In The Affirmative: Our brand new monthly blog about the real life of a queer Christian

Wendy Young lives in Warwickshire with her artist-wife of 10 years. Her main interests are God, music and chocolate. She works part time and is studying towards being a Chartered Manager.

“My faith in God’s love was so sure, but it didn’t extend to me personally.”

OUR MOST READ BLOGGER since 2022, author of Seen, known, loved: My life as a lesbian Christian, ‘You're not… what you thought, ok?’ - Coming out as a queer Christian, and our This Is My Story podcast episode, God rejoices over you, is back with a new series sharing more of her story.

In the Affirmative is a monthly blog from Open Table member Wendy Young. Wendy shares her life, thoughts and experience as a queer Christian living in Britain. We’d love to hear from you, too: Wendy invites readers to add their own responses and reactions as we build community together.

Hi, I’m Wendy and I have been let loose to write you a new blog series!

Why ‘In The Affirmative’? Well, you know that tricky thing about the difference between being welcome, being included, and being affirmed?

What I’ve gathered so far is that when a church is welcoming, you’re fine to attend but not to become involved in anything. Keeping a low profile is ideal.

Churches that are inclusive have started doing the work of truly understanding the harm of exclusion, as well as trying to mitigate it, but the leaders could be further along on this road than the congregation, or the other way around. I don’t personally feel 100% safe here.

A painting by Wendy's wife Jo which Wendy says gives her 'a lovely feeling of belonging, of being included, held'.

And then there are those churches or communities that are affirming of LGBTQIA+ people, no holds barred. I am utterly blessed to belong to such a church, where there are no barriers in the fair and equal treatment of all people regardless of their sexuality or gender identity. I sing in the worship band, my wife and I host small group meetings in our home, she reads Scripture and does prayer ministry. I have even delivered a few short talks during evening services.

The Oxford English Dctionary says that affirmative is ​a word or statement that means yes; ‘an agreement or a confirmation’. I hope we can spend some time together in this blog-space saying yes to one another. It will be challenging at times, but we have at least one thing in common: we love God and God loves us. In my opinion that is the most important thing about us.

Last night my wife and I watched the Songs of Praise episode about Lizzie, the young girl from Manchester who took her own life because she knew her sexuality wasn’t accepted in her church. My barista this morning was a beautiful non-binary young person with the sweetest smile and silver lines from many cuts all across their arms. I wanted to hug them, but it wasn’t the time or place for it. Tomorrow my wife and I will walk in only our second Pride march ever and I hope to see many ‘Such People’ - MY people - and hug those open to a hug and smile at the others and perhaps even give them a little stone or a little shell to carry in the palm of their hand. One that says ‘God loves me’.

Sometimes I’m not sure how I made it to 45. How will my barista make it to 45? Lizzie didn’t. Perhaps the hope lies in the sharing of our stories, the telling of our truths. Saying things out loud or putting them down somewhere for others to see can often break the power that secrets, and silence have over us. That is why a large part of this blog will be my life story.

I was born in South Africa, during Apartheid, into a Christian family who moved around a lot and attended the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC}. I am white, my first language is Afrikaans, and I grew up having maids. I told you: challenging. I’d like to think we were nice enough people, but there were a few complicating factors. The one I’m most comfortable mentioning at this early stage is that my mom has bipolar disorder, still called ‘manic depression’ back then, which wreaked havoc when my sister was born. I was five and our mum was institutionalised on and off for a few years. My dad worked full time, the maid looked after me, and my baby sister was mostly with neighbours.

You might be guessing that we’re in for quite the ride if that’s the easiest thing for me to share.

Church was lovely. I felt safe and at home and precocious, knowing all the stories from the Children’s Bible. Every service was the same no matter what town we lived in, and the predictability was definitely a comfort zone. I had ‘given my heart to the Lord’ as a young child and felt secure in my salvation and my place in the world in general. I was going to be a church minister when I grew up.

When I was 11, and in another new school, one kiss changed everything. (She was also new, from a family who moved around a lot, and we spent many hours together mostly at her house. Her dad was a gentle, slightly useless drunk who allowed us to paint his fingernails and didn’t notice the level of his booze going down a little too fast). My crush ended pretty abruptly when she also started kissing many of the boys in our class and I must’ve had a thing for monogamy even then because I withdrew immediately. She wasn’t bothered and then she moved away and then I moved away. To an all-girls high school. (I kind of want to insert a LOL-emoji but I’ll refrain.)

The undercurrent of playing strip-poker at sleepovers and having a crush on my art teacher was that there was a dissonance in my church life suddenly. I had no idea of what was going on in DRC Synod meetings.[1] I just knew that the church said being homosexual was a sin and that ‘Such People’ should be praying it away daily, or there would be no chance of getting into ministry, never mind heaven.

After many sleepless nights, eyes wide open staring into the corners of the room where I was sure the devil was hanging from the ceiling, ready to devour me - that was the kind of teaching we were fed - I was confirmed at 15 and started singing in the church choir and at weddings and funerals. My faith in God’s love was so sure, but it didn’t extend to me personally. Deep down I believed I was an anomaly, an abomination and I was only just getting away with pretending to be straight and into wearing dresses and high heels and make up, which were very much part of the Afrikaans Christian culture. I had always been top in my class but my grades started slipping and I was acting out at home, getting pretty impossible to live with I’m sure.

Here endeth the lesson.

I look forward to writing for you again soon and I hope you’ll be back too! In the meantime: try to remember that the most important thing about you is that you love God and God loves you. More than you can ever imagine.

Wendy

[1] In 1986, when I was eight years old, the General Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church made a statement that homosexuality was indeed a real sexual orientation, but a ‘deviant’ one. By 2022 some policy resolutions had been made towards the inclusion of LGBTQIA+ members and clergy and to sanction same-sex unions, with much backlash from the church community.