Download or read book Loving My LGBT Neighbor written by Glenn T. Stanton and published by Moody Publishers. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever feel like we’re just fumbling through the LGBT conversation, always asking but never really finding answers to questions like: What does it look like to be friends with my lesbian neighbors? How should I love my gay child and his partner? What if I’m invited to a same-sex wedding? What did Jesus say—and not say—about homosexuality? What is the role of the church in the same-sex debate? We don’t have to fumble. While the questions are hard, answers can be had. Just ask Glenn Stanton. Stanton, of Focus on the Family, travels widely meeting with and debating LGBT advocates across the country. In doing so he has had the privilege of becoming friends with a number of them. He says, "We disagree on certain convictions, but we still admire and esteem one another . . . Since when was it decided that people who see the world in polar opposite ways can't be friends?" He shares his personal journey building bridges with the LGBT community and offers candid insights on hard questions. In Loving My (LGBT) Neighbor, Glenn Stanton shows us how to speak the truth in love on this difficult but important issue.

Download or read book A Change of Affection written by Becket Cook and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The powerful, dramatic story of how a successful Hollywood set designer whose identity was deeply rooted in his homosexuality came to be suddenly and utterly transformed by the power of the gospel. When Becket Cook moved from Dallas to Los Angeles after college, he discovered a socially progressive, liberal town that embraced not only his creative side but also his homosexuality. He devoted his time to growing his career as a successful set designer and to finding "the one" man who would fill his heart. As a gay man in the entertainment industry, Cook centered his life around celebrity-filled Hollywood parties and traveled to society hot-spots around the world--until a chance encounter with a pastor at an LA coffee shop one morning changed everything. In A Change of Affection, Becket Cook shares his testimony as someone who was transformed by the power of the gospel. Cook's dramatic conversion to Christianity and subsequent seminary training inform his views on homosexuality--personally, biblically, theologically, and culturally--and in his new book he educates Christians on how to better understand this complex and controversial issue while revealing how to lovingly engage with those who disagree. A Change of Affection is a timely and indispensable resource for anyone who desires to understand more fully one of the most common and difficult stumbling blocks to faithfully following Christ today.

Download or read book Messy Grace written by Caleb Kaltenbach and published by WaterBrook. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes, grace gets messy. Caleb Kaltenbach was raised by LGBT parents, marched in gay pride parades as a youngster, and experienced firsthand the hatred and bitterness of some Christians toward his family. But then Caleb surprised everyone, including himself, by becoming a Christian…and a pastor. Very few issues in Christianity are as divisive as the acceptance of the LGBT community in the church. As a pastor and as a person with beloved family members living a gay lifestyle, Caleb had to face this issue with courage and grace. Messy Grace shows us that Jesus’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” doesn’t have an exception clause for a gay “neighbor”—or for that matter, any other “neighbor” we might find it hard to relate to. Jesus was able to love these people and yet still hold on to his beliefs. So can you. Even when it’s messy. “Messy Grace is an important contribution to the conversation about sexual identity for churches and leaders. Caleb's story is surprising and unique, and he weaves it together compellingly. He states his views clearly, leaves room for disagreement, and champions love no matter where you are in this conversation.” —Jud Wilhite, Sr. Pastor, Central Christian Church

Download or read book Is the Homosexual My Neighbor written by Letha Scanzoni and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1980 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the biblical views on how Christians should treat all people, which includes homosexuals.

Download or read book Gay Girl Good God written by Jackie Hill Perry and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I used to be a lesbian.” In Gay Girl, Good God, author Jackie Hill Perry shares her own story, offering practical tools that helped her in the process of finding wholeness. Jackie grew up fatherless and experienced gender confusion. She embraced masculinity and homosexuality with every fiber of her being. She knew that Christians had a lot to say about all of the above. But was she supposed to change herself? How was she supposed to stop loving women, when homosexuality felt more natural to her than heterosexuality ever could? At age nineteen, Jackie came face-to-face with what it meant to be made new. And not in a church, or through contact with Christians. God broke in and turned her heart toward Him right in her own bedroom in light of His gospel. Read in order to understand. Read in order to hope. Or read in order, like Jackie, to be made new.

Download or read book God Believes in Love written by Gene Robinson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the IX Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church, the first openly gay person elected to the episcopate and the world’s leading religious spokesperson for gay rights and gay marriage—a groundbreaking book that persuasively makes the case for same-sex marriage using a commonsense, reasoned, religious argument. Robinson holds the religious text of the Bible to be holy and sacred and the ensuing two millennia of church history to be relevant to the discussion. He is equally familiar with the secular and political debate about gay marriage going on in America today, and is someone for whom same-sex marriage is a personal issue; Robinson was married to a woman for fourteen years and is a father of two children and has been married to a man for the last four years of a twenty-five-year relationship. Robinson has a knack for taking complex and controversial issues and addressing them in plain direct language, without using polemics or ideology, putting forth his argument for gay marriage, and bringing together sacred and secular points of view.

Download or read book The Book of More Delights written by Ross Gay and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe, Garden & Gun, Electric Literature, and St. Louis Public Radio** The New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is back with exactly the book we need in these unsettling times. Margaret Roach of The New York Times says, “Yes, please. I'll have another dose of delight.” In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

Download or read book Not Born Gay and the Zebra Effect Illusion written by Iter Tracy Green and published by WestBow Press. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are people born gay? I think you need to read what we have discovered in this book. What is the zebra effect? What have the experts and authorities told us about what we are to believe and how to think? There are many people leading a gay lifestyle, who know that they are not born gay but were conditioned to it by nongenetic factors. Why do some people want to think so simplistically about LGBT orientations and behaviors? Yes, many feel that they were born gay, but were they really? What do the teachings of Jesus say about same-sex marriage and sexual relationships? To Bible-believing Christians and pastors, here are some ways to be more empathetic, more understanding, and more helpful to the LGBT community while never compromising the teachings of our Lord, Jesus. To the general public, what do you believe about the gay rights issues, and why does it matter? Do you realize that the Bible points to the truth and that news and media sources sometimes misrepresent the truth? What does it really mean to love others in the best way? To the atheist, the agnostic, the gay activist, and others, here is a chance to try to understand the beliefs of millions of Bible-believing Christians in this country. Please realize that for the great majority of your Christian neighbors, their beliefs are not going to change, even under pressure. Please keep an open mind.

Download or read book Building Bridges written by Kendra Weddle and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Letha Dawson Scanzoni changed the landscape of American evangelicalism through her groundbreaking work on the gospel-based intersection of gender and LGBTQ justice. She coauthored two of the first books that support women's equality and LGBTQ rights with the Bible: All We're Meant to Be and Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? In all her work Scanzoni applies the liberating message of Jesus to women and to people who have been marginalized by church and society because of sexual orientation. Building Bridges combines an exploration of the life and work of Letha Dawson Scanzoni with stories of people she continues to empower through her writing and the Evangelical & Ecumenical Women's Caucus - Christian Feminism Today, an organization she cofounded. This book illustrates her growing influence as she continues her prophetic collaboration with new generations. In addition, it provides resources for churches as they build bridges for their ministries of liberation, justice, and peace.

Download or read book Scattering Ashes written by Joyce Smith Helyer and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-06-08 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scattering Ashes is a resource for Christian families confronting the reality of their loved one's gay lifestyle. Joyce Smith Helyer takes the reader on a journey that changed her life when her brother began their midnight Christmas Eve conversation with these words, "Joyce, I have something to tell you." As I waited expectantly for what he was going to say next, he paused, but then shifted the conversation. He tried again, but the same thing happened. I felt like he was trying to land an airplane in trouble and kept circling the airport looking for the best approach. His attempted landings kept falling short of the runway. A vague sense of uneasiness began to fill my mind . . . Little did I realize that my nice, "typical" Christian experience would be undergoing a significant change . . . Fear I could barely articulate almost overwhelmed me . . . Finally, I looked at my handsome, 26-year-old brother and knew the words he was having so much difficulty saying. "Ron, are you trying to tell me you're gay?" His quiet response echoed across the living room. "I thought you had it figured out."

Download or read book You Can t Buy Love Like That written by Carol E. Anderson and published by She Writes Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young lesbian girl grows beyond fear to fearlessness as she comes of age in the ’60s amid religious, social, and legal barriers. Carol Anderson grows up in a fundamentalist Christian home in the ’60s, a time when being gay was in opposition to all social and religious mores and against the law in most states. Fearing the rejection of her parents, she hides the truth about her love orientation, creating emotional distance from them for years, as she desperately struggles to harness her powerful attractions to women while pursuing false efforts to be with men. The watershed point in Carol's journey comes when she returns to graduate school and discovers the feminist movement, which emboldens her sense of personal power and the freedom to love whom she chooses. But this sense of self-possession comes too late for honesty with her father. His unexpected death before she can tell him the truth brings the full cost of Carol's secret crashing in compelling her to come out to her mother before it is too late. Candid and poignant, You Can't Buy Love Like That reveals the complex invisible dynamics that arise for gay people who are forced to hide their true selves in order to survive and celebrates the hard-won rewards of finding one's courageous heart and achieving self-acceptance and self-love.

Download or read book Goodbye My Tribe written by Vic Sizemore and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memoir of a writer's growing disenchantment with his evangelical upbringing Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus is Vic Sizemore's collection of personal essays chronicling two simultaneous transformations. One is the gathering of unconnected--and nonpolitical--evangelical congregations across the nation into the political juggernaut called the Religious Right; the other is the author's own coming to terms with the emotional and spiritual trauma of his life deep inside fundamentalist Christianity, and his struggle to free himself from its grasp. Sizemore, whose father was a preacher and professor at a small West Virginia Bible college, attended Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, arguably the crucible of American evangelical Christianity. Sizemore began writing these essays with the aim of exploring and understanding what happened when the mythology of his "tribe" crumbled from beneath his feet. He draws heavily on his upbringing and his family history as a framework for how his "tribe" of white evangelicals have found ways to reconcile Christianity with what the author finds to be troubling stances on many social issues, among them race, gender, sexuality, materialism, anti-intellectualism, and white supremacy. In a clear-eyed and eloquent voice, Sizemore grapples movingly with his own bewilderment and chagrin as he struggles to reconcile the essential philosophical and moral decay that he believes many evangelicals have come to embrace. His insights, arranged topically and thematically and told through graceful and accessible prose, toggle between memoir and literary journalism, along a spectrum that touches on history, philosophy, theology, and personal reflections.

Download or read book Leading a Church in a Time of Sexual Questioning written by Bruce B. Miller and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biblical Guidance for Ministering God’s Love in a Sexually Diverse Culture In a time when sexual norms are changing rapidly, how can a local church be a place of grace—a loving community for all kinds of people—where everyone can flourish and disagreements are overcome in a Christlike spirit while at the same time stay true to biblical standards? In a way that appeals to pastors and lay leaders alike, Bruce offers a biblical theology of sexuality and provides practical wisdom for how a church can approach ministering to, and alongside, people who identify their sexuality in diverse ways: LGBTQ+. Here is a church-tested program full of wise pastoral insights to help church leaders think through day-to-day decisions, such as how to handle baby dedications, small groups, who can serve, membership, baptism, retreats, the Lord’s Supper, weddings, funerals, teaching, hiring, and caring for those caught in sin. If you are a leader who is facing any of these challenging issues and decisions, then this practical, grace-filled book is for you.

Download or read book Every Believer Confident written by Mark J. Farnham and published by AuthorLoyalty. This book was released on 2021-02-06 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the average Christian who longs to share their faith effectively but doesn't know where to begin, Every Believer Confident is the ultimate guidebook. All believers are called to make disciples and "give an answer" when objections are raised against the faith. Most Christians want to share and defend their beliefs, but they often feel ill-equipped. They desire to reach friends, family, coworkers, and classmates with the good news of Jesus Christ, but lack confidence and skill. They want to be like Jesus and effectively engage the lost with the powerful truth of the gospel. They just don't know how. What's needed is a way to simplify apologetics and make it accessible to the average church member who will never study philosophy or science. If every church member was indeed a skilled evangelist, churches would not have to depend on come-and-see events to reach the community, because every member would be practicing the go-and-tell approach Scripture assumes. Every Believer Confident: Apologetics for the Ordinary Christian simplifies the basic principles of apologetics and provides effective strategies for use in actual encounters with unbelievers. It provides a structure whereby any Christian can engage anyone they meet, move the conversation to spiritual matters, answer objections raised against the Christian faith, and present the gospel of Christ in all its glory and rationality.

Download or read book Same Sex Marriage Thoughtful Response written by Sean McDowell and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Same-sex marriage is here, presenting unique challenges and opportunities. How do those who follow Christ faithfully answer the standard talking points for same-sex marriage? And how can they best articulate the case for one-man, one-woman marriage in everyday conversation? Sean McDowell and John Stonestreet believe a thoughtful approach to God's design for marriage is the answer to both questions. The key is not a contentious attitude towards those who believe in same-sex marriage, but a winsome perspective that is faithful to Christ, committed to truth, and shaped by a love for God and others. Christians need to know that because Christ has risen, there is no such thing as "all hope is lost." They are still called to engage culture even if they are viewed as wrong, illegal and intolerant.

Download or read book Jesus in the Courtroom written by John W. Mauck, JD and published by Moody Publishers. This book was released on 2017-07-04 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever thought of Jesus as a lawyer? It may sound odd, but at times in His ministry, Jesus wore his lawyer hat. When he defended the adulterous woman, when he argued from Scripture that the disciples were fine to pick grain on the Sabbath, and in other instances, Jesus insightfully applied to uphold justice and promote goodwill. The legal aspects of Jesus’ ministry have long been obscured or misunderstood, particularly his interactions with and attitude toward the law and lawyers. Jesus’ desire in his day and ours is to use the law to secure the rights of people to hear the gospel and to set humanity free. In other words, to be the best citizens we can be, we need to follow in the footsteps of the greatest citizen who ever lived. Jesus in the Courtroom covers topics like: Why we should care about the law Strategic involvement with the law How God has used the law to expand His kingdom What can happen when we partner with legal professionals How citizenship is part of discipleship Christian citizenship in matters like adoption, abortion, minimum wage, foster care, and schools We are citizens of two kingdoms, but many of us duck and run when it comes to civil life. For anyone who cares about their community—parents, teachers, pastors, you name it—engagement with our legal system can play a huge role in the health of our communities and in cultivating a context where the gospel can flourish. Jesus in the Courtroom will help us understand not only why we have failed to appreciate the legal aspect of Jesus’ life, but also to understand and cooperate with his legal ministry to us and through us. If we are going to be faithful “citizen disciples” in this challenging new world, we need to look anew at how Jesus taught, thought, and interacted with the legal establishment of his day.

Download or read book One Man and One Woman written by Joel R. Beeke and published by Reformation Heritage Books. This book was released on 2016-03-25 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does the Bible teach about sexual relationships between people of the same sex? Does true love require that we accept all forms of sexual expression? No, real love does not rejoice in sin, but rejoices in the truth. In the Bible, God reveals that He created gender, sex, and marriage, and we may not alter them at our will. Through His laws and works in history, God has made it clear that homosexual practices violate His holy purposes for mankind. The New Testament reaffirms God’s created order and moral laws. It too warns that homosexual practice, like any other sin that we cherish, is the pathway to God’s judgment. However, the Lord Jesus Christ saves sinners by His Spirit and gives them a new identity, forgiveness, life, and power to live according to His commandments. This is the message that all people need to hear: God’s laws have not changed, but God’s grace offers hope to sinners through Jesus Christ. Table of Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Foundations: Love, Authority, and Sexuality 3. Directions: God’s Word to Ancient Israel about Homosexuality 4. Expectations: The Power of Sin and the Power of Christ 5. Conclusions: Grace and Truth