Looking for Answers

Utter frustration and defeat was what Ceil and I felt after we left the first Evangelical church in 2005. Lamenting over the injustices and questioning the purpose of it all eventually lead us on a deep search for the Truth.

Would we have been treated differently and accepted as part of the church family had we been heterosexual? Would we have had opportunities to minister had we been males in that organization? Would those people have taken time to know us had there been no walls of religious doctrine separating us from them? Sadly, the answer to those questions were YES for both of us.

At this point, however, that was only our assumption and opinion, and not our truth. Neither one of us had ever experienced life as male nor heterosexual. With a burning passion and conviction to find Truth, we embarked on a social experiment to get some answers. Ceil and I would alter our physical appearances and become what we perceived as "acceptable" by church leadership standards. We wanted to see if the Evangelical church would get to know us and connect with us, perhaps even love us, if we looked and acted just like them.

It was unbelievable, some of the things we witnessed and experienced as a man and woman inside the inner circle of a powerful Evangelical church. It's all recorded in the documentary. The most heart-breaking truth we discovered is the fact that many religious leaders in both communities, gay and straight, have lost sight of the most noble purpose of humanity - to build up one another through love.

The Evangelical Blow

Shortly following the 2004 National election, Ceil and I started becoming ostracized by the Senior Pastor of a mainstream Evangelical church we called home for over a year. To our dismay, we witnessed the rampant increase in godless, homophobic rhetoric in the months leading up to the election from Christian TV networks such as Paul and Jan Crouch's TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) and Pat Robertson's CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network). However, we never imagined that we'd feel the blow of the "morality" vote in such a personal manner as we did at our own home church.

We had regular, private meetings with the Pastor because he wanted to be educated about homosexuals, and to have open dialogue about our presence in his church. Though we made good progress in these private meetings with the Pastor, the leadership of that church was never given the queue to fully welcome us. Most kept their distance. In fact, the Pastor's wife never shook our hands the entire time we were there.

After the national empowerment of the Evangelicals in late 2004 / early 2005, the Pastor began to distance himself from us. His warm greetings grew colder with each encounter, and the eye contact soon faded completely. Sensing the change in his treatment of us, we called twice to try to schedule a meeting with him. Both attempts were ignored with no return call. In the last sermon we heard him preach, the Pastor spoke on morality, and said if those living in sin would come down to the altar and repent, God would change their DNA, and they can become part of the body of Christ. Giving him the full benefit of the doubt, we tried one more time after that sermon to set up a meeting with the Pastor. Again we were ignored. We concluded that our goal of reconciliation with this "spirit-filled" church had come to an abrupt end.

If this "man of God" no longer wanted open lesbians and gays as members of his congregation, why didn't he have the conviction or the sac to stand up and defend his beliefs? We have our ideas, but what do you think?