June 2, 1992, from my prayer journal

I’m struggling deep down with the homosexuality issue. Lord, grant me your wisdom. Being with JP has been so wonderful and I feel like I’m really learning to accept his gayness, but I don’t know where I stand. I’m afraid of clarifying because I’m afraid that will put a huge wall between us.

When my brother came out to me in the last days of 1990, I tried to buy myself some time before telling him his gayness was sinful. I firmly held conservative evangelical beliefs but I’d never studied LGBTQ questions, so one of the things I said in our initial conversation was that I would need to look at the bible to see what I really thought about him being gay. That wasn’t a terrible response, especially since he asked me directly about what I thought about the morality of it all. I suspected I knew the answer but hadn’t done the work, so I wasn’t being dishonest. I needed time, so I asked for it. These days I’m convinced there are better responses in that situation, but that’s largely covered in this post.

What became problematic about my ambiguous response is that I began to use it as a shield to protect myself from the discomfort of telling him his sexual orientation was sinful. For the next couple of years I dithered and dallied, working hard not to come to a theological conclusion because I did not want to face the emotional consequences. Fear, unsurprisingly, is a poor motive for doing theology. Or, in my case, not doing theology.

I knew that if I told JP that I held a traditional Christian sexual ethic that it would offend him, putting up a wall between us. So I did him the disservice of not answering his question—for years. For his part, JP has been nothing but gracious to me about that era. We just spent a week traveling together and again he reminded me that I’m far tougher on myself for those years than he was. I responded, “Yeah, but that’s only because you didn’t know what I was thinking.” He, an agnostic at best, quipped back, “Thank God for that!”

Clear is Kind

The majority of evangelical churches take my approach to JP when it comes to LGBTQ questions: we protect ourselves by not saying what we really think. Brené Brown wasn’t talking about churches and their approach to LGBTQ questions, but she might as well have been when she wrote, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”^[1] So few evangelical churches have a statement on their website or an easily accessible sermon that explain how they view LGBTQ questions – and the silence speaks for itself. Like me, we’re afraid of being honest because we don’t want to hurt feelings. We don’t want to sound exclusionary or, gasp, homophobic.

Her brief blog on this topic is a master class in how poorly we’ve approached clarity around LGBTQ questions. Two of her many insightful comments strike home to me.

The first is that by being unclear we are “diminishing trust and engagement.” Instead of following Jesus to the uncomfortable places and the people in need, we push them away from us and from the gospel. An often-quoted statistic is that 76% of LGBTQ people would be interested in returning to church, as opposed to 9% of the general population.^[2]But to reach out we would need to build trust and actively engage – the very things that being unclear inhibits.

LGBTQ people are deeply suspicious of any church that proclaims it is “welcoming” and yet has not posted an official statement about what participation LGBTQ people are welcomed, or not, into. And they are not wrong to be suspicious!

The second comment Brené Brown makes in her blog that I just can’t escape is that “Talking about people rather than tothem is unkind.” Oof. That’s me, for sure. I’m guessing that’s a lot of us who are straight and who don’t have a clue about what it means to be trans, gay, bi, ace or intersex. And too often our we go round in circles on our church boards talking about LGBTQ issues without ever talking to an LGBTQ person. That’s why over at Small Church Big Table we consistently hold panels of gay leaders and interviews with trans Christians (all from a variety of theological perspectives) – just to help us all start listening better so that we can move towards clarity.

A decade ago when our church was having these conversations – on a team with no LGBTQ people – we hosted a panel discussion in our home to listen to the stories of queer Christians. There was a gay man married to woman, a trans man who’d just accepted Christ, a teenager who’d just come out and wasn’t sure what his theology was, a celibate gay friend, and a gay neighbor who’d been kicked out of church for being gay. What an incredible evening of listening to stories. At the end of the evening, someone from the crowd asked what initial step churches could take to be helpful. Unanimously – from the most conservative to the most progressive – they each said, “Be clear on your website or your bulletin about where your church stands on LGBTQ questions.” Clarity is kind.

If you want to love and serve the LGBTQ community in the name of Jesus, make a statement. Please. If you don’t want to love or serve them, make sure you stay ambiguous.

The Deeper Clarity

But If you look above at the quote from my prayer journal, there was something else going on besides my unwillingness to tell JP what I really thought. I was learning how to love JP, and that was complicating things. Love does that.

It’s tempting to think that courage for me in 1992 meant simply telling Porter I held the traditional perspective on homosexuality and that he and his boyfriend were living in sin. I would have been taking a strong stand on the truth, so to speak. By 1994, I did indeed take that stance, including letting him know he was going to Hell. Not my finest moment.

But, again, I missed real clarity because I was not speaking the truth in love (Eph 4:15), as Paul would say. The difficulty wasn’t the love part. As my journal mentioned, I was growing in love for JP, no doubt about it. The problem was the truth part: I only shared part of the truth.

I’d pigeonholed truth. At that time it meant quoting a couple bible verses and regurgitating what I’d read in a few books. It was overly simplistic. I couldn’t figure out how to do the hard work of looking into my own heart and soul to realize that even though I held to certain convictions about sexual ethics, I held questions at the same time. And that’s not to mention the feelings rumbling around inside me that were incongruent with my convictions. It was those very true things – my questions and my feelings – that I did not share. So I did not speak the whole truth.

Part of the reason I did not share all that truth with Porter is that I had such little access to my own interior world. I was often oblivious to what was going on inside of me. I had few role models who lived integrated lives, able to present what they thought, what they questioned, and what they felt all at the same time.

I don’t think it was ‘bad’ to have those conservative convictions, by the way. It’s just that I had settled for a tamer, one-size-fits-all approach to truth in that season, which then limited my relationship with JP. I chose directness about a set of beliefs—which took plenty of courage to share—over the even riskier, more-nuanced approach where I allowed him into my own processing. It would have been terrifyingly vulnerable to invite him into my own journey. And yet, by coming out to me in the first place, he had modeled a way forward. He had shown me how to be vulnerable and to invite someone else into their process, even when it was twisty, turny, and mess. I just couldn’t see he had paved the way forward, so it took another twenty years to get there.

^[1] Brené Brown, Dare to Lead, 2018.

^[2] Andrew Marin, Us vs. Us, 2016 (with Barna). That study is about 10 years old, and newer studies don’t track the same question, but suggest so potential similar results (see 2020 survey by UCLA Williams Institute and 2025 survey by Pew Research Center)

Apparently, there was a whole world I didn’t know anything about, and my ignorance was about to be on display.

I had never met a gay person and had never thought of a gay person. We were raised in the South, lived on 11 acres of forested land, and went to a fancy private school. Sporadic church attendance didn’t mean we lacked good traditional Southern values, and everyone knew that men were supposed to be men and girls were meant to be asked on dates properly. I was shocked by JP’s revelation. I couldn’t get my head around my brother liking guys.

From that conversation I mostly remember the two questions he asked me. Unfortunately, I don’t remember his determination or my insecurity—no doubt those were the controlling factors in the conversation. I just remember the two questions—and my poor replies.

First, he asked, “So what do you think?”

Since I’d gotten involved in Christian ministry a few years before, I immediately knew he was asking the moral question – what other question could there be after all? I missed that opportunity to tell him how courageous he was to share that with me, how proud I was of him as his brother, and how much I loved him. He laid his heart on the line to me, and all I could think to do was pronounce a moral verdict on his confession. Sigh.

By God’s grace, my misdirected response wasn’t as bad as it could have been—over the years I’ve heard much worse. I said, “Well, I’ve always thought homosexuality was wrong, but I’ll need to go back and think about it and see what the Bible says.” Of course, it never occurred to me that the Bible would tell me to focus on loving him. What did occur is that the Bible would have the correct moral answer to deliver to him.

Next, he asked, “Do you think Mom and Dad know?”

Again, I missed hearing the real question. I just thought he was being thick. Are you kidding me? They are going to be crushed! I didn’t say that; instead, I said, “No, I don’t think so.”

What I didn’t say, because I didn’t hear the question, was this: I hear you longing to be known and feeling a stranger in your own family. That must be so hard. What’s that like for you? I’m sorry for not noticing that part of you, for not really seeing you all these years growing up together. I grieve that, most likely, our parents missed that, too. I think they missed some things about me, too, and I still don’t know how to process that very well but I know enough to say that it really hurts. I’m here with you on your journey.

JP also asked me to be a part of a conversation with Mom and Dad. It didn’t go well. There were tears and yelling and a lot of “How could you do this to us?!” But I felt honored to be there, and his courage and resolve began to dawn on me. It also struck me that I didn’t know a thing about being gay.

That week I left for the Urbana Missions Convention, where I proceeded to attend every seminar related to homosexuality and to buy every Christian book I could on the subject. What I didn’t do, however, was talk to any gay people.

So, that’s how my not-so glorious journey of connecting to LGBTQ people and thinking about these questions began.

We were all sweating as a hundred pastors and elders grilled me and the other seminary students about our theology. Some knew I had a gay brother, so they pushed extra hard to make sure I knew that homosexuality was a true test of orthodoxy worth dividing the church over. I’m certain they heard what they wanted to hear, because they passed me. I had said nothing inauthentic, but what I didn’t speak aloud was how I’d been questioning these things for years, wondering if there might be a way for the church to hold space for more than one view.

This week, over 25 years later, two leaders of very different churches reached out to me about those very same questions. The lead pastor of a large Midwest church asked for help navigating conflict around LGBTQ questions in her church because they have a gay staff member and same-sex couples who are members, but they haven’t been good at bridging the divide over the theological diversity in the congregation. It sounds like many of their more traditional folks have felt dismissed and disparaged. On the other side of the theological bridge, an elder at a large, conservative church in the Pacific Northwest reached out wanting to talk about how to help their church figure out the same thing, though from the other shoreline.

The dominant theology is quite different in these churches, but the conversations are remarkably similar. That’s because, at the core the question is how do we recognize and honor the theological diversity in our congregation? There are some baseline skills needed – conflict management and clear decision making and communication. But far more important than skills will be the posture taken by those who determine the church’s stated theology.

From the work I do over at Small Church Big Table, I can tell that both of these churches are on a good trajectory simply by the fact that they are asking for input. It’s the rare church leader who honors the reality that our congregations hold together a vast tapestry of theological ideas that differ in color and size and texture. But even with their humble and curious attitudes, their journeys will not be easy. I know that all too well.

Last week a dear friend reflected on how LGBTQ questions in the church test the mettle of the leadership. In her words, “I don’t think very many pastors have the tenacity or, frankly, the faith in Jesus, to pursue this journey. It’s too uncomfortable.” I see it all the time: pastors committed to not rocking the boat, not asking the questions, not trusting that Jesus is big enough to hold together the congregation.

As a 32-year-old seeking ordination, I lacked the faith to tell the gathered assembly about the tension in my own mind around these theological questions. Then I spent the next dozen years at an incurious megachurch which gave me an excuse to persist in not asking those questions out loud. It was only when I knew Timothy was gay that I found the courage to start the journey. I’m still ashamed of my self-protective deference to the status quo. My unwillingness to engage God and everyone else more honestly and courageously did no one any good. Instead it set me up for a cataclysmic theological collision that could have been so much healthier. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Oof. My immediate reaction was to say how sorry I was.

But then this sort of spilled out of me: “I’ve always thought it was a parent’s privilege to confess their faults to their kids. How else will the kids learn how to own their own crap?” What a lovely ideal.

The truth is that I hate apologizing to my kids. I’ve always hated it. It’s so humbling to ask a two year-old or a twenty year-old to forgive you for raising your voice or being impatient. It feels like something dies in me every. single. time. And yet, God, it is so good! Because on the other side is where life and freedom and intimacy lie. I cannot imagine a life that doesn’t include regularly apologizing to my kids, even now that they are in their 20s.

Just after that lunch today, a friend had sent me a one minute clip she ran into on social media. It’s from Oprah’s Book Club when Oprah asked Timothy about the book (John of John). In his response, he longs for the dad to apologize - just once - to his son. And he reflects on what it meant for him to have that experience growing up. I’m still trying to live up to the man he sees me to be.

You can see that short clip of Timothy HERE.

For me, the process didn’t go the same way.

When Oprah asked me the question, “What happened to change you?” what I really wanted to say was, “Read the book I’m writing.” And that’s not even because I wanted to boost sales (although, who wouldn’t want Oprah to read their book?). It’s because the answer is not a short one, and there have been so many twists and turns along the way.

What I said to Oprah was, “It was a long, slow journey.” And I stand by that. How do you turn decades of distress, resistance, and wrestling into a paragraph?

My best friend, Bo, and I were roommates in college, we stood up in each other’s weddings, and we continue to be in touch almost daily 35 years later. About 15 years into our friendship we realized we needed a bit of structure to help our friendship grow, so one of the things we did is we started the practice of asking ‘the question’ when we got together. When we were 45-years old, he was out from Indiana visiting here in California and the question was, “What attributes do you want to be known for by your kids when you’re 75 years old?”

We sorted through options like “kind” and “patient” and “growing” but I don’t remember what exactly we landed on. I think it might have been all three. What I do remember is the conversation it started. As we talked, it became painfully clear, looking at who we were then, that we were not simply going to develop these attributes naturally. They would not drop in our laps. And we knew ourselves (and each other) enough to suspect that there was no way we were going to master one per year. Instead, we took the long view. We made the bold decision to seek to grow our character by one of those attributes a decade.

That was almost 15 years ago, and I wish I could say we’ve succeeded. I suppose there’s been some progress, but to confirm you’d really have to ask our kids and I’m not giving you their contact info. But what struck me is that something inside us knew deep down that change—real character change—doesn’t happen easily or quickly. More on that later, but you can see why I just didn’t know what to answer Oprah. It would take a book to do so.

She’d read the NYTimes article that Timothy and I wrote and wanted us on her Book Club to respond to John of John by Douglas Stuart (which, I just realized when I copied that link, is today’s #1 bestseller on Amazon - wow!). So we had a great adventure getting to NYC for the taping… and then she spent EIGHT MINUTES interviewing Timothy and me in the middle of her Book Club, all of which made it into the final cut.

If you’d like to watch, we start at the 25:50 timestamp on YouTube HERE, and it’s also on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Fun story: After the taping, Timothy and I started our race to catch a train to Philly and saw there was just enough space to squeeze into the elevator there on the 24th floor. But we pulled up short when we realized that Oprah herself was on it, saying we’d take the next one.

“You get in here right now,” she commanded. And when Oprah speaks, you listen.

So there I am, smashed up against Oprah Winfrey as the door sealed us in. She holds my arm and leans her head against my shoulder all the way down and we have a lovely, quiet conversation (mostly about her escaping the Southern Baptist Church, in response to her sharing on the Book Club). What a gift that woman is.

I flew out to DC, and then Timothy and I took the train up the NYC for the day. I met my fantastic agents at CAA in their fancy midtown high-rise while Timothy furiously helped his team secure the passage of the biggest housing bill in decades through the senate. We met up at the Glasshouse right on the Hudson River and were ushered into the green room. We grabbed sandwiches as we watched Oprah finishing up taping another episode, and the producer sent me off to a side room in an attempt to fix my face and hair with his makeup person (she gave up after less than 5 minutes).

Then we were ushered into the pop-up studio on the 24th floor with 55 other guests along with the famous author whose novel was centerstage. That book was about a conservative Christian father and a gay son, so Oprah wanted us on the show to share some of our journey and insights.

After interviewing the author for fifteen minutes, Oprah turned to us. To be held in that woman’s gaze is to be ushered into a comfortable, private room built for curious conversation. I cannot remember what she asked - it all seemed so natural, so warm, so inquisitive.

We’re about to see how it turned out. Your guess is as good as mine - I haven’t seen what they made of it.

Tomorrow, Oprah’s Book Club drops on Spotify and Apple, and the video goes up on YouTube. Take a look or a listen and let me know what stood out to you in the comments below!

One of the ways you know you’re truly born again is that people give you crap for being born again. Some call it confirmation bias, but whatever it is, it worked for me.

I went to college believing I would be the one to convert my campus and bring revival. I’d been a Christian for almost two years, so at that point I had all the energy and knew all the right answers. Often, it was the criticism I received that galvanized my faith.

I played Varsity Lacrosse my freshman year at Williams College, a small liberal arts school in Massachusetts. I learned quickly where all the stereotypes of male lax players came from. It was a rowdy crew, fond of’ anatomical’ conversations, shall we say. After our first away game all the frosh were made to compete chugging beers on the bus ride home… but I was a Christian. I told them so and chugged a grape soda instead. Between that move and my lack of anatomy references, I wasn’t very popular on the team, which I took as a confirmation of my true faith. (I’m sure it wasn’t that I was too skinny, too slow, or too sloppy of a player.)

Proudly not drinking, often bringing up Jesus in class, and inviting everyone in the dorm to my bible study earned me a lot of nicknames. “Jesus Freak” was my personal favorite, a badge of honor. All the pushback seldom made me budge. That’s the thing about religious opposition - rarely does a frontal assault make any headway. Personally, I loved it when atheists called me stupid. I’d invite them to lunch and confront them with the ontological proof for the existence of God. Using more big words than they did became my ‘nice’ way of calling them stupid to their face–and confirming that I was right and they were wrong.

I’d come into college as a true fundamentalist. I didn’t know that was my religious persuasion, because we didn’t talk about religion in our home and in my youth group we were merely ‘Christians.’ But looking back it’s clear as day. All the might of an elite liberal arts college couldn’t topple my faith because I’d been inoculated against liberals and their arguments in high school (in part by my family, in part by evangelist Bill Gothard’s training). The harder they pushed, the harder I pushed back.

In the end, it was the kind and thoughtful Christians who helped me to soften up. My roommate was (and still is) the long-suffering sort, loyal to a fault. There was no amount of foolishness that could drive him away. Instead, after an afternoon studying or kicking back he would gently ask how I was certain that psychology was demonic (his father was a psychiatrist, after all). Eventually he wore me down. In my last semester in college I actually took Psych 101, and loved it.

If I’d only encountered the opposition, I suspect I’d still be a fundamentalist today.

• April 28, 1989 [from my journal, age 21]

During high school back in the 1980s God spoke to me half a dozen times. I thought it was normal. I hadn’t grown up very Christian, so I didn’t have anything to compare it to.

But the problem with God speaking to me was that I thought somehow that was all I needed to be a Christian. Of course I’d heard that the bible was important, so I finished that before going to college. And I had some good Christian friends—those helped. But basically, I figured I had this whole faith thing nailed down within a year of becoming a Christian.

Five years later, I was stumped. I’d wrecked a bunch of friendships and grown frustrated with my inability to stop looking at porn and wasn’t getting all the clarity I used to have when I prayed. Most of the time I found myself blaming God for not doing a good enough job making me. In a rare fit of honestly, as a junior in college, I finally admitted that the issue was me. God, I just don’t know how to be me. I didn’t like the man I saw in the mirror and I had no idea how to morph into the person God intended for me to be.

What it came down to was that change, deep change, was difficult. I had banked on God’s voice fixing me, but that’s rarely how it works. Just look at the bible – God spoke directly to the people any number of times in the book of Exodus and yet they made the Golden Calf as soon as Moses turned his back for a minute. Maturity does not result from executive order.

Twenty-five years after that journal entry, my son came out to me and my wife Katy, and the journey repeated itself. How do I be a dad—especially since I’m an evangelical pastor—to a gay son? Who am I really and is my relationship with God everything I thought it was?

There were a lot of theological questions and plenty of professional questions along the way, but ultimately it really came down to Who am I? and Who are you, God?

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I record things with almost pathological intentionality. It started in high school after I was born again. I wanted—needed, really—to track what God said to me and how it matched up with my experience. No one told me to do it; I just couldn’t not do it.

My father similarly documented his thinking, his family history, his parenting flaws, and his net worth—so maybe it’s genetic. In one of the greatest disappointments of my adult life, on the day my father died and just before I arrived at my parents’ house in Virginia, my mother marched down to the desk in the basement and shredded all his journals, letters, and notes from therapy she could find. To my delight and her dismay, she missed a couple of files of notes he’d addressed to me and my brothers.

Each Saturday morning, I Iook back over my journal entries from the same week a year ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago and thirty years ago. They keep me honest about how my relationships and theology have shifted over the decades. It would be convenient to imagine my younger self as inclusive and justice-oriented, but I do not have that luxury in my self-reflection or in the book I’m working on—the written evidence proves otherwise.

This book I’m writing is rooted in my personal journal entries, each of which is written to God as a form of prayer. I have over ten thousand pages of them, starting in 1985. And I include snippets of my father’s surviving journals, and letters I started writing to my future wife, Katy, in 1990. When Katy was pregnant with each of our kids, Timothy and Caris, I wrote letters to my unborn children and to their future, entirely hypothetical (but certainly heterosexual) spouses. To my chagrin, I those show up as well in the book.

In addition to writing letters to both kids over the years, I also kept a journal for them. I haven’t decided yet when to give each kid the 750 pages of journal entries I jotted down to capture funny things they said or did, key moments they might not remember, and my own insights into who they were becoming. I guess they’ll see some of them pretty soon.