Christians who are LGBTQ reconcile their faith, identity
A stranger’s story a few years ago about a plant made the Rev. Luther Young Jr. realize that God would always be there to nourish and cultivate him, even after others discarded him.
But Young, now minister of music and creative arts at Woodland Christian Church on the Near East Side, said during a recent panel on religion and LGBTQ identify hosted by Stonewall Columbus that he still struggles with reconciling his calling as a clergyperson with being a member of the LGBTQ community.
He told the story of how when he came out to a church he was serving a
few years ago, the Baptist congregants came to the conclusion that they weren’t ready to have an openly gay minister on staff.
“I was hurt and confused, and I told God. I said, ‘Why?’ I asked God, ‘Why are you calling me to something when the people don’t want me here? Why should I even stay? What is this?’” Young said.
Then, he continued, God sent him a sign in the form of a woman’s story about her plant.
He had stopped by a different church one day not long after his own congregation rejected him and heard a woman telling attendees about a plant that had died. She never threw it out, and one day — long after she thought it was dead — she noticed it started to look a little bit alive again.
So she repotted it, nourished it, watered it and cared for it. It grew two to three times bigger than it had ever been before, Young said.
“She ended by saying, ‘God is like that. Sometimes when people will seek to discard you, when people find you are no longer worthy, that you are useless, they think you’re dead to them, God will take you and care for you and water you and nurture you,’” Young recalled.
He said during Thursday’s virtual panel that he cried uncontrollably after he heard the story because that was just the answer he needed.
Another panelist, Karen Hewitt, deputy director of Kaleidoscope Youth Center Downtown, a center for LGBTQ youth, also shared her story.
She grew up Pentecostal, her father a minister. But she remembers a pivotal point in her faith was being invited to a drag show at a reconciling ministries conference — reconciling ministry organizations work toward the inclusion of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities in the United Methodist Church — after she first attended Summit on 16th United Methodist Church on the North Side.
Seeing the drag queens and kings at the conference made her think of the Scriptures that say God loves her.
“It was the first time I felt like I didn’t have to defend myself,” she said.
Now, she said she believes Jesus is nonbinary.
“I like to think Jesus is all things,” Hewitt said.
Jacob Nash, another panelist, remembers walking to his mailbox years ago, asking God for a sign. A transgender man who transitioned 23 years ago, he said that, at that time, churches weren’t talking about transgender people.
“For me it was never about whether I left the church or not because for me it really wasn’t about church as much as it was about a relationship with God,” said Nash, who lives in the Cleveland area and is a consultant on LGBT issues.
One day, after he’d done a Bible study about Jacob wrestling with an angel of God and saying, “I just want you to bless me,” Nash asked God to do the same for him. In the mailbox he found a letter from his doctor affirming his then-new gender identity: male. That was the sign — and blessing — for which Nash had been asking.
Although Nash has been comfortable with his identity and faith since, others on the panel said they are still working on reconciling the two.
Arykah Carter, a transgender woman also living in the Cleveland area, said it’s an ongoing task for her.
“It seems like every day I have a new thought, a new idea as I get more into studying the Bible and reading the Bible and trying to increase and strengthen my relationship with God,” Carter said.
She said she has a hard time believing the things she was taught growing up in a Black Baptist church.
“I have a hard time believing a God I love and serve is going to send me to fire and brimstone because of who I am when I can look around to many churches and see clergy that are doing things that are wrong,” Carter said.
“I had to kind of reconcile using my logic, and my logic is the God I serve is not one that is going to cast me into a pit of fire and brimstone because I’m transgender or because I love someone of the same sex.”
dking@dispatch.com