I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, but there's one that I can barely talk about.

Years ago, in the early days of the Internet, I was a pastor and our church started a list serve.

It was like a chat room that you participated in by email.

It provided a way for folks from our church to interact before the days

of Facebook and Instagram. One day, in our listserv, someone posted something that was deeply

judgmental and offensive to gay people. That was pretty common in those days, especially among

conservative church folks who assumed that all good Christians agreed with them, that

LGBTQ folks were sinners, objectively disordered, and so on. I wasn't really in that camp myself,

but I wasn't very outspoken about it.

A man in our church emailed me separately from the listserv. He was gay, but was not out yet,

so he didn't want to post as himself, but he had privately come out to me, and he wondered

if I would post something for him on his behalf, asking everyone on the list serve to understand

how homophobic that comment felt to him, how it made him feel pain, and how it made him feel maybe he wasn't wanted or didn't belong in our church.

And of course, I was happy to do so.

So he sent me something.

I cut and pasted it and put it into the list serve.

And soon people responded to him.

Some of them responded with a lot of sensitivity.

Some of them responded with all the predictable fire and brimstone.

But the conversation now was happening.

Whenever he wanted to post a response, he would send it to me, and I would cut and paste

it and put it in the list serve.

...