By Kevin Seitz-Paquette
Our culture would have us believe that there is some inherent tension in being both Christian 
and a member of the LGBT community. In my own past, I’ve heard things like “being gay isn’t sinful, but being in a homosexual relationship is,” or, from LGBT friends, “why should you be a part of a movement that hates us?” The latter cut particularly deep—homophobia is not exclusively a Christian problem, and all of Christianity is not a homophobic movement. The view of incompatibility between the Christian and LGBT communities persists, however, and I had fallen victim to it by the time I graduated college.
When I was a teenager, and I was first starting to grapple with one of life’s most troublesome questions—whether some people are evil by nature—my father answered that “God’s law is written on the heart of all men and women.” Even as I wandered outside the Church, the law written on my heart told me that LGBT individuals were not actually unwelcome. To the contrary, I felt pulled towards finding a faith community that would celebrate LGBT individuals and welcome them as children of God.
To be LGBT and Christian is to recognize that God created us—all of us—in his image, and that we are called to honor that image by living authentically. We know that the Church is a place that looks in awe at all that God has created and welcomes it. By our own experience, especially at St. John’s, we have felt the Christian community telling us that our relationships are just one more manifestation of God’s love for us.
God transcends the lines that humans use to create division, like race, gender, and sexual orientation. The Christian community reflects that transcendence in its diversity, and LGBT Christians play an important part in the completing the big quilt that is the Church.
Originally published in the May-June 2019 Evangelist.
