Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the RAW. A few weeks ago or a couple weeks ago, maybe a week ago, I forget.

I released a conversation, a talk that Misty Irons gave at the Revoice Conference.

The Revoice Conference happened a couple months ago. Misty Irons gave an incredible talk about the so-called, you know, the topic of gay identity.

And I prefaced that conversation with my own kind of wrestling with and thinking through the whole idea of being a gay Christian, that concept.

And yeah, I released on the podcast and I decided to release a couple more talks that happened at the Revoice Conference.

This talk that you're going to listen to is from yours truly. I gave a talk on why the church needs LGBTQ people.

I don't need to say too much more to set it up because the talk I kind of, in the intro of the talk, I kind of talk about what I mean by that and where I'm going with it and why I have come to understand that LGBT people aren't just needy,

but need dead in the church. And so I give basically kind of a personal narrative on several things for things in particular that I've learned about Jesus and the Christian way from hanging out with LGBTQ people.

So without further ado, please welcome back to the show. Me. That was super weird. Anyway, yeah. So here's my talk that I gave at Revoice a couple months ago.

Oh, man, good to see you all again. This is my second Revoice. Very excited to be back.

And I just, I've so appreciated the talk so far and listening to Revo that last talk as a straight person listening to that. I was just so deeply encouraged by that. And it's, it's funny. There's a lot of things that he said that I'm going to end up saying kind of, I guess from the other, the other side about how, how straight Christians absolutely need LGBT people in their lives.

And people often ask me how I got into this conversation and it's just, I'll save you the long story, but in short, I sort of fell into it as an academic doing a lot of research on the issue of homosexuality.

I was, you know, interested in what the Bible has to say about this, you know, hot topic, this debated topic that people were starting to talk more about, you know, in my circles and students were coming to me asking me questions about it.

And I didn't really have a good answer. So I just kind of started to do the research and I dove into the books and began to read on both sides of the conversation. And as an academic, like I love to just read, like everything I can get my hands on.

And so I just had stacks of books. I didn't realize there was so many, especially academic books written on the topic of what the Bible says about same sex, sexuality. And so I buried myself in the books to try to figure out this issue.

And early on in my journey, I got my head out of the books and started to listen to the stories and the journeys of actual LGBTQ people.

And my life will never be the same. I remember hearing story after story after story, which were all very diverse in many ways. And yet there was one common thread that was woven throughout every story and it went something like this.

I was raised in the church and I was in a walnut champion. I still have the goofy sweater thing with the patches. And I love the church. I love the church and I love Jesus.

But it just wasn't a really good experience. I felt unseen, unknown, unloved, uncared for.

I was scared to tell anybody about my experience. In fact, I don't know if I've ever met a Christian once they heard about my story.

I don't know if I've met a Christian that was actually kind to me. It was one common thread that was woven in various ways throughout all of these very diverse stories.

And that just blew me away and it broke my heart.

...