Seen, known, loved: My life as a lesbian Christian
Wendy and her wife as they married in December 2014
It’s not easy being a Christian woman who loves another woman, writes Wendy Young.
After years of wondering about it, I came to the final conclusion about my sexual orientation halfway through high school.
We had a new home economics teacher who was also a trained youth counsellor. When she introduced herself to us during her first assembly, she invited anyone who had something they needed to talk about to make an appointment to see her. I think I might have been the first to go.
There wasn’t a big age gap between us and we felt like equals. Very quickly we lost all sense of a hierarchy and our sharing of difficult details from our troubled lives was reciprocal. We spent a lot of time together. We became close friends. I fell in love.
In the same year I came to faith in a very dramatic way. A visiting pastor to our school assembly (who knew school assemblies could be so life changing?) extended the invitation to come forward and give our lives to Christ and before I knew it I wasn't in my seat any more. I was up there in the front with a group of other kids who wanted to do the same thing. We said the prayer of salvation together out loud and I had a visceral sense of being in the very presence of God: humbled, submissive, completely seen and completely known.
“Our wedding day... was the happiest day of my life. As a couple we tried to attend so many churches. Our friends would say ‘don’t say you’re together’, ‘don’t tell people you’re married, just slip in and out anonymously!’ But sometimes people don’t understand: to be part of a church family means to be actively involved in the life of the church; to be part of a family means to be seen; to be known; to be loved.”
It was an incredible experience. I know it's not the same for everyone, and it doesn’t have to be, but I do hold onto it as something special that happened to me. From that day on I have never doubted the truth of the faith I had been taught since I was a little child. I have never doubted that Jesus Christ is Lord. I have never doubted my salvation…
That last little bit isn't true. I doubted my salvation every day, for many years.
I was chosen to be a group leader in the Christian Youth Association. I was attending numerous church services every week. I was part of the worship band. I thought my path was quite clear, especially when a group of students came to the school recruiting for young Christians to give a year of their life to Christ after they finished high school, by working on a cruise ship sailing from port to port around the world proclaiming the Gospel. It sounded like the most amazing way to spend a year of my life.
I went to talk to one of the recruiters to see what the process would be. Somewhere in this conversation she asked if there was anything in my life that might get in the way of me doing missionary work. I knew immediately what she was getting at but I didn't want to say it. I asked her to name a few examples of things that might stand in my way and I can't actually remember the rest of the list. The rest was irrelevant to me. I was a lesbian, and lesbians were not allowed. I’d have to promise to walk away from this ‘lifestyle’ and to commit to long-term ‘prayer ministry’ (also known as ‘conversion therapy’) before someone else would decide if I had indeed been freed from my sinful desires and could perhaps join the cruise ship in the future.
Anybody who has walked this path will know that there are a number of verses in the Bible that people use to ‘prove’ that anybody who isn't in a heterosexual marriage but has any sort of sex life will go to hell. There are many ways to make people believe this, and there are many ways to make it serve your own agenda. After years of struggling with this I know now that many phrases in the Bible have been mistranslated into many different languages and for many different cultures. The only way for me to get to the bottom of what’s true about Christianity and God is to measure anything I read in the Bible against who Jesus Christ was as a person. If something doesn't match with who He was, and how He behaved and how He treated people, then it isn't true.
It isn't true, Westboro Baptist Church with your nasty posters, that ‘God hates fags’. It isn't true that the LGBTQIA+ community are not allowed to be part of God's church. Jesus never said that. This was something people decided. People like to put other people into boxes. People like to say which other people are allowed and not allowed to do something or be something or be part of something. This is not the word of God. Jesus did not say ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through being heterosexual’. He DID say: ‘No one comes to the Father except through me’.
One term into my final year of high school, I wanted to kill myself. I had to leave school and live under the watchful eyes of my parents and do my final year through correspondence, because all that was going on in my head and in my body was too much to cope with. The tension between being gay and being a Christian, and not fitting in anywhere, piled on top of the traumatic childhood I was already in counselling for, and having fallen in love with said counsellor, had taken a terrible toll on me. Being removed from that environment and having to focus on getting high school done made me gather myself together and like Nike, Just Do It.
Skip nearly twenty years - one failed long term lesbian relationship, a few rejections from various churches and a number of jobs later - in my mid-thirties I met the person who has by now been my wife for nearly eight years. What attracted me to her the most was that she had no doubt about who Jesus Christ is. We met through a writers’ group on Facebook and we lived on opposite ends of the world, so we Skyped for six months to get to know each other. We fell into a different kind of love than the one I had experienced as a teenager. This was mutual, we knew this was for life, and so she proposed.
My whole world came crashing down.
I had been taught that marriage was not for me; it was for straight people. We knew that this was a massive problem and that it may very well be the end for our relationship. She did not want to continue on a path that could never lead to marriage and we decided that I needed to figure out what I really believed in, versus what I had been indoctrinated with all my life. I spent the night wrestling with God (like Jacob and the angel did in the Old Testament), deep inside the kind of prayer that put me, once again, into the very presence of God. It was as visceral and undoubtable an experience as I had in high school.
By the morning I knew that this relationship, this love, this woman had come into my life as a blessing, a gift. We were meant to be together, and we were meant to be married.
Our wedding day in December 2014 was the happiest day of my life. As a couple we tried to attend so many churches. Our friends would say ‘don't say you’re together’, ‘don’t tell people you’re married, just slip in and out anonymously!’ But sometimes people don't understand: to be part of a church family means to be actively involved in the life of the church; to be part of a family means to be seen; to be known; to be loved. We even tried the churches that my wife had attended years before when she had a husband and a pew full of kids. She had always been very active in prayer ministry, and leading Bible studies, and working with the homeless. We were told to our faces that these churches now could not have us. Because of those few mistranslated Bible verses, it would be completely unacceptable for us to be included and actively involved in the church.
This summer, at the Lambeth Conference, a gathering of bishops from across the Anglican Communion for dialogue on church and world affairs, there was a re-affirmation of the notorious 1998 Lambeth Conference Resolution 1.10, in which bishops rejected ‘homosexual practice as incompatible with scripture’. Not all bishops agreed with this – it’s a divisive issue which has led to calls for the Anglican Communion to split.
Meanwhile, a few months ago my wife and I stood in the front of our church, next to a young person who was being baptised into the Christian faith. She had asked us to be her sponsors, a bit like godparents. My wife and I found this church just at the point of wanting to give up on ever finding one. I had started a job just down the road and we decided, one last time, to put ourselves at risk of ever increasing hurt and rejection.
As we arrived for this very special honour of being part of someone’s baptism, we tried to keep our focus on our friend; on her big day. But the vicar came to sit in the pew just behind us and said: ‘I just want to let you know that all the nastiness that has come out of the Lambeth Conference makes me SO angry. I want you to know that you are loved. If the bishops won’t affirm you, I affirm you. You are a blessing to us; your marriage is a blessing to this whole church.’ We hugged and cried together.
