We must acknowledge that God’s people have frequently not modeled this distinction well. Call people to repent for whenever their words or actions have failed to represent God’s heart for people who experience unwanted SSA and the gay community. If people leave your sermon thinking only the LGBT community needs to repent, it will reinforce the values that make it feel unsafe for Christians who experience unwanted SSA to confide in anyone until their loneliness and disillusionment compels them to leave the church feeling hurt and angry.
5. Avoid applause lines and humor for self-comfort on stage.
Preaching can be lonely and intimidating. After all, it’s only you on the stage and everyone else is staring. This isolation might give you some appreciation for those in your congregation who feel the loneliness of not having an outlet to talk about their experience of SSA.
Sometimes we use a one-liner or humorous remark to assuage our discomfort more than for the benefit of our audience. These moments are particularly dangerous in a sermon on homosexuality. This does not mean clear, concise take-away statements or humor are off limits in this message; it just means you should think about them in advance so that you can evaluate the unintended message or offenses you might be sending.
6. Be intentional about providing resources and outlets for conversation.
Think of three audiences for these conversations. One audience would be the general church member who wants to be a better friend (i.e., ambassador of Christ) for individuals who experience SSA. This is the primary audience for Do Ask, Do Tell, Let’s Talk. Another audience would be parents of a child who has come out as gay. Homosexuality and the Christian: A Guide for Parents, Pastors, and Friends by Mark Yarhouse is an excellent resource for parents.
As you provide this guidance to friends and family members, you are demonstrating that your church wants to be a safe place to talk about SSA, which is vital for the third audience: the person who experiences unwanted SSA. For this, I would offer several suggestions:
1. Be clear about your joy and your sadness; joy that these individuals are at your church and sadness that they have likely felt their struggle has been off limits to Christian care.
2. Acknowledge the fear that is involved in disclosing a struggle with SSA. None of us want to acknowledge any of our weaknesses or sins, but the social climate around the subject of homosexuality adds an additional layer of trepidation.
3. Be available for pastoral conversations but be clear that you want the entire church to be a safe place. Private conversations can be an excellent first step as someone gets comfortable with part of their life being known. But pastoral counseling can never replace community. Counseling without friendship is like being stranded in the ocean and given a raft for one hour a week but being asked to swim the other 167 hours.
Mark Yarhouse has written a workbook for individuals putting their experience of SSA into words. This tool can be recommended to help individuals grow more comfortable with what they would want to say when they are ready to disclose what they were experiencing.
In each of these suggestions, your role in the sermon is threefold:
(a) to help every member of your congregation to represent well both what God’s Word says about homosexuality and also what God’s heart feels towards those who experience SSA;
(b) to provide resources for family and friends who experience opposite sex attraction to see that friendship does not require compromising God’s standards; and
(c) to cultivate a safe environment and offer achievable steps so that individuals who experience SSA can have the Christian community God has intended as they explore embracing and/or going deeper in the gospel.
7. Invite feedback.
Hopefully you are already in the habit of receiving feedback on your sermons. On controversial subjects this is even more important. Inviting feedback is another way to make your church feel safe for those who experience unwanted SSA but have not yet confided their struggle to anyone.
When we neglect to invite feedback, we create a context where people feel like they are speaking to someone who is closed; resulting in their words being more forceful. Hopefully you can see how inviting feedback does more than make the tone of your Monday morning inbox lighter. It is a vital step towards a more civil conversation on a subject that is notorious (on both sides) for divisive rhetoric. Until someone invites a conversation, there will be endless debates and attacks.
Consider saying something like this in your sermon, “I know this message will raise many questions. That is good. When we discuss these questions let us remember that how we share our thoughts and concerns may be the most important application of this sermon. We must learn to have conversations, not just debates. Until we can have good conversations in the church, where we share the same faith but possibly have different emphases or concerns, how will we do so with friends who disagree with Christianity and need to hear the gospel? In this sense, how we raise our questions, thoughts, or concerns may be the best measure of how prepared we are to embody this sermon.”
I pray these suggestions allow a sermon you preach or lesson you teach about homosexuality to provide not only an accurate biblical theology of sexual ethics, but also to equip your congregation to become better ambassador-friends of the gospel to members of your congregation who are struggling in silence. I also pray it opens doors for members of your congregation to befriend members of your community, who will only realize the gospel is for (not against) them, if we are willing to develop a relationship with them.
Brad Hambrick is the pastor of counseling at The Summit Church in Durham, North Carolina, and author of Do Ask, Do Tell, Let’s Talk: Why and How Christians Should Have Gay Friends (Cruciform Press, 2016). This article was originally published on JDGreear.com.