Brady Boyd, senior pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo., recently wrote a blog post titled “What I Learned From a Coffee Meeting With Three Gay Men.”
Boyd said the meeting was “challenging, thought-provoking and enlightening,” despite an immediate tension. The megachurch pastor shared five lessons from the meeting.
The first lesson is that our stories are more similar than we think. Boyd said the details that separated his experience from theirs “were grossly outnumbered by the uncanny similarities” they shared. “The truth is,” he wrote, “none of us has perfect families.”
The second lesson Boyd shared is that truth isn’t always conveyed in love. The three men he met with explained that Christ followers—who wanted them to “know the truth”—treated the men terribly after they came out as gay.
“Consequently, these men were well versed in the evangelical theories of marriage, family and sexuality,” he explained. “They were also well versed in the art of being judged and scorned.”
Third, homosexuality is more bipartisan than we may think. Two out of the three men were Republican, Brady said.
The fourth lesson is that common sense points to common ground. He shared that though they may not agree on what the Bible means when it speaks of sexuality and homosexuality, “certainly we can agree that both the gay community and the evangelical Jesus-following community can do a better job of being kind toward one another.”
Boyd told the men bullying is never OK and agreed to stand up for everyone in their city—both gay and straight—who is being targeted with insults and violence.
The fifth and final lesson: Coffee tables are places of peace. “The four of us—three gay guys and a straight pastor—agreed that further dialogue held in neutral territory was imperative to our bridging a volatile gap,” Boyd wrote.
Boyd points out that he has not budged at all on his theology regarding biblical marriage between solely a man and a woman, nor has he wavered in his belief that acting on homosexual tendencies is a sin. But he’s determined to live as Jesus lived. He said Jesus “had real relationships with people who believed and lived differently than Him.”
Boyd concluded, “We are called to be people of peace. Join me if you dare.”
