An Open Letter To The Church on LGBTQ

Dear Church,

A few days ago I was made aware of the statement going around from a group within the denomination in which I was raised who are calling the church to affirm LGBTQ lifestyles. My heart has been grieved ever since. Many of the people in this group are professors from my Christian college alma mater, pastors, peers - all suggesting, rather strongly, that we toss aside the truth of Scripture and affirm the LGBTQ lifestyle. My heart has been so broken and even distraught that the pressure to affirm sin has come so boldly into the Church. And while I know this isn’t the first time we have faced these questions surrounding sexuality, given the caustic nature of our culture and the way many Christians are compromising, I felt an urgency to offer a different and potentially unique perspective as we face this again as the Church.

I’m not just passionate about the need to stand on the truth of the Word of God as we’ve been committed to doing for decades for the sake of being passionate. This issue is personal to me because 14 years ago as a high school senior I found myself in a same-sex relationship with another Christian friend. It was secret and it was shameful, but it was fulfilling something I thought was missing in my life. 

I didn’t want to tell anyone because just a year earlier, a young man in our youth group at church had announced that he believed he was gay and I watched the way our church and even I myself treated him in the months that followed. When I look back I can pinpoint this event as the catalyst for tearing apart what looked like a thriving, growing youth ministry. I saw us try to fix this friend and bring him the truth but grieved as he grew further and further away from church and his relationship with Jesus. I was angry about the whole situation when, ironically, I looked up in my own life and realized I was in the exact same situation.

Because of the response I had seen with my friend at church, I didn’t feel like it was safe to talk about any of the feelings and emotions I was having. I knew most everyone who had responded to him, including myself, had the best of intentions and desired for my friend to come to repentance and wholeness, but in the end, he felt driven away. I wasn’t willing to risk losing my faith and my community by confessing, regardless of the fact that I was taught and even believed what the Bible said was true - homosexuality is a sin. Given my past woundings and the lies I didn’t know I was believing which the enemy had implanted many years before, I moved forward in attempts to justify my actions and my feelings, and somehow live with one foot in each world. 

I felt utterly stuck and confused, but I pressed on in both lives I was now living. In one life I was hearing and answering God’s call to full-time ministry, making plans to become the youth intern at church and go to Bible college after graduation. In the other life I was contemplating if homosexuality was a part of me and even who I was, and if I would ever find my way out… or if I wanted to. In the many nights I spent at my friend’s house doing things I am not proud of, I would hear the Holy Spirit say clearly, “Rachel, this is not what I have for you.” I remember telling him, “I don’t care. It feels right.” Constantly I would push away his loving conviction and correction and instead feed my flesh. The longer I pushed him away, the quieter his voice became in my life. I was desperately trying to have both lives, not realizing I was living out James 4:4, “Don’t you realize that friendship with the world make you an enemy of God? I say it again: If you want to be a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of God.” As much as I wanted to have a foot in each world, the reality was I was making a choice who I would serve.

The best worst thing that ever happened to me was that friend moving to another state for college. Now faced with a gaping wound and a huge secret which the devil was using to drag me under, I had to confront who I had become and decide which person I wanted to be. Would I serve the Lord no matter what it cost me, even putting my flesh to death? Or would I walk away and feed my flesh every desire it cried out for?

For the next 8 months I would wrestle with God, with my flesh, and with the enemy trying to take me out. The depression was so thick and the anxiety so strong that I was truly unsure some days how or if I was going to come out on the other side of the wrestle. I would hear the voice of the enemy trying to convince me that killing myself would be a better option than facing what my life had become. God seemed mostly silent in these dark months, until one day when he asked me if I would let him show me that it was his love I was really after all along. Tired of fighting and desperate for real change, I said yes.

This whole time I was silent about what was really happening in my life. No one felt safe to talk to with honesty, especially my church. I know in hindsight all of that was a lie - I had so many people who would have walked with me in love and compassion, but I had seen too much of the opposite be true when it came to the church and the LGBTQ community. I was afraid if I couldn’t find freedom in this area, I would become the next casualty. 

God was an ever-present source of love and truth in the months that followed though. I started to see light again in my life and came to a true repentance for a homosexual lifestyle and everything it brought with it. His voice became clear in my life again, telling me how loved I was by him and what good plans he had for my life. He assured me I hadn’t ruined the calling on my life for ministry. In fact, he had been telling me even in the midst of the relationship that one day he would set me free and offering freedom in Jesus to the LGBTQ community would become my ministry, which of course I laughed at even after I had left that lifestyle behind since it would have required me to talk openly about what I had done.

In August 2010, I moved to Portland, Oregon, to finish my last 3 years of college at Warner Pacific University. I was excited to attend a Christian college which I assumed held similar theological and doctrinal beliefs as I did. I was also grateful to have left home in Arizona to remake my life and pretend that homosexuality had never been a part of me at all. You can imagine my panic when in 2012 the student leadership that I served on as chaplain and the school itself decided our mission all year long would be to discover how best to build bridges between the church and the LGBTQ community. Suddenly the conversation I never wanted to have was front and center in my life. Students started to come out as gay or lesbian in attempts to move the conversation along and make a case for affirmation and inclusion. I knew I had a perspective to offer that no one else was saying as someone who had been a part of that lifestyle and had come to find that life in Jesus required my repentance and my putting to death my flesh which wanted to live that way.

The secret I had kept was bubbling to the surface. I told a friend, a fellow ministry student, and she wondered what the big deal was, quickly affirming that even if that’s who I was it would be just fine with her. I told a professor and got the same response. Then I found myself meeting with the university’s president, who I still love and respect deeply. I told her I was torn about the conversation we were having on campus surrounding the topic because I knew what it was like but knew Jesus had called me to repent and leave it behind. We talked about how nervous I was to talk about my experiences for fear that my friends and peers would see and treat me differently. She lovingly told me I held the decision for who got to know my story and when. I believe it’s possible I should have decided to stand up and tell my side of the story, but fear of rejection overtook me.

In what could be a much longer story, that root of rejection turned out to be the very thing that was keeping me bound for the majority of my life. Same-sex attraction took another lap in my life a few years after college, but I knew I couldn’t go back to it, so instead I turned to masturbation and pornography at the advice of Christian friends. Once again I found myself in two worlds - leading in a church plant and spiraling in sexual sin. I had no plan to talk about it this time either, especially in church, for fear of rejection. But God had other plans, giving me a blatant opportunity in February of 2017 to come all the way clean and face the reality of my life once and for all. In a moment, I knew if I would put everything on the line and get honest with others, with God, and with myself… if I would truly repent and turn around from sexual sin… if I could take a risk and trust God to take the broken pieces of my life and make something beautiful out of them… if I would let him have it all, he would come in and heal it. Maybe I would never serve in ministry again, maybe my relationships and friendships would change, but I would be free. The freedom Jesus was offering me was worth more than any of the fallout that was to come.

So why tell you this story? Because what we are facing today in the Church matters more than we can possibly imagine. The theological, spiritual, and most importantly eternal significance of this conversation cannot be overstated.

When I look back on why it was that I never fully gave in to the same-sex lifestyle, I truly believe it is because of the strong foundation of the Word of God which was laid in my life by my parents, my church leaders, my Sunday school teachers, my pastors. Our commitment of living by, preaching, and discipling according to the Word of God, even when it wasn’t popular, gave me a foundation to know the truth: there were two genders, made to complement each other in a covenant of marriage, and same-sex wasn’t a part of God’s plan. In fact, not only was it not a part of his plan, it was undeniably sinful.

The truth set me free. And I can’t help but wonder if God is giving me another opportunity in this moment to stand up and tell my story, offering the testimony of Jesus and his way that set me on a path to wholeness and true freedom.

I recognize that part of the argument of those wanting the Church to affirm LGBTQ lifestyles is that people who identify themselves that way do not always feel welcomed into our congregations and churches. I understand this argument well as I’ve been on both sides of it. Are there places we need to repent as Christians and as the Church of Jesus Christ when it comes to how we have treated people and approached this issue? Absolutely there are! We’re all sinners who have fallen short and need a Savior. No one is immune to this. There are always going to be ways in which we need to grow and mature when it comes to having compassion for people and walking that out. Before I move forward, I want to be clear about the fact that we aren’t without sin here. However, when we cross a line and start to excuse and accept what God calls sin, we are in dangerous waters that will bring harm to both the people demanding our acceptance of sin and to ourselves. What’s being insisted upon by those who are pushing us to affirm is a clear overcorrection that stands to divide us into those that will stand firm in the Truth and those who will cower in fear of man.

If I was living out my story in today’s cultural and spiritual climate, I believe it could be a much different ending. Today we’re so afraid of preaching and declaring the truth of Scripture that I fear we have severely weakened the faith of a generation and given them nothing to stand on when the enemy comes to steal, kill and destroy them with the lie that LGBTQ is normal and somehow compatible with being a Christian. We’re selling a false gospel which tells people they can have salvation in Jesus AND have their sin too. All because we are too afraid to be strong in our conviction to the Word of God and preach and disciple with that same conviction. Who would I be today without the strong foundation of my faith? I shudder to think I could be lost to the world and the sin that so persistently knocked on my door and begged to make and keep its home in me.

Paul gives a very direct warning to the church in Galatia about the retrogression they have made in their faith by allowing themselves to be fooled by a false gospel. “You are following a different way that pretends to be the Good News but is not the Good News at all. You are being fooled by those who deliberately twist the truth concerning Christ,” Galatians 1:6-7. What many in the church today are offering is not the Gospel at all but a deliberately twisted, counterfeit truth. We’ve decided it’s too strong to tell people their sexual desires are counter to God’s way and therefore sinful.  We’ve allowed ourselves to be greatly deceived into thinking these desires and attractions could be natural and God-given and, therefore, must somehow be compatible with the Gospel and immune to Scriptures that say otherwise. What a grave mistake we are making!

Living a gay lifestyle and being a Christian are two completely incompatible lives. Contrary to popular belief, homosexuality is not up for cultural context debates. Throughout all of Scripture from the Old Testament to the New, God never changed his mind about the natural order of sexuality as one man and one woman bound in marriage. For thousands of years the Church has held these beliefs and interpretations of Scripture as truth. But suddenly in the last several decades as WE have changed, we have come to think Scripture must change to match what we now feel is right instead of coming into alignment with Scripture that we are to put to death the things of our flesh, regardless of how we feel. 

Have we forgotten what Paul goes on to say in Galatians 2:20-21? “My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless…” Two of the foundational doctrines of the church that I believe we’ve forgotten is that of holiness and sanctification, but if we coddle our flesh instead of putting it to death, how can we claim to be in the process of sanctification? 

To the Corinthians believers, Paul writes he can’t even believe the report he’s heard that the church is allowing a man to live in sin with his stepmother. He condemns the believers for being so proud of this fact and says they should be mourning in sorrow and shame! It’s not a nice, sweet message. But he knew this sin, because the man was openly persisting and wouldn’t heed counsel for repentance, was like a little bit of yeast spreading through an entire batch of dough. Make allowance for this deliberate sin and the door would be open to overlook deliberate sin in every area. If we make allowance for homosexuality, where will it end?

In 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 he warns, “Don’t fool yourselves. Those who indulge in sexual sin, or who worship idols, or commit adultery, or are male prostitutes, or practice homosexuality, or are thieves, or greedy people, or drunkards, or are abusive, or cheat people—none of these will inherit the Kingdom of God.” While Paul doesn’t leave the list just to homosexuality or just to sexual sin, we cannot deny the fact that it is indeed listed clearly! Praise be to God for the final verse which gives us HOPE that we can be set free from this when Paul writes in 6:11, “Some of you were once like that. But you were cleansed; you were made holy; you were made right with God by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” I find myself in the story right here in this verse, filled with the hope of Jesus Christ that I am truly free from my sexual sin - cleansed, sanctified, made holy, made right with God through Jesus!

What a tragedy for us to sell people short of the full Gospel by affirming their sin. I am grieved to the point of weeping over this as I watch more and more people whom I love and cherish fall into this trap. I can’t imagine how deeply entangled in sin I might be if it weren’t for people who cared more about obeying Jesus than their own motives and feelings. When we refuse to tell the truth about sin and refuse to walk with people through the process of sanctification, we are participating in the devil’s agenda. We might as well be taking someone’s hand and leading them straight into hell ourselves by our lack of giving them the full, real gospel of Jesus.

Jesus didn’t take the woman caught in adultery once all her accusers had left and tell her he didn’t condemn her but it was ok for her to go back to her adulteress life. He told her to go and LEAVE her life of sin. Who do we think we are to do any different than what Jesus himself modeled for us? Are we so afraid of what others might think of us or do to us that we are willing to honor man more than we honor God? Have we been taken captive by a spirit of intimidation that’s causing us to even consider compromise on what we know is right? 

Some people will read this and be upset because they will think that by being strong in our faith, we aren’t leaving room for real feelings and real attractions to be processed. They will say that taking this stance on the truth is unloving. This simply isn’t true. Again, the Church must find better ways to engage with people who are struggling with same-sex attraction and relationships, gender dysphoria, and everything in between. The Church should be the community in which people feel safe to engage and explore faith. But real love doesn’t lie to people. Real love doesn’t let people walk off of a cliff without doing everything in its power to warn and direct people to safety. At the end of the day, everyone operates in their own free will and makes their own decisions, but we can’t say we are truly loving people if we are standing by encouraging and celebrating their decisions to go toward death and destruction. Shame on us if we choose to twist the Word of God into something it isn’t and participate in the confusion and deception the devil is using to drive many away from God in this hour.

Is there a cost to ministering to the LGBTQ in my life? Absolutely. Hated by the LGBTQ community because I refuse to back away from the truth of the Gospel that the lifestyle is sin and that Jesus can and will set you completely and totally free. Misunderstood by the Church because I refuse to stop going back to the community that hates me to see them brought to salvation. Put down by my progressive Christian friends who are convinced I can still have it both ways and must be denying myself and therefore them in the process. Yet none of it matters when I compare it to the truth of what Jesus has done for me and the glory that my obedience and testimony brings him! I am convinced that if he did it for me, he can and is doing it for others as well!

If we hold unswervingly to the truth, will it come with a cost to the Church? The answer is always yes. Could there be a split in our denominations? Most likely, yes. Will people leave our congregations? It’s very possible. Yet at the end of the day, when we stand before the Lord, let us be able to say that to the best of our ability, no matter what it ended up costing us, we taught and trained and guided his flock in the truth of the Word and lived empowered by the Holy Spirit to love people in the way Jesus did.

I am eternally grateful that my parents, my leaders, my pastors, taught me in the truth and didn’t back down when demonic agendas came knocking on the door so I would have a foundation of faith and truth to return to when sin entered my house. The decisions we make on these issues have eternal consequences. We must hold to biblical truth and love in the way of Jesus like someone’s life depends on it - because it does.

May we not be like the churches in Revelation whom Jesus rebuked - those who tolerated sexual sin and idolatry, who permitted Jezebel to lead them astray, who had a reputation for being alive but were truly dead. May we not be spit out of Jesus’ mouth for our lukewarm ways. May we repent for the ways in which we have not loved well, both in our rejection of the LGBTQ community and in our fear of man when it comes to the truth. May we hold tightly to the Word of God without fear of the repercussions, knowing that our obedience to Jesus will produce the good fruit we want in our personal lives, in our congregations, and in the Church.

For His Glory,

Rachel Plyler