Today’s post was written by Dr. Lana van Essen, our dear friend and Executive Director of Operations for Transmission Ministry Collective. We are grateful for her advocacy and voice and are thrilled to share her work with all of you here during Pride Month.
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The first time I prayed as my true self was when I became a person whose body, name, and love had finally stopped apologizing for existing. For some reason, I expected the room to go cold because the judgment I had been hearing about “my lifestyle” had taken a true stronghold in my life. I had been told, in a hundred small ways, that God met me on the condition that I keep certain parts of myself in the dark, so I braced for the silence of a God who had left. However, what I found instead was the same warmth that had been there my whole life, waiting, patient, a little amused that I had ever thought I could scare it off.
I am queer, I am trans, and I love Jesus. I want to say that out loud before I complicate any of it, because the complication only matters if the affirmation is real. So let me be clear: this is not a story about leaving the faith to save myself. It is a story about the faith being bigger than the people who tried to hand it to me with conditions attached.
Zach has written a whole book about how the Bible gets turned into a weapon, and how it can become a tool for healing instead. I read it as someone who has been on the receiving end of the weapon. I know what it feels like to have a verse aimed at you, to watch a text get lifted out of its world and pressed against your chest like proof that you are a problem to be solved. When you read the Bible through the lens Zach calls flourishing, the verses that were used to exile me stop reading like a verdict and start reading like someone else’s fear, dressed up in borrowed authority.
When I stopped reading Scripture as a list of ways I might be disqualified, I started actually meeting Jesus in it.
Jesus, who kept finding the people the religious establishment had sorted into the “outside” pile, and who kept treating that sorting as the actual sin. Who let an unnamed woman argue him into a wider mercy and then praised her for it. Who touched the people you were not supposed to touch, ate with the people you were not supposed to eat with, and seemed constitutionally incapable of leaving anyone in the category the system had assigned them.
I did not have to smuggle my queerness past that Jesus. He was already standing on the far side of every line I had been told not to cross, waving me over.
Ironically, true repentance, for me, did not look like becoming straight or becoming a man again. It looked like turning around and walking back toward the person God had been calling by my real name the whole time.
I know how this sounds to some of you, because I used to be on the other side of it. I am not interested in pretending the disagreement is small or that everyone arrives here easily. The question underneath all of it is not really “what does this verse say?” It is “what kind of God do you believe is on the other end of the verse?” If you believe in a God whose first move toward difference is rejection, then no amount of careful exegesis will land, because the conclusion was decided before the reading began. But if you believe that the God revealed in Jesus runs toward the margins rather than away from them, then the presence of a queer person who loves that God is not a contradiction to be explained. It is exactly the kind of thing that God has been doing the entire time. The thing God has been doing my entire life.
People sometimes ask me whether it is exhausting, holding these two things at once, the faith and the queerness. But my exhaustion is over. The exhausting part was the years of holding them apart, spending all that energy keeping God in one room and myself in another, certain that if they ever met, something would break. But when they met, nothing broke. The only thing that shattered was the small, frightened theology I had been handed, the one that needed me to disappear in order to feel safe. I do not miss it. I have a bigger God now, and a truer self, and they get along beautifully.
So if you are reading this from inside the in-between, loving Jesus with your whole heart while some part of you stays braced for the silence of a God who might leave, I want you to hear this from someone who also expected that silence and never found it. You are not a problem the gospel has to work around. You are exactly the kind of person it was always running toward.
What would it change, for you, to read the next hard verse as if the God behind it was already on your side?
Lana
Dr. Lana van Essen serves as the Executive Director of Operations for Transmission Ministry Collective, a community dedicated to cultivating the full spectrum of trans flourishing. In their support groups, online community, church education programs, and mutual aid network, they are continuing the work of those who came before us, building the places where trans people can discover God without having to lose themselves first.
This June, two of TMC’s community members have partnered to offer a $10,000 match challenge with a goal to raise $20,000 this Pride. If you belong to an affirming church, consider dedicating one or more of your Sunday offerings to TMC this month. If you are an individual, or an ally, consider setting up a recurring gift. https://transmissionministry.com/partner/donate/
If this article resonated with you, please follow Dr. Lana van Essen, subscribe to Like Quiche (her Substack), give to Transmission Ministry Collective, and restack or share this post.
Here are some other pieces you may enjoy:
Let's Talk about Homophobia and Transphobia in the Church: Part 1
For far too long, churches and Christians have tried to take Jesus from LGBTQ+ people. This group of people has been marginalized, excluded, and even violently attacked in the name of Christ, and that’s why we must address the problem of homophobia and transphobia in the church.
Let's Talk about Homophobia and Transphobia in the Church: Part 2
I believe so deeply in full acceptance, inclusion, and equality of the LGBTQ+ community within the church that I have been kicked out of a denomination and several networks, I’ve given up major funding, I’ve lost friends and family members… and none of this compares to what my queer brothers and sisters experience on a daily basis. Everyone is welcome in God’s family. There are no exceptions. If you have questions, just look to the words of Jesus in his scripture.
Let's Talk about Homophobia and Transphobia in the Church: Part 3
Jesus says that we will know believers by their fruits. If our theology leads us to more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness, we are on the right track. Conversely, if our theology leads us to exclusion, marginalization, and harm, we need to reconsider.
No matter our beliefs, we must see others as Jesus sees them: worthy of love and just as welcome in God’s family as we are. This is the basis of Jesus’s invitation and the foundation of our faith. There is no hierarchy in God’s kingdom. All are welcome. There is no other way.
The Church's Pride Problem
I can tell you firsthand just how much more Christlike love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control our community embodies because of the LGBTQ+ folks who participate, pastor, and preach at our church. I am so grateful to live and lead alongside of them.
An Evangelical Pastor's Journey to LGBTQ+ Affirmation
Then came the text from my daughter that messed up my well-ordered world. “Mom, Dad…..I’m gay.”
My world flipped upside down! What was I supposed to do with that? I was a pastor! I knew what I had always been taught about “these issues,” right?
Or did I? I loved my daughter without hesitation, but this seemed like tragedy in the making. Little did I know, however, that God was simply extending me His invitation to understand Him more deeply once again. He didn’t need to change her. He wanted to change me.
I am Queer. Interesting that when I was headed into my first parish my Conference minister told me to go back into the closet not because I was a lesbian but because I was single. This was '89. I look back on it with more understanding because in "family churches" women are the power base and every single woman was seen as a threat to their marriage. As my ministry moved me around to these smaller churches all over the country I saw this a lot. When I met and married my wife it changed. Not because she made me "safe" but because they became more accepting of the way things were changing to a point.
Now retired, divorced and learning to live as a queer elder
God Is LOVE and i as an gayman believe in that!!!!