We might not belong the way other people do, with normal homes and normal families and normal ways of fitting in.

The way Jesus tells it, if we give up on belonging in order to follow him, we’ll find ourselves belonging anyway. I’ve often wondered what it means to belong to others even when I can’t manage to blend in with them. Later, when I came out as a celibate gay Christian, I found I didn’t fit into the church as easily as I used to.

Growing up, there was my mutated national identity to deal with–my not-quite-American, not-quite-Indonesian soul, restless in both countries. No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation By Gregory Colesĭescription by Greg Coles, author of Single Gay Christian: “Belonging has never come easy to me. It affirms one can be gay and a Christian, like Johnson whose hope is not in heterosexuality but in Jesus.

This paradigm of care distinguishes between a gay person’s sexual orientation and sexual ethic. As a result, “a driving narrative in Western culture is that anyone who holds to a biblical view of sexuality hates gay people.” Johnson argues the opportunity facing the church today is not to change the historical Christian teachings on sexuality or perpetuate emotional abuse caused by the legacy of the ex-gay movement, but to revoice the conversation on human sexuality, to shift to from cure back to care for gay people. In part because of the church’s failure over the past four decades to cure homosexuality and to engage in a culture war against gays. With personal experience and original research, Johnson provides insightful analysis as to why the church today is facing profound cultural and generational shifts on human sexuality. Greg Johnson, a gay atheist turned Christian pastor, tells the untold story of the rise and fall of the ex-gay movement in the evangelical church. Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church’s Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality By Greg Johnson Community discussion questions and activities are included to engage these topics out loud.

She lays out a biblical sexual ethic and some practical ways we can faithfully and graciously live it out as a church and create open, ongoing conversation with our children. She underscores the ways purity rhetoric harms female victims of sexual abuse. She names not only what was taught through popular purity culture books but also what the teachings neglected: same-sex attraction, female sexuality, perpetual singleness, painful sex, and infertility. In Talking Back to Purity Culture Rachel Joy Welcher invites readers to re-evaluate purity culture teachings by holding them up next to Scripture. Where have messages such as the “idolization of virginity marriage and sex as a reward for chastity men as lust machines, and women as responsible for the purity of men” come from? Evangelical purity culture. Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality By Rachel Joy Welcher

Costly Obedience by Mark A. Yarhouse