I’ve got a really good friend named Wesley Hill.  He’s a Christian.  A real one.  He’s also “gay”…by which he means that he struggles with being attracted to males the way males and females are attracted to each other. This is now being parsed by the evangelical community as “same sex attraction” or SSA…an attempt to talk cogently and think clearly about the penumbra of issues that the reality of male-male/female-female attraction surfaces.

The struggle’s been with him since before reaching puberty, as far as he recalls. From what he tells me (and says in his recently published book, which by the way is brilliant), he’s never acted on those desires. He’s a “celibate gay Christian”, to put it in his words (see his “Elevating the Conversation? A plea to evangelical Christians to get serious about loving gay people”, which is an excellent review of Andrew Marin’s recent book Love is an Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community at http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/columns/bookoftheweek/elevating.html?start=1).

A while back, Wes wrote this article “A Few Like You”: Will the Church be the Church for Homosexual Christians? about his own struggle with homosexuality and loneliness within the Christian community.  To put it mildly, this created a bit of a firestorm when, from what I can tell, Justin Taylor of Desiring God ministries put it into the Christian blogosphere.

And then the debate hit home here in Little Rock and elsewhere…and I’m quite sure it will go on and resurface and erupt and…for some time into the 21st century….

Thankfully, Wes’s book was picked up by Zondervan and is now out for full consideration of the American e/Evangelicals of all stripes. I wholeheartedly commend it. It’s titled, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (Zondervan, 2010).

Pick it up. Read it. It will deepen your walk with the Lord. It will challenge you in your thinking. It will help you think deeper and better about the issues surrounding homosexuality, same sex attraction and how to think like a Jesus-and-the gospel centered Christian and church.

And hopefully it will help us all become better God imitators (Eph 5:1) when we encounter and relate to those honestly struggling with SSA in the obedience of faith and pursuit of holiness in Christ as Wesley is, as well as those who have gone where Wesley boldly has refused to go.

AMDG

Advent 2010