Upon learning about Room for All for the first time, the writer of this account contacted us to express gratitude for our ministry. She said it had moved her to write about her experience as a lesbian student several years ago at an RCA college (“It came pouring out!”), and she wondered if her story might be helpful to anyone else. (more…)
The story of my journey toward accepting LGBT people is really quite short and boring. I never really thought about homosexuality much going up. My friends and I often used the word “queer” as a put down toward classmates, but thinking back it was just a general term referring to anyone who offended us in any way. (more…)
“To remain silent about oppression is to further the hate. It’s as bad as doing the killing yourself.” Alex Odya-Weis, age 14.
“Mom, what’s hypocrisy? I know we discussed it in class, but I just want to be sure,” my 14 year-old son asked before he started his English assignment.
“It’s when your behavior does not match with your beliefs. If you say you believe one thing and act another way, that’s hypocrisy,” I answered.
“Oh, like our church,” he responded, referring to the RCA church where we had been members for 13 years. (more…)
The “Room for All” focus gave emotional impact to this day for me. In 1958, on this very January weekend, a phone call revealed my younger brother had ended his life in the darkness of that early Sunday morning. He was 19. He was gay, unknown to me then. (more…)
As I look over my life, I have always felt different than other boys. I always felt that my interests were more “feminine”: music, arts, museums, antiques, even doll collecting. My mother tells me that she could send me out to play in white and I came back clean! I think she always feared that I was “one of them” and that message came out loud and clear. The other message was that good Christian folk were not like that. (more…)
In the 1950s and ’60s I grew up in a Reformed Church in a small town in Southwest Michigan. The sermons in church assumed a literalistic interpretation of the Bible and leaned more heavily on reinforcing obedience than on embracing others in unconditional love. Sex roles were and still are rigidly enforced. Women in that congregation have never been elected elders or deacons (more…)
August 3, 2012
I am a Christian. I was raised in a Christian home, my father was a pastor. I was taught to love the Lord and to serve Him. This I have done all my life. My relationship with God has never been stronger and I am more thankful than ever for the redemption that I have through Jesus Christ and His work of redemption on my behalf on the cross. I know what repentance is and I know what forgiveness is. (more…)
My desire to belong in the Reformed tradition was so strong and I thought if I changed my mind about this, I would lose that part of myself. This was the tradition that raised me, that gave me the gift of faith and my love of God, and that made me who I am. My need to belong was stronger than my desire to embrace the truth that God was revealing to me. (more…)