Yet, despite what would appear to be a very affirming statement, one message remains clear from the whole narrative emerging from the CHANGED Movement:

Straight = holy.

LGBTQ+ = damaged.

While Bethel’s official stance on questions of LGBTQ+ identity remains a bit of a grey area, the majority of the stories being shared on the CHANGED website usually start with some sort of childhood trauma - more often than not with one or a combination of sexual molestation, drugs, alcohol or broken family relationships.

This would suggest that, similar to organisations like Exodus International, Bethel believes that to be anything but straight must be the result of some childhood trauma or past negative experience.

On the outside, Bethel’s CHANGED Movement doesn’t look too sinister. The matching t-shirts, smiling faces and ‘God loves you!’ narrative is indeed quite alluring. The movement promises a community and safe space to live out the heterosexual life many LGBTQ+ people have spent years praying for. It almost sounds new, radical and revolutionary.

Yet, behind the hashtags, well-dressed millennials and seeming transparency is the damaging belief that to be LGBTQ+ is to be lesser and for someone to live their life as they were created to is to miss out on a more fulfilling alternative.

Do I think you should stop listening to Bethel? Maybe. That’s up to you.

It would be wrong for me to discount all of the stories coming out of Bethel’s CHANGED Movement as fake, and I sincerely hope that for the sake of those people that the stories are true. The testaments on their website are some of the rawest and most vulnerable accounts I have read in a long time.

However, I do think I can speak from scientific evidence, well-researched statistics as well as my own personal experience to suggest that there is a better way.

A few years ago, UK LGBT charity Stonewall released the findings of a report on LGBT people in Britain in the context of homes and communities. According to the report, only 2 in 5 LGBT people think their faith community is welcoming of lesbian, gay and bi people. One third of LGBT people are not open with anyone about their sexuality in their faith community.

Here are a few more statistics for you. LGBT people are 2 to 3 more times likely to experience psychological or emotional problems compared to their heterosexual counterparts.[1] Nearly 1 in 4 LGB young people have tried to take their own life at some point[2], with this increasing to 48% among trans people under 26[3]. In over 70 countries around the world, homosexuality is still a criminal offence.

I think the statistics speak for themselves when I say that as the Church, we need to do better.

I am not willing to give my support to an organisation that continues to promote a harmful and abusive belief that is literally taking the lives of LGBTQ+ people, despite all of the scientific evidence and personal testimonies that say the contrary.

It’s for that reason that I am no longer listening to Bethel; I could easily be one of the above statistics.

Growing up in the church and discovering you’re gay can be a confusing and often painful place to be. In my own personal experience, my church community offered no support to LGBTQ+ people and for the most part avoided the topic altogether. Any small allusions to homosexuality were enough to put a person off delving any deeper.

I spent many of my teenage years wondering where exactly my place was. Among the confusion, one thing remained clear: my place was definitely not in the Church.

Fast-forward to today and I am now at a point in my life where I am deconstructing many deep-rooted beliefs that I’ve held about myself for many years: that I am defective, inferior, unloved and therefore unloveable; that for a reason beyond my control, God destined me for hell even before I knew how to speak.

Instead, I choose to live in freedom. I choose to hold on to the belief that I am fearfully and wonderfully made by God and that He loves me and embraces me, just as I am as a gay man. I choose to live in the knowledge of God’s all-encompassing grace and unconditional love.

Now, I’ll be the first to point out that the conversation around LGBTQ+ identity and its relationship with the Bible is not a simple one. I’m not suggesting it can be solved overnight, nor am I pretending that you’re going to read this article and start waving a rainbow flag at the front of church during worship.

Yet, the lack of clarity around where certain churches stand on questions of human sexuality is one of the most painful things for LGBTQ+ people. I know several churches who are, in good conscience, seeking the best way to hold conflicting views on sexuality in tension in order to in some way appease all sides of the debate.

Yet, to remain in a place of conscious and contented confusion is a privilege not granted to LGBTQ+ people.

Before we even get to the debate on whether same-sex relationships are Biblically sound or whether LGBTQ+ should be able to marry - and I would happily discuss that with anyone who would like to - I think we first need to take a few steps back.

The fact of the matter is, there is a whole community of people outside of our church doors who are looking in and saying, ’there is no place for me there’.

You might not think your church community is unaffirming, nor would you consider yourself to be homophobic, but with a quick look at the news or scroll through Twitter, it is not difficult to work out what the world outside of the church thinks the church’s view of LGBTQ+ people is.

My prayer is for the Church to one day reach the point at which we fully include and affirm LGBTQ+ people in our communities, and I pray that day comes soon.

Until that day comes, however, we need to be speaking out against these harmful practices and the people advocating them, for to stay silent in situations of injustice is to choose the side of the oppressor.

We need to affirm LGBTQ+ family and friends already in our churches in their identity as loved and cherished children of God, and we need to go the extra mile to welcome those in the LGBTQ+ community who are still on the outside.

What are you doing to affirm, build up and support LGBTQ+ siblings inside and outside your church community?

How are you intentionally going out of your way to listen to and hear the stories of those whose journey of life and faith is different to yours?

How are you using your voice to speak for those whose voice goes unheard?