My Love Letter to Revoice

Revoicees (Revoicers? Revoicians?)

I chose to come to Revoice this year to learn. I’m a straight, married pastor who wanted to hear from and better understand my gay brothers and sisters. I wanted to learn how I can be a better pastor to sexual minorities, and I expected to leave the conference with all kinds of ideas and insights and a more robust framework for how to understand what it meant to be queer in a church that believes in a historic Christian sexual ethic. I was going to head back home with new and better thoughts.

To be sure, I got that. I learned a great deal.

What I didn’t expect to leave with was a whole series of feelings I was not prepared to feel.

I feel incredible grief. It is a good grief for me to feel, because it is an honest grief. It comes from the way that you openly shared the aches of what it is like to exist in that liminal space between what Dr. Johanna Finnegan brilliantly described as “two churches of glory.” You shared the pain you had experienced at the hands of Christians who should have loved you but didn’t. You shared about the difficult path that you walk as you strive to be faithful to Christ. And I grieve as I wonder, and even now see, in what ways I have ended up contributing to that pain for gay Christians in my own community.

I feel a deep sense of joy. I had read about how last year’s Revoice was a balm for the community that attended, and while I know I do not understand first hand what a respite Revoice has been for you, it has been amazing to get to be present and witness everyone here give a three-day-long sigh of relief. It is like I could watch the tension and burdens of walking a difficult path lift off of your collective shoulders, if only for a few days. I have loved getting to laugh and celebrate and cheer with you as you encouraged one another. It has been beautiful.

I am remakably humbled. Dr. Mark Yarhouse spoke to it last evening, but it is an inspiration to see the ways in which you have strived to follow Jesus on a path that everyone around you says is impossible, self-loathing, or contrary to the Gospel. Getting to worship with you is a gift, because it is so clear that you have seen God work in your lives and you take those blessings and give praise in return. I am humbled because in the world in which I live there is next to no cost to me for holding to a traditional understanding of human sexuality. You bear the implications of my theology. I am humbled because I don’t know if I could do what you do. And I have no doubt that there are days in which you do not follow Christ with the kind of singleness of purpose and steadfastness that was on display here in St. Louis, but your witness to me this week has encouraged me to return home and pursue Jesus more faithfully in my own life.

I am grateful and honored to have been able to be here. I hope to go home and not just be more educated, but to strive to make the church in general, and my church in particular, a little slice of the haven that this was for you.

This community will be in my prayers and in my heart.