about Satan/the devil being associated with lifestyle choices and all that, and yet one of his most successful/proven ways of spreading evil is by getting the good people in the church to wage war against the good people in the LGBT communities, the Muslim communities, the Catholic communities, the poor communities, etc. The more we get distracted, the more love is replaced by judgment, faith is replaced by religion, and whole communities are completed isolated and feel ousted by the church. Shane Claiborne once said that if the homosexual community cannot find a home in the church, then where can they find a home and what have we as the church become?
I went to this parade as an outsider, as a person apologizing on behalf of the church for the way we have hated and judged the gay community. It was to let a community know that we are more than megaphones and hate, that we are a people of unconditional, sacrificial love, and that the Jesus we serve would be hopping up on the floats in the parade, grabbing every man and woman He sees, embracing them, looking them in the eyes and saying- “I love you, and I always will”. I left this parade as a part of a new community, friends with people I would have never talked to in my younger days and immature stages of faith, and full of the love Jesus had everywhere He walked on this earth and everywhere He still shows up, begging the church to simply and genuinely- love!!!
Throughout the entire parade Sunday, people on floats and those walking in the parade would pass our area, see our t-shirts and signs that said “I’m sorry” and why we were sorry, and being completely amazed and happy to see Christians showing love rather than judgment, talking about unity rather than hellfire. One of the most amazing moments came when a particular float went by and this young man looked over at our spot in the crowd and saw us standing there with our t-shirts and signs of love and reconciliation. At first, he assumed we were the typical Christian megaphone protestors, there to show our disgust and words of judgment on their community. But as the float turned the corner, his eyes stayed glued to the signs and shirts. All at once, I saw the imaginary light bulb go off in his head as he realized what we were doing there and what we were saying and representing. He immediately jumped up, hopped off of his float and ran back to us, diving into our arms and, with tears held back, simply said over and over again “Thank you”. I will never forget that moment, being hugged by someone I was told to distance myself from, sharing God-like love with people while the stereotypes of religion and world attempted to keep us apart saying that we do not belong together. I remembered at that moment the words of Billy Graham- “It is God’s job to judge, the Holy Spirit’s job to convict, and our job to love”. I love my job. I get to love, to love like Jesus.
I will always be a different kind of Christian having been a part of this parade, having friends from a walk of life I am still processing, still digesting, still working out in my own faith journey. Above all, I will always remember that there are some things we can always debate, some issues people in the church and world alike will take opposing views on, but that in the end there is never a debate around love. Love is never called into question, and love can never be wrong.
As our good friend and author Andrew Marin says (and is the title of his amazing book), love is an orientation.
“And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him”. – 1 John 4:16
“We love God because He first loved us. If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen”. – 1 John 4:19-20
You can see photos from the parade at http://www.loveisanorientation.com/ or http://www.maladjustedmedia.com/ (ours start at like around photo #160).
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