What Are 4 Common Mistakes We Make When Ministering to the LGBT Community?

The following is a transcribed Video Q&A, so the text may not read like an edited article would. Scroll to the bottom to view this video in its entirety. 

Christians make several mistakes when trying to relate, understand, or respond to the LGBTQ community. And I honestly do not think anyone means to do this on purpose, it is not intentional, but many times we still make these mistakes.

Some of the mistakes we make are thinking that all people who are gay or lesbian are political extremists. Most of the people I know just want to live their lives and they don’t want to be political extremists. Usually, the extremists make the most noise, but we should be careful viewing everybody under that label.

We make other mistakes by thinking that we have nothing in common with the LGBTQ community. While our communities definitely have different beliefs and passions, we both have similarities. We both have a sub-culture: where we have our own music, and books, and movies, and tv shows, comedians, etc. We both are passionate about knowing why we believe what we believe. We have deep relationships from our community. If you go down the list, at least in the way we operate as a community, there are similarities. These are not in the passions we have but how we operate. Perhaps this could be a bridge to build.

Some of the times we make mistakes by being too forceful with people without building a relationship or seeking to understand who the person is and what their experience is, and their pains, and hurts, and upbringing, and joys. Again, many people don’t mean to do that but we make that mistake. Some of the times I’ve seen some who are really fearful of being around other gay men because they are afraid, they are going to be attracted to them. I always tell people who have that fear, “look, I can tell you that you are not attractive to the opposite sex so you won’t be attractive to the same sex. So, we need to get that kind of thing out of our thinking because I just don’t think that is true.”

Other times we make a mistake by making closed door attitudes—huge closed-door attitudes. Where we have our church, our beliefs, and if you do not fit the mold then you should go find another church. No, we need to get people on the margin to come into our churches and hear the gospel. And we need to give God margin to be able to break down the spiritual pride walls around our hearts. 

What a 4 Common Mistakes We Make When Ministering to the LGTB ...

We make several mistakes when trying to relate, understand or respond to the LGTB community. Pastor Caleb Kaltenbach breaks it down.

Posted by Crosswalk.com on Wednesday, December 30, 2015

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