Identity and Culture – some thoughts from the Living Out conference

Image credit: Pixabay

I mentioned recently that I’d been to the Living Out conference in June.

I was so excited to hear Tim and Kathy Keller speak, because last year I read their fabulous My Rock My Refuge for my quiet times, and this year I’m going through The Way of Wisdom.

But I was also hooked by the topic. Sexual orientation and the church is something I’ve been thinking and reading about for several years now – and, let’s be honest, we all need to grapple with this, don’t we? (Click here for a highly recommended book on the subject that I read earlier this year.)

Needless to say, from the first minute that Tim Keller got up to speak, I was typing notes as fast as my little fingers could move! There really was some stellar material across the day, and over the next two or three blog posts I’m going to share a few things I found interesting.

I’m not going to plagiarize the Kellers or any of the other speakers by repeating great chunks of their work, but plan to share a few things that I’d been thinking about anyway, which the day’s teaching helped to clarify for me, plus a few of my reflections in the weeks since the conference.

This topic is highly emotive for many people, so I hope my writing will be gracious, humble and compassionate in tone – and, in turn, that you will be kind and gentle if you choose to engage with anything I’ve written. This is not about winning an argument, this is about wrestling and grappling together, as we seek Christ first.

The day was themed around the idea of ‘Identity’, and the first session of the day was on ‘Identity and Culture’. It was like an undergraduate sociology lecture, and I found it fascinating!

Have you ever thought how ‘invisible’ our culture is around us? How easy it is to take so much for granted because of the time and place we’re living? Keller (assume Tim, for this post – I’ll talk about Kathy’s input in a future post) gave the analogy of a fish being totally surrounded by water, and yet not really aware that it’s there.

Every culture throughout history and across the world has had its own way of giving its members an identity – but without asking permission! So we end up in a place where identity information is kind of being imposed upon us – what is acceptable in our culture, what is not, where we get our value, etc.

However, in every single culture, Christians have formed their identity in a radically different way. We find our identity through the revelation of God’s love in the Bible. We are children of God, we are saved by Jesus, we have the Holy Spirit living within us – these are constants, regardless of which historical period you are living in, or which continent you’re inhabiting.

In other words, our identity is going to look rather at odds with the culture around us. The good news is: it always has done. We are in good company.

At the start of the conference, a guy gave his testimony to encourage us. I won’t share it all here, but suffice to say he is a gay male who has chosen a life of celibacy. One thing he said hit me hard. He said (excuse the paraphrase): “The church needs to stop talking about sacrificial living for gay Christians, and start talking about the sacrificial living required of all of us.”

Wow. And totally true.

I acknowledge the different arguments and tricky grey areas when discussing the Bible’s teaching on sexuality. I fully understand that people will come to different conclusions regarding what is said about unmarried sexual relationships, marriage, divorce, remarriage, and homosexual practice.

But I also believe that, wherever we stand on the ‘debate’, actually the most important thing in all of this is to give ourselves to God wholeheartedly, and I worry that maybe sometimes we come to a conclusion so firmly and forcefully that we’re not open to any kind of change that God might be whispering to us – and this happens on both sides of the fence.

If a gay Christian reads the Bible, seeks the Lord for wisdom, and comes to the conclusion that he/she may enter into a monogamous sexual relationship with someone of the same sex, I’m not sure anyone is able to disagree. After all, everyone is reading the same Bible, yet coming to different conclusions. Hasn’t God given us our minds to use in this way? Reading, absorbing and turning things over in our minds until we find some kind of way forward?

But if any of us come to know Christ for ourselves, yet resolutely refuse to change a particular area of our lives – be it our jobs, our money, our family relationships, our character or our sexual practice – is that not opposed to the message of the gospel?

Isn’t the whole point of turning to Christ that we do just that – turn towards Christ, seeking to obey whatever he might ask of us? It might not mean that there’s anything inherently wrong with what we’re currently doing, but we still need to be open to God asking us to do things differently.

I can give you an example. When we had our birth children, there wasn’t anything ‘wrong’ with that, we weren’t being disobedient. After all, we’d read the Bible, and believed that ‘Go forth and multiply’ was to be taken literally!

And yet, shortly afterwards, God called us to adoption, and we obeyed. Would it have been right for us to say, before God, “This is our family, this is how it’s going to look, and nothing’s going to change that”? No, of course not! We needed to be open to God transforming us in every area of our lives, including what our family would look like.

So I guess my first ‘big thought’ from this conference is twofold. Firstly: if we are Christians, God calls all of us to Himself – and this will involve sacrifice. Rather than pointing out specks in others’ eyes, shouldn’t I be looking at the enormous logs in my own? (And they are enormous, and they certainly are plural.)

The second aspect is this. As Christians, our calling is simple: to give all of ourselves to God. This inevitably means that we hold onto earthly things a little more loosely than if we were not Christians. Is our sexuality also something we can hold a little looser than our culture would have us believe?

I’ll be continuing with some thoughts and questions over the next week or so. In the meantime I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

(Incidentally, the image I’ve used above – courtesy of Pixabay – is absolutely spot-on for what I learnt, and am still processing, from the conference. We are all unique – fearfully and wonderfully made, with totally unique fingerprints – and yet LOVE. Love covers all, love joins us together, love covers differences in opinion and different interpretations of Scripture. More next time!)

Now read my second reflection on this thought-provoking conference!

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You may also like:

• Identity and Sexuality: is it possible to be celibate and fulfilled?
• Sexuality, Faith and the Art of Conversation – a fabulous book, reviewed here!
• #shetoo: Can I protect my daughter from being a victim?

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