Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep946: A Celibate Gay Christian’s Perspective on Valentine’s Day and Belonging: Dr. Greg Coles

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Dr. Gregory Coles is senior research fellow at The Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender, and is the author of Single, Gay, Christian: A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity (IVP, 2017) and No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation (IVP, 2021). He holds a PhD in English from Penn State and works as a writer, speaker, and worship leader. His fiction and expository writing have been published by Penguin Random House and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; his academic research on rhetorical theory (how language works in society) has appeared in College English and Rhetorica and in an edited collection from Cambridge University Press. You can find most of his creative activities curated at gregorycoles.com. Theology in the Raw Conference - Exiles in Babylon At the Theology in the Raw conference, we will be challenged to think like exiles about race, sexuality, gender, critical race theory, hell, transgender identities, climate change, creation care, American politics, and what it means to love your democratic or republican neighbor as yourself. Different views will be presented. No question is off limits. No political party will be praised. Everyone will be challenged to think. And Jesus will be upheld as supreme. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hey, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw, and happy Valentine's Day. To celebrate Valentine's Day, I wanted to have on the podcast my very, very good friend, Dr. Greg Coles. Greg is a senior research fellow at the Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender. He's the author of a few books, including Single Gay Christian and No Longer Strangers. We talk about both those books on this podcast, especially his most recent book, No Longer Strangers. He holds a PhD in English from Penn State and works as a writer, speaker, and worship leader. The dude is just all around awesome. As you'll see, Greg's amazing. A lot of you guys know Greg, and he's just one of the most delightful human beings to walk the face of the earth. Also, just to let you know that we have recently,

I mean, both Greg and I have helped produce this new resource called Parenting LGBTQ Kids. We produced it through the Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender. And it is a discipleship resource to help Christian parents to embody both the grace and truth of Jesus toward their LGBTQ loved one.

We have a pre-order discount that's available. The resource comes out February 28th, but if you pre-order it between now and February 28th, you'll get 20 bucks off of this resource. That's parentinglgbtqkids.com. Go to parentinglgbtqkids.com and all the info is in the show notes. Okay, let's get to know the one and only Dr. Gregory Coles. Welcome to the basement, Dr. Greg Coles.

Oh, hey, thanks. It's always a pleasure to be in your basement. This is the second time that you've been in the basement for Theology and Rock. Yeah, we did a doubleheader sometime last year. No, not last year anymore. 2020. It was 2020, a year and a half ago. Wow. I had tom in here uh so that we did two and a half almost two and a half hours on brothers karamazov and i was like nobody is gonna listen to this this is you know the five people who keep asking me you should do a podcast on the book i'm like i would enjoy that but i don't know if anybody else and i've got so many people that like raved

about that episode there you go you should do more on literature i know i was thinking maybe like once a month once like whenever i finish a book to have somebody come in and but he's such an expert he's read it like 10 times and teaches it like every year and so i don't know if i can get that for every book i read i'm reading um oh it's right over there uh east of eden have you read no i haven't i've heard good things as have i i mean it's a classic do you have a top five favorite fiction i'm not we oh my gosh um i feel like my my number one fiction personally is definitely uh c.s lewis till we have faces i've never even heard that but what you've oh people till Have Faces by C.S. Lewis.

It's a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. And if you want fiction that is theologically rich, there's none better. I mean, some people prefer Lewis's Space Trilogy. Yeah, a good friend of mine said that's his. The Space Trilogy is great. Less so That Hideous Strength. That Hideous Strength is fine, but I think I'm less philosophically on board with what Lewis is trying. Less so That Hideous Strength. That Hideous Strength is fine, but I think I'm less philosophically on board with what Lewis is trying to do in That Hideous Strength.

Perilandra, fantastic, wonderful, out of the silent planet, delightful. But Till We Have Faces, for me, is top shelf Lewisian fiction. That's not part of the trilogy? No, no, no. Okay. Totally different vibes than the Space Trilogy.

Really? It's great. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun is glorious. The Indonesian? No, no. She's Nigerian. It's about the Nigeria-Biafra War. Oh, wow.

And it's historically rich. It's so thoughtful, so insightful about just the human condition. Is it fiction? Yeah. Okay. Wow. Yeah, that's definitely just the human condition. Is it fiction? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's definitely up there for me. For sheer writing beauty, I would say Anthony

Doar's All the Light We Cannot See is glorious. I don't know who he is. Anthony Doar, he's in Idaho, actually. He's one of our homegrown delights. He's in Boise. Wait, I've heard about this guy. He won Pulitzer Prize

or New York Times? Yeah, yeah. So he won the Pulitzer for All the Light We Cannot See. Anthony, he's in Boise. I think he lives not far from you. I mean, yeah. Well, we're not close personal friends yet, but I can always wish and dream. He has a new book that just came out called

Cloud Cuckoo Land, and one of my other writer friends who is also brilliant, Kimi Cunningham Grant, she's amazing. She texted me and she was like, oh my gosh, I just finished Cloud Cuckoo Land. You're going to love it. So I need to read it.

Anthony Dore, just sheer writing prowess. Is it like traditional literature, like good literature that's kind of hard to read? Or is it more more like steinbeck i always think steinbeck's really easy to read i think it's more often what makes i think what makes a lot of traditional literature hard for people to read is like the narrative accessibility like i understand this sentence but i don't understand how all these sentences fit together into a story that makes sense and pulls me in i would say all the light we cannot see is really like narratively accessible okay so uh so in that sense i think it's it's yeah more more than your average classic literature i think it's the sort

of thing that a lot of people can pick up okay not like cormac mccarthy or you know whom i love but man that's a chore it is a chore i mean mean, the road wasn't too bad. The road is at least narratively accessible. I feel like some other McCarthy less so. But yeah, I would say Doar is an easier read than McCarthy. At least certainly a less depressing read. Well, it has its heavy moments, but it's not as heavy overall as McCarthy, which is just like...

Okay, pretty dark. Yeah. I mean, The Road road from what I've only read two of his books but I think the road is probably the least dark among them and even that has some dark scenes but but an overall very positive moving sad I don't give too much away but yeah I mean the road if you haven't read the road two and a half hour podcast on it I know I maybe I feel like I would need to read it again. My memory doesn't retain stuff well. And I went and watched a movie the other day,

and I was like, it felt like I kind of remember the book a little bit, even from the movie. It wasn't like it all came back. Yeah, I totally forgot to mention. I'm going to release this podcast. We're recording it. I don't know what today is, February 1st. But it's going to release on Valentine's Day.

Oh, happy Valentine's Day, everybody. So I want to talk about that. And would that fit in with your book? So this is the book, Greg's second Christian book you've written, No Longer Strangers, Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation. Would this book be a good launching point in talking about your theology of Valentine's Day? Oh, probably so. I mean, I didn't write it thinking like, this book should be pitched for Valentine's Day. Oh, actually, can I tell you a side story about Valentine's Day?

So when I first met our mutual friend, Rebecca, I got an email from somebody, just some random person I didn't know back in 2018. And they were like, hey, I work at the theological library at Dallas Theological Seminary. And I just wanted you to know that Single Gay Christian is on our Valentine's Day book display. And so she sent me a picture of my book. And it was like next to like Tim and keller's book on marriage and some book called the passion principle which i was like that sounds spicy and then like there it was my first

book uh yeah so single gay christian which is my first book um it was on a valentine's day book display and i was like i did not write this book thinking that people would uh read it for valentine's day but here we are Did Rebecca, was she responsible for that? No. Though I actually have since met the person who was responsible. Who's also delightful and now lives in Boise. I'll introduce you sometime.

Oh, did I meet her at the conference? Anjali. Yes. She was at the conference, right? Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. She seems delightful. I was like, man, Boise's scoring some people here.

We got great people coming in. I'm just saying. They are, I know. Keep it coming. This episode is basically PR for encouraging people to move to Boise. We've got Anthony Doerr. We've got the former library setup director at Dallas Theological Seminary. We've got big people here.

We have Greg Coles. Yeah. You've been here for eight months, six months? Let's see, since July. What is that, seven months now, I think? A little more than half a year, yeah. How has the transition been? Here's what I would say about Boise.

I would say that Boise is full of individual people that I deeply love. I think if you distilled all the people of Boise into a single person, that person and I would probably not be close friends, which is okay, because you don't have to be close friends with... There's a culture here, it's hard to figure out. It's got its challenges. This is the most churched place that I have ever lived, which I guess if you move from the South, I think people who come here from the South are like, wow, Boise is so unchurched. But when you move from the South, I think people who come here from the South are like, wow, Boise is so unchurched. But when you move from the Northeast and before that you lived in Indonesia,

you moved to Boise and you're like, hot dang, there's a lot of churches here. No huge churches. There's only a few that are over maybe a couple thousand. Boise is not that big of a city. The metro is 660,000, I i think but growing like crazy every day but um yeah we don't have like when you go to the south i just the size of the churches it's like you go to church with like 5 000 and it's like house church plant you know it's crazy um but yeah there are yeah there are a lot of churches i came from simi valley and i feel like there's a decent amount there.

But I would say, yeah, definitely more. Well, then you throw in the Mormon church, and beyond that, there's not a whole lot of Catholic churches. Yeah, I haven't noticed a ton of Catholic presence. It's also been interesting to me just the number of non-denominational, like the proportion of non-denominational churches. of non-denominational, like the proportion of non-denominational churches. I think in the Northeast, there are a lot more churches tied to denominations and it's like, ah, and we've got a few non-denoms. Here it's like 97% of the churches, it feels like they're non-denominational. Yeah. Yeah. With that good Western, you know, innovative spirit.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Idaho is a very, it's not even like it's conservative, but it's more like libertarian kind of like it's, uh, beyond, um, yeah, the culture here is interesting at the face value. I would say very nice, but we've had in my anecdotal experience been to get below the surface is, is is can be pretty difficult with people it's like it's like you you linger on that kind of like if you're just having a casual conversation it's like it's easy but to get like depth you just even in churches you've been churches for a while and it's just like to get beneath the surface it's just it does it's like either there's not much there or everybody's just kind of prone to putting on the kind of good face

everything's fine you know but yeah statistically we know that's not right i think the idea the idea that we need to posture ourselves in a certain kind of way in order to be oh now i'm talking about belonging oh this is this is bringing the circle back around and no longer strangers look at me go um the the idea that we have to posture ourselves in a certain kind of way and that to go too deep and reveal too much of yourself is actually a threat to fitting in somewhere. I think it's endemic to the human condition, but it maybe in some ways feels particularly endemic in this area like don't be too don't be too particularly yourself um because at the moment you stop seeming like everybody else that will be the moment at

which we know you don't really belong oh interesting that's an interesting way of putting it yeah i could see that i could see that it's such a cool like for me i i think it's like the perfect size town it's not too spread out like when i go to phoenix or something it's like my word to get from one neighborhood to the other i just feel like you're driving forever and la is you know obviously a massive sprawl and i like the culture of california though like that's i do miss that but there's like i would say downtown north and around the university like i feel like there's this kind of like, you know, mountain granola athletic kind of culture, like, which I, I, I gel with, I think it's pretty cool. So yeah,

I'm a fan, but it hasn't been the easiest, uh, relationally, um, for, for us, it's taken a while and we're making more and more friends now, but anyway, um, so give it, so you're single um and feel called to a life of celibacy um and how how do you process valentine's day like what i want to know is what are some of the potential potentially problematic statements phrases assumptions that kind of go into valentine's day that you may be more alert to than the average, say, married, dating Christian. Is that a good way to put it? Yeah. I mean, I would never want to posture myself as somebody who gets it more because it's like, I with my deep insight, I know the things. But I think there are certainly things about the messaging that happens around Valentine's Day, and maybe

just more broadly, like the messaging that happens around love and romance and marriage that I think once you have said to yourself consciously, I'm going to live a life that chooses to find meaning without those things, then you start to be suspicious of all the people who are like, the most meaningful thing I've ever had in my life was when I felt the warm fuzzies from my sweetheart. One of my favorite Valentine's memes of all time, it's this picture of St. Valentine. And then it says at the top, roses are red, violets are blue i was beaten beheaded disinterred by my followers and now you commemorate my martyrdom by sending each other chocolate is that true is that the what's the myth yeah i mean that's that's more or less the that's more or less the saint valentine

story can you give us the two minute version of valentine if i were if if i were if i were more catholic if i knew more church history i could i could give it to you really beautifully i know nothing was he an early church leader or something or uh yeah uh i don't even know the timing on on saint valentine again all my saints my people can google my upbringing is is uh i mean i don't get me wrong i love being a protestant but i'm like tragically Protestant in the sense that my awareness of church history is like, then there was the New Testament, and then there was the 20th century. The non-denominational church. Right. And then, yeah, then our current evangelical expression in the West was born, and boom, here we are. um so even growing up in indonesia you have that yeah well

i mean if anything indonesia uh made me even more predisposed to not think that western church history was like a significant object of study because that's the i mean christianity that was brought there was western right yeah um not that it's yeah there. Yeah, yeah. The entrance of Christianity mostly came from the West into Indonesia. And Protestant mainly? Or mixed? No, there's some Catholic presence there. Okay. The Catholic presence may have even preceded,

but the circles I was running in were more Protestant. No, but the thing about growing up in Indonesia versus growing up somewhere in the West is that in the West, you see more directly the relevance of church history to current cultural manifestations, even in ways that the culture is now kind of conceiving of itself as post-Christian. You can still talk about church history as a thing that sort of directly informs where your broader culture is now. Whereas in Indonesia, Western church history

has very little relevance to the current state of Indonesian culture. So it's not really an object of cultural study. It could be an object of faith study if you want it to be. But again, I was much too sort of iconoclastic evangelical to be paying much attention. So these days, I feel like I'm trying to catch up because I've only somewhat recently developed even an academic appreciation for the value of understanding church history. Yeah. And so now, yeah, now I feel like an infant in my understanding of church history. I'm the same way.

Yeah. I mean, I've always, you know, I've always pride myself on being a Bible guy, you know, and, and over the years I've had to kind of footnote that with a little more sensitivity to, there is no such thing as a pure Bible guy. Like we're all products of our tradition and any kind of interpretation of scripture is your, whether you believe it or know it or not, you're interacting with a, a, you know, various traditions, you know, and, or at least you should be in conversation with, you know, various traditions, you know, and, or at least he should be in conversation with, you know, tradition and how that works out. And, um, yeah, I mean, the Bible, even as a Protestant, as a soloist scripture, a guy that even that means Bible is the ultimate

authority, not the only authority. Right. I mean, there, um, we, I think we still appeal to tradition, a tradition that also saw the Bible as the ultimate authority, right? Would that be accurate? I don't know. We're two novices talking to each other about something. Well, we could talk about something like the Wesleyan quadrilateral. Are you familiar? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love it. So the Wesleyan quadrilateral, which would conceive of the sources of Christian authority as being scripture and tradition. Does the Holy Spirit make it on? Experience, I think. Experience. Okay. Right. And then reason.

And then reason. Yeah. Reason. But even the quarter, they're not all equal, right? Like Wesley would be the first one to say the Bible is the ultimate authority of these, but they all kind of interact. Yeah. I don't think Wesley is saying like, sometimes experience and the Bible are up against each other.

And so, you know, sometimes you go with experience just because it seems better. I think the point of the quadrilateral is to say like, those four things need to work in unity in order to inform. So, basically to say like, if you're taking up scripture and you're saying, I'm just scripture, and that's why I'm ignoring tradition, I'm ignoring reason, and I'm ignoring my own human experience and being like, it's just the Bible. His point is, the Bible needs to be understood in the context of these other things. These are all interacting with each other, whether we like it or not, it just is, right? I mean. So, yeah. So I think in the same way, like people who are suspicious of tradition are often saying like, well, the trouble with tradition is you start to do something because it's tradition

and ignore the fact that it's not actually in scripture. It doesn't actually align well with our experience. That's what I like. When I say bible of trump's tradition whatever it's it's more that i guess in my context i'm typically pushing back against a modern evangelical western american church tradition you know like it's it's typically not so much as much like no i think augustine you know got it wrong although there's there could be some of that but gregory of nissa you know i don't know. Like we're standing on the shoulders. You know a lot of people who get all freaked out about Gregory of Nyssa.

Well, he's, I mean, the main, as far as I know, the main or one of the main architects of the Nicene Creed and a full-blown universalist, which is interesting. We could go there. I don't know. They bring in all kinds of interesting... But yeah, I think it's interesting how much... And again, I'll speak to present-day Western evangelicals, because that, for better or worse, is more or less my tribe. Right. I mean, I have a hairy relationship with evangelicalism these days.

But still, I would claim that as my tribe. And many of them would conceive of themselves as being kind of anti-tradition. Yeah. But I think that the anti-tradition is mainly, you know, we're anti-tradition that came before 1950. But, you know, things that the religious right introduced to us as like undeniable tenets of the faith in 1973. We are now so committed to... So the human impulse toward tradition, I think, continues, but it's just a question of which traditions we're allowing to inform us. And it's just being aware. Tradition's like water for a fish, right? I mean, we're always going to be products of some kind of tradition some movement like that's sure acknowledging it

and being able to critique it where it needs to be critiqued and affirm where it needs to be affirmed and and again that's where i go back to like constantly saying does this resonate with scriptural themes passages the flow of the text and or does it not um in which spirit i think we can talk about a tradition like valentine's day okay yeah there we go yeah so how do you feel yeah i'm just curious how uh assuming when this isn't technically valentine's day when we're recording but it is when people are listening and how do you how will you feel on february 14th i will feel largely indifferent okay I think, and there have been times in my life when people's obsession

with romantic love would have felt really alienating to me, I think. These days, maybe it's that I've grown a little more confident in my sense of my own calling, and so I feel less angst around the holiday than I used to. Maybe it's that I've grown a little more confident in my sense of my own calling. And so I feel less angst around the holiday than I used to.

But a younger Greg would have felt greatly angsty. And I think it was largely because there was this heightened narrative that said, Ah, the deep fulfillment, the place where your heart finally finds rest is when you find this sort of erotic duality. Right, right. There's a phrase. That's where it's at. Yeah. Let me tell you, evangelical Christians love their erotic duality.

Can you expand that? What does that mean? So we've got our four loves, right, as Lewis would remind us. We've got our agape, which, and in Greek, of course, these loves all kind of like intermingle. So we can't make the dichotomies too strongly. But we've got our agape love, which people associate with the love of God. We've got our phileo love, like our brotherly love. We've got our storge, like our sort of friendy, familial kind of love.

Okay. Passion, too? Like anger could be storge like more emotional whereas eros would be kind of the erotic side of that emotion passion or i don't know yeah again i'm i always i always want to be cautious of like i feel like you could do a word study on them and yeah as soon as soon as i learned that the that the verb agapao is used in the septuagint to describe rape i I was like, okay, all bets are off.

Really? Because, yeah. I forget whose rape it is. God. But it's basically like, so-and-so agapode so-and-so. What are we, Shechem? Shechem, maybe? I don't know.

No, I don't know. And Dinah? Or who knows? It might be Dinah. Okay. Anyway, but in any case, yeah, the fact that agapao is used in that context signifies, I think, sort of the messiness, the fluidity of the boundaries between. But yeah, I think Storgate does often have or can have some extra degree of kind of like the aggressive

side of passion versus Eros, which has kind of the close, the intimate side of passion. Yeah. So erotic duality. So erotic duality would suggest that, oh, so the intimate side of passion, that aspect of love exists between two people, always and only between two people, always and only in a way that's consummated sexually, always and only in a way that's connected to marriage, and then your 2.3 children and so forth. But it's this narrative that says, yeah, the part of your heart

that seeks this sort of deep, intimate connection is meant to be fulfilled in this one person. You know, like, I met my spouse, and that was when I met my best friend, and my life was forever changed, and this is the single most important thing in my life. You know, and maybe all of those things are true, but I think the primacy of that narrative as like the number one thing around which Christians ought to order their lives, especially when so many of the significant leaders in Protestant evangelicalism in the West are married men. The fact that that narrative is so strong then leaves those of us

who anticipate not being married men, including those of us who are LGBTQ, also including all the women, incidentally. But like, those of us who see that narrative as like, oh, well, this is what we hear is like the thing. And then we have trouble, I think, seeing how Jesus intends to work particularly in the kinds of loves that he has given to us, apart from that vision of a particular application of eros in marriage. Does that lead to your book? I mean, I would imagine that this book, I mean, I, well, I endorsed it, sorry. You better know what's in there. It's been a while though. I might, my retention rate of books, I mean, I know if I went back and started reading, I would be like, oh, reminded, you know, but I remember, I mean, it's more like

your other book. I mean, it kind of has this personal narrative to it, but it really is too. I mean, a call for the church, right, to embody a more biblical and holistic vision for hospitality in a way where it doesn't let that narrative become the dominant narrative in the church as it has been, right? I mean, would that be a decent summary of where you're... Yeah, I would say, in large part, No Longer Strangers was born out of my own angst of feeling like there's this single narrative that I know of in Protestant evangelicalism for how I'm supposed to express love and find family. Like, get your Valentine's Day date on,

and then once things work out with the right nice young lady, then, you know, onward the story progresses, then you'll build your family, then, you know, someday you'll have grandkids, you'll always spend the holidays together. Just like this sort of iconic vision of how intimacy is supposed to play out, how belonging is supposed to play out. And belonging is supposed to play out. And so recognizing that that was not going to be the story of my life insofar as I could discern it, then that challenged me to wrestle through, like, what does it mean to find belonging in the world when the ways that people tell you you're supposed to find belonging don't actually work out for you. And is it possible that maybe embracing the weird ways in which you particularly get to belong with people

is a lot better, is actually a lot more fruitful and more life-giving than just trying to sort of scrape your way into someone else's vision of belonging. And so this book kind of moves episodically through various aspects of belonging and various ways that I have found or not found belonging over the years. So the book is broken into three parts. We've got belonging in, which is all about spaces, physical places. Belonging with is about people and relationships. And then belonging to is about ideas and purposes and the ways that we feel a sense of calling and vocation in the world that gives us a sense that the fact that I am here matters for some reason. the fact that I am here matters for some reason.

Chapter titles are so brilliant. Jedi's Training, Friendship Costs $25 an Hour. What's that one? I forgot. Oh, so Friendship Costs $25 an Hour. That is probably my favorite writing in this book from like a pure storytelling perspective. It's about a man that I met when I was in grad school and I was tutoring the GRE,

which for those of you who don't know the GRE, God bless you, more power to you. The GRE, it's kind of like the SAT, but for grad school, an entrance exam. And I have the blessing and curse of being pretty good at standardized testing. Okay, what did you get on the GRE? I plead the blessing and curse of being pretty good at standardized testing. Okay. What did you get on the GRE?

I plead the fifth. Why? I want to know. I think I failed it. I got a sufficiently good score that I was able to get a job with kind of a bougie tutoring company. Let's leave it at that. Is it like 600 to 2,000 scoring? So the scoring of the GRE has changed multiple times. Folks

who are tuning into this podcast, I'm sure you're so glad to know that you're going to get schooled on GRE scoring. When I took the GRE, and I think when you took the GRE, because I think the scoring had been consistent for a while, it was scored out of

1600. So kind of like an old SAT in that regard. Okay. I think I got like a 700 or something. I literally, I got my score. I'm like, I don't know how I even got in the PhD program because that was like one of the main things that we're looking at.

Yeah, anyway. Embarrassing. But look, here you are. None the worse for wear. Well, people spend a whole life. They'll spend months. I think I spent a weekend studying for it and i wasn't i i i had the desire i had ambition i could study literally 20 hours a day every day and be a happy cat so i had all that i just had zero natural like my my vocabulary was like it was still i mean bad but i mean yeah it was i don't

know what half the words meant they're asking me on the test. Anyway, we're getting off track. The GRE was so fun. Anyway, the point is I was tutoring this exam when I started grad school. And so one of my students in State College, who was currently an undergrad at Penn State, but he was an older student, and not particularly a likable person. But between a variety of factors caused us to be in one another's lives quite a bit. And I dealt with him kind of like I deal with nuts in my brownies, like fine when I'm in the mood. So here I was. I just moved to this new town, and I'm kind of like, I want to find places to belong.

And I'm so obsessed with my own sense of belonging. And meanwhile, I've got this relationship with this guy who I'm like, I don't really want to be in a relationship with you. I'm getting paid $25 an hour. He starts treating me less like a tutor and more like a friend and I'm kind of uncomfortable and it's awkward. I won't spoil the end of the chapter for you, but suffice it to say, things changed that caused

me to realize that he had actually felt like he was in search of belonging the entire time. And he was paying $25 an hour. And yet the way I interacted with him, in retrospect, I realized that I had been so obsessed with my own desire to belong

that I had completely... I had been so concerned when I moved to State College, so concerned with praying the prayer like, God, please help me find people I can belong with, that it never occurred to me, because I'm apparently a total narcissist, it never occurred to me to pray the other side of the prayer, which is, God, help me find people to whom I can give the gift of belonging. And so I realized, tragically too late in this case,

I realized that I had missed the opportunity to give that gift to him. Interesting. Wow. That's good. How would you describe, so you say, I mean, this book is born out of kind of seasons where you've had to find belonging, found it other times when you haven't found it so much. Can you describe maybe both what it feels like to be in some kind of community? And as a Christian, I'm sure church community or whatever, where true belonging isn't really happening. Like, what does that look like? And then what does it look like when you do find belonging? Yeah. Um, I think in terms of, in terms of some things that it, that it doesn't look like, um, uh, some of, some of what I do in, in this book, uh, is, uh, grieve theieve the relationships that

ended up being really damaged after I came out as gay. So it's not No Longer Strangers is not all about sexuality in the way that Single Gay Christian is. Single Gay Christian is a very thematic memoir on the subject

of sexuality. In No Longer Strangers I had the joy of only bringing up sexuality when it felt relevant and not shying away from it, but also not needing to talk about it all the time. Which, in my mind, is sort of like the ideal for life, too. Being gay and celibate

doesn't take a lot of my time in general, because not having sex takes very little time. So, there's a sense in which I want to be like, yeah, like this is a relatively small part of my life. I don't really need to talk about it or think about it a lot. But when I feel like I don't have the freedom to be able to process it when it is relevant, then I'm trying to sort of stuff it down. And then it feels like it, you know, swells even larger in that contained space. And, um, so trying to strike

the balance in relationship between not needing to talk about sexuality all the time, but having the space to talk about it when I do need to talk about it. Um, so, so after my first book came out and I was finally for the first time, uh, you know, choosing to talk about it. It's kind of how you came out, right? I came out with the book. It's not recommended to others if you're looking for strategies. When I started having those conversations, there were some really heartbreaking

ends of relationships. Can you share any particulars? Yeah, so one of the... Well, so, I mean, I tell some stories in the book. And so, yeah, if they're in the book, I guess they're public knowledge at this point. So there was one family in particular that left our church after my book came out,

specifically because I was leading worship at the church and they weren't comfortable with me being a worship leader as somebody who was gay and celibate. Even though you're... I just will never understand. Well, I don't know. Everybody is on a journey and have their different backgrounds

and narratives and fears and stuff, but it just doesn't make sense. I'm glad it doesn't make sense to you. I could try to charitably you know explain where they're coming from but that would get us maybe slightly off topic well I'm curious I don't get a lot too deep in the weeds but when the discussion happens maybe you or the pastor whoever when they're leaving saying it's because he's committed to the traditional view of marriage and sexuality that he's committed to celibacy.

Like he's theologically like, what's the problem here? Like, what's the answer? Is it, is there any like, or what was it in this case? I think for them. Was it just blatant homophobia? their sort of paired concern was that using the word gay was inviting an unhealthy

kind of posture toward my intrinsic sinfulness. I think fundamentally it boiled down to they believe that the experience of same-sex orientation was itself like a morally culpable sin. So you were, in a sense, living in sin by being gay.

And so in my... The fact that I wasn't pursuing orientation change, like at one point before they left, the husband had reached out to me and said like, hey, I'd really love to counsel you to help you become more straight. Was he a reparative therapist or just? No, he was just a guy who believed I was in sin and wanted to help. Which again, insofar as I agreed with him theologically, I could have said, like, it's very kind of you to want to help.

I had my reasons to say, no, thank you. Um, would they, if it were up to them, would they say Greg needs to leave the church or just stick around and not lead worship or either he needs to stop repenting from being, or he needs to start repenting from being gay or we're gone or how is it? I mean, what would they want? I think, I think, uh, they would have, they definitely, uh, had they stayed, I think they would have, they definitely, had they stayed, I think they would have wanted me to step out of leading worship. Okay. And I think they would have wanted the church leaders to be directing me toward, you know, pursuing holiness. Which, again, to their mind, I was not currently pursuing because I wasn't pursuing orientation change. Hold on a second. There's something chipped up here. Let's see.

No. Oh, is that AirPods? Sorry. No, don't. Sorry, my earbuds are in. Okay, we're good. We're good. Just want to make sure my recording was still going let me actually do this i can see a little more okay sorry about that yeah hey and we're back hey we're back yeah uh so so so yeah so so so all of these all of these concerns uh factored into their their decision to leave um okay excited to keep cutting off it was it shocking or not was it gonna and that wasn't too i i expected i, I mean, there were probably... Because you're friends. These aren't just some random... Yeah, these were friends of mine.

There were like 600 people in our church. And so the fact that there was only one family that left immediately, I mean, over the years. Once COVID rolled around and our services got combined and some of the folks who had been going to a different service were suddenly stuck in the service with me and they were like, oh, we'd forgotten about that gay worship leader who went to the other service. That caused some new issues, I think. Okay. But as far as the initial fallout was concerned, it was just the one family, which honestly was better than I was expecting. Okay. It was just the one family, which honestly was better than I was expecting. But speaking to expectations, like when I imagined – because I anticipated ahead of time. I was like I'm coming out and it's going to be relationally challenging.

Like it's going to impact my belonging in this space in some way. And so I was sort of braced for it. But the way that I thought it would play out in my heart, I sort of assumed that I would be like, good riddance, suckers. You know, like maybe not that brazen, but don't let the door hit you on the way out. I think I was ready to feel like these people are theologically different enough from me that I'm just – I'm not even interested. Like I'm just as glad that they're gone. And the reality was a lot messier than that. There was a lot more grief in it than that.

Because I realized that the loss of unity, even when it's for reasons that make a lot of sense is still, you know, yeah, we still leak wasteful tears no matter how much plumber's tape we wrap around it. You had the pastor and leadership 100% behind you, right? Like that, you had way more support than like people kind of divided over it. It kind of mattered, but you know, the leadership. Yeah. Your pastor, I'm there. I really want to meet your pastor.

Oh, he's so high quality. I'm hoping, I'm hoping they'll come out and visit some point. Every time you describe him, that's fantastic. I know people that, several people where, man, even the leadership was kind of on board. But once there started to be some like people leaving and stuff, then all of a sudden the leadership starts to kind of lose their courage a little bit or like, well, can you stop calling yourself gay? Or have you tried to prepare therapy? You know,

maybe we can give it another shot, you know, cause this elder, you know, he gives a lot of money to the church. I don't know if I want to see him leave. They don't say that, but I mean, there's, I've, I've, yeah, I know other stories where not having that support from the leadership, um, is super gosh. I mean, that's one friend, I won't name him, but he talks about it in his book, but man, it was just the first time he came out as a gay man. He didn't say he's gay. I think he even says like, I wrestle with bisexual attractions or something. Married to a woman, theologically conservative, all the checks off all the boxes. and even then he had like several families leave yeah like yeah oh man it was ugly yeah i just can't

imagine how dehumanizing that would feel i mean you're very gracious and saying you know like kind of understand the way that way of thinking is and you're trying to honor them but that does that feel just like or even now when you experience and i know maybe some speaking engagements that gets canceled canceled because they find out you're not straight like it always cracks me up when people ask me to speak and then and then reach out afterward and they're like actually we realized you're a little too gay for our taste and it's like how did that not come up when you first asked me? Anyway, that's neither here nor there. You know, the thing that I have tried to do more and more, and again, this is sort of getting to the question of

what it looks like to foster a heart of belonging within the body of Christ, even when there are people within the body of Christ who would say things that feel like they amount to, like, we don't count you as part of us, or we wish you weren't here. And the posture that I've tried to take is a posture of saying, someday, someday, we will all be in the glorious hereafter, and these things will be sorted out. And whatever the nature of our relationship is meant to look like, it will be perfect then. This family that I dearly loved while they were at our church, and continue to dearly love in a really residually painful kind of way,

there will be a time when our relationship will be the perfect thing that it was meant to be. And in between... You believe that. You put your hope on that. Absolutely. Yeah. Because I agree with that on paper. It's just functionally, it's just so hard to... When I think about the people who think that I am a heretic, When I think about the people who think that I am a heretic, I hope that my first thought about them is the delight of the grand unity that we will share in the end. And I think when I hang my hope on that future unity, I can feel a little more freedom to say, it doesn't have to be perfect now. I don't have to fix it now. I don't have to convince them that I am okay now. Whatever brokenness exists within us, I can do what is incumbent on me to forgive without needing to feel like we have to become besties in this life.

And I think we can find a kind of unity in that, in the trust that we will someday be more unified than we can ever fully experience now. So good. And that applies to everybody listening, right? We all have these relational hiccups and problems and tensions and blown relationships and family issues. And, um, man, that's, that's great. So can you describe, cause you have experienced, would you say you've

experienced seasons communities where it's like, man, this, this is not perfect, but this is, I feel like you belong here. This is, this is, I feel like there's a great community. Like, what does that look like? Yeah. Um, and you can even describe it in the abstract if you haven't maybe experienced the fullest extent of it. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I certainly haven't experienced the fullest extent. Me neither. Which I think is kind of the point, right?

Is that we're always sort of living toward the beauty for which we were intended. Right. And, you know, again, we'll get there in the end, but the fact that we're not quite there yet doesn't need to make us angsty about what we have now. What really beautiful belonging has looked like for me is, and I'm going to use the word queer here because I just think it's such an appropriate word for what I'm describing. The queering of family. There's your next book. Because, okay, and so the word queer, for those of you who are like, how dare you use offensive language.

Yeah, the Algeneral listeners are really sensitive to that. Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure. Oh, man. It kind of makes me want to drop more exciting words than that. language. Yeah, the El General listeners are really sensitive. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. Oh, man. It kind of makes me want to drop more exciting words than that, but we won't. We'll pass. So the word queer, you know, it begins as derogatory. And then like many a derogatory term, the group of people it's describing take this word up and say, like, actually, we're proud to be queer. So around 1990, we see the beginning of people... For instance, there were some protests where people were chanting, we're here, we're queer, get used to it. So they kind of start to own this label for themselves.

Which is not uncommon for minority populations, right? To reclaim... Very, very common. Yeah. The most kind of iconic example in the U.S. is the word black as a marker of racial identity, which was an insult prior to the late 50s. And then you've got things like the black arts movement, the black power movement, Black is Beautiful, which is sort of like a fashion show. All of these things kind of accentuating the beauty of cultures you know, cultures and people and bodies that have dark skin. And so there's what rhetorical theorists would call, and I say this because I wrote an article on it once, like a semantic affirmation. Okay, here's what the word black literally means. It means that I have dark skin, and I am proud of that fact. I can affirm that which is semantically true about this word, yes, indeed. A similar thing happens with queer. Okay, your word

queer, you're making fun of me for in some way not fitting the norm of society. And I can say, yeah, I don't fit the norm of society, and that's a really good thing. So this is why the word queer starts to be reclaimed, and so you get things like queer theory within the academy. You get shows like Queer as Folk and Queer Eye, which has since, you know, used to be Queer Eye for the straight guy back when the show first existed. Now it's just Queer Eye. But all these sort of common cultural moments where the word queer starts to rise in usage. Now to the point where there are a lot of LGBTQ folks who would prefer the word queer to a word like gay or lesbian or bisexual, or even something like trans, because they would say like, queer just sort of like, it doesn't give too much specific

detail. It gives me space to not need to nail myself down too specifically but i can own the fact that i am not your norm and that's okay is it accurate to say that queer too just go beyond capturing capturing the specific sexual experience like it's it captures a more broader holistic way in which sexual and gender minorities are living as minorities in the world. Because I heard a couple of different women who would be lesbians say, you know, the word lesbian just figured it's so sexualized. Like I just picture like, you know, two women getting on or something. It's kind of reduced to this very explicit sexual experience,

whereas queer talks about the whole kind of minority experience when I'm not just having sex. Does that, would that be accurate for a lot of people? I know people use it differently. Sure. I mean, I mean, certainly, certainly it extends beyond just sexual orientation or just gender identity, though it can, you know, involve both of those things. Um, but broadly, yeah, it speaks to non-normative ways of being in the world when it comes to gender, sexuality, etc. And so, for instance, when I say something like the queering of family, what I mean by that is if there's a normative societal way of finding family, ah, enter into your heterosexual marriage and have your biological children.

Anything that falls outside of that norm, whether it's, oh, we're actually not having biological children, whether because we're adopting or fostering, or, oh, we're actually adopting or fostering or having biological children, but we don't have sort of a normative heterosexual two-parent household.

Right. Or we've actually chosen to live in community and be committed to one another, but not in a way that involves civil or Christian marriage as a part of that dynamic. part of that dynamic. Basically, just ways of rethinking how to do family, rethinking who we live with, who we do life with, who we think of as our people, who shows up in our Christmas photos, who gets to be our plus one, two, three at weddings, who does life with us, just the dailies of life and in our interactions with other people. So have you experienced this kind of querying of the family? In your trajectory, how has that looked? So one particular place that I've experienced it,

and I would say I've encountered it in many places. And I continue to try to seek it out and make space for it. One example that for me is really beautiful that I talk about in No Longer Strangers is, so in my relationship with my pastor and his wife and their family, my relationship to their two kids. So they've got two boys who, the older one just turned 15, and then the younger one will soon turn 12. But when I met them, they were six and three. And I've just been kind of in their lives, in and out of their house, seeing them all the time at church and hanging out, you know, all the time for years now. And so at one point, I was at their house with another friend

and they were having a conversation and they were like, we can't decide, Greg, if you're more like an older brother or like a weird uncle. Go for the weird uncle every time. I patch. And it was interesting to realize

I didn't really have a category for the relational space that they occupied in my heart. But it was in some way familial in a way that really defied normative categories. It was

weird, and yet if you ask me like, oh, these kids are not your kids, they're not your, you know, biological children or your nephews or whatever. Like, how does that work? And the best thing I could do, I think, is point you to Isaiah chapter 56. I'm almost sure it's chapter 56. Although, frankly, I'm not good with the numbers. I prefer to think that I quote the Bible like Jesus does. It is written in there someplace. Yeah, it is 56. The eunuch passage?

Yeah, yeah. So in this passage, it is 56, thank goodness. 58 is the... It's either 58 or 56. I don't think it's 58. One's the poverty passage, the other one's the eunuch passage. I think 58 is the one where it's more addressing reversal of poverty, and 56 is the eunuch. Anyway, they can Google it. Yeah, that's right.

Look it up. And there's also a discussion of foreigners in 56 with the eunuchs. But the specific commentary about the eunuch is, let no eunuch say, I'm only a dry tree. And then God, through Isaiah, goes on to say to the eunuch who honors me and who keeps my Sabbaths, I will give to them a name and a memorial better than sons and daughters. That's so powerful. And so there's this sense in which the sort of eunuch impulse, right, and I am not physiologically a eunuch. That may be TMI for some of our listeners, but whatever.

It works downstairs, you know. And yet I don't plan to have any, you know, biological children. And so in that sense, I am functionally a eunuch to take kind of the language that Jesus uses in Matthew chapter 17. 19. Thank you. Matthew 19, Mark 10, Luke 18. There you go.

Nice. The one who chooses to be, wasn't born a eunuch, not made a eunuch, but for the sake of the kingdom, chooses to live as a eunuch. Which most people say that's more symbolic. Anokizo, I think, to make himself a eunuch. Poor origin took it literally. But most of us do not. But there is this sense of like, yeah, having chosen to live like a eunuch, like a person who is not going to produce physical biological offspring, what does it mean to still leave some kind of meaningful legacy? What does it mean to still be a part of the lives of people younger than me in a way that

is not paternal? I mean, yeah, I'm not their dad. We're not confusing me for their dad or for, you know, they've got biological uncles. I'm not trying to pretend that I'm one their dad. We're not confusing me for their dad. Or they've got biological uncles. I'm not trying to pretend that I'm one of those. I'm not trying to act like a biological brother, even though I'm not. And yet, in the most non-normative of ways, in the queerest of ways, if you will,

when I think about family, I think about them. And so to say that we cannot just be like, oh, how nice that you have some young friends. Isn't that cute? But to actually honor, we can choose to live our lives in ways that intentionally prefer, intentionally inconvenience ourselves for the sake of people who we have chosen to make our family. There's a big idea within the queer community of something called chosen family. Right, I love that phrase. And this is especially for people who are kicked out of their homes or are distanced from their families because of their experience of sexual orientation or gender identity.

But it doesn't necessarily, it's not necessarily exclusive to that experience. It can speak more broadly to the choice to live like family ties exist where our societal expectation would not look and see those family ties naturally existing. Well, that's, I mean, that's Mark 10, right? 10, 29 to 30, where it really pushes home that with familiar language, people who leave mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters,

fields will gain back a hundred fold in this life, brothers, sisters, mothers, and it really, that's more than just you're going to leave behind biological family for the sake of friends and community. It's like the family for family, right? I mean, it is that that is the passage right about chosen family yeah it's yeah i mean the the it's hard because it's a two-way street like like i often tell heterosexual married christian people like we are the embodiment of the reward part part of uh that jesus promises like's, dare I say, it would be almost disobedient to not on some

level, like live out that vision. I know like look different for different people and seasons and patterns and situations or whatever, but. Yeah. Yeah. I would say the New Testament vision of family is kind of the original chosen family that exists among ties that are meant to be stronger than blood. And so for those people who read the New Testament and say, this is primarily an affirmation of the value of the nuclear family unit, I would say you've missed the point. The point is actually that the nuclear family unit needs to be subsidiary to that which is more primary, which is the chosen family that exists

within the body of Christ. Right, right. Yeah, man. And we're far from, I mean, we have so many cultural, both Christian cultural and just American cultural things that just really war against that. Like it's really an uphill, even people like me who believes everything you're saying, it's like functionally, it's like a constant daily, like reminder because the narrative, alternative narrative, the family centric kind of dare I say the idolatry of family. And then when I say that, it's not like we have a, I have a call to be a, to disciple my kids, to love my wife and everything. And Paul even says in first Corinthians seven, right? That like, if you get married, you're going to be occupied with distractions of this world namely caring for

your wife so he acknowledged that that's is a reality um but that has to be held in congruence or intertwined with living out the mark 10 vision anyway i'm preaching and and and maybe maybe it's not maybe maybe sometimes the problem when we're like we got to make space for the single people in the midst of – maybe the problem is that insofar as we frame those pursuits as dichotomous with one another, insofar as we frame pursuit of relationship outside of our biological or legal family with pursuit of relationship within that like, oh, the more time I give to my nuclear family, the less time I can therefore invest in other. Maybe we need to see those two, maybe we need to see the circles of that Venn diagram as overlapping much more than they do, so that we're not saying, I have to go take time to leave the house so that I can meet up with my single friend for coffee and we can, you know, but maybe instead we just need to let our lives in mesh a bit more yeah um when we have done that and we are far from doing it as much as we should but i've just

noticed that our family is super blessed by it like when you even use the phrase like the inconvenience whatever i'm like i i it's just not like it's it's we're so i mean you've seen my kids you know i come home from work like hey dad put their earbuds back in you greg comes over and everybody you know it's pretty rare that my kids will come down from downstairs drop what they're doing to greet anybody that comes in without being told they're that's not fair but they but yeah when they hear you come in the door it's's, yeah, I'm a little jealous. You don't have to be. And I do feel like even with your family, I feel like I've had the pleasure of filling in some ways like a slightly avuncular role.

Avuncular, for those of you unaware, is the adjectival form of the word uncle. There's an adjectival, really? Yeah. Say it again. Avuncular. Avuncular is the adjectival, really? Yeah Say it again Avuncular Avuncular is the adjectival form of uncle It comes from the Latin avunculus, I believe Golly, wow, avuncular, yeah

Anyway, yeah So to get to fill a bit of an avuncular role in the family Which again, it's a gift to me In so far as it's like, yeah, like this is a bit of expression of family. Um, but hopefully it's also a gift to you guys. It is a hundred percent. Yeah. And so in that sense, it's not, it's not that doing this sort of like this more queer family

ties defined in a way that's not just nuclear family. That's not supposed to be like an attack against the nuclear family, right? Those of us who talk about things like queering family are often accused of like, you're just trying to destroy the nuclear family as the Lord designed it. And it's like, the point is not to destroy. The point is actually that like family as like a spouse and kids was meant to exist. Like the best vision Jesus had for us involves the enmeshment with the lives of other people. And when that happens properly, it's actually better for everybody than it is when the, you know, husband and wife and 2.7 children go off into their own little

cloistered space and do their own thing. Yeah. No, that's it. That's so good. And you're, real quick, can you check the time i can't see the time i can it looks like we're at one hour or what's the actual one hour and 10 seconds oh that time 11 38 a couple more minutes yeah um yeah the classic example i was wondering you know so my wife and i we travel to conferences and stuff. And, um, I travel more than she does, but especially the last few years, she's been doing a lot more traveling. Oftentimes she kind of comes in and comes out quickly. I have to stay longer. So we don't travel together very often. So, you know, she, she, she doesn't love traveling alone, you know? Um, and it might,

might be kind of old. Well, I'd be kind of old school. Some would say it's old school. Some will say it's not, it's just what, but like I, you know, to have another guy traveling with her, you know, typically it would be like, I don't know, like she wouldn't want, she, she would feel kind of uncomfortable, you know? Um, but it was so great when like you and her came out to the board meeting and she's like, Oh yeah, me and Greg are on the same flight together. She's like, is that, you think that's fine? Right? I'm like, he's gay. You're not as perfect act because she does get hit on and stuff

and airplane airplanes you get you know um and she just she doesn't like that and it's all you know but like it was like so perfect i'm like dude find yourself a gay traveling companion and it's like this is like the ideal situation we should create we should create a service honestly gay traveling buddy uh yeah it was it was so much fun. Both of you have a very honest relationship. You have your extroverted and introverted. So like, hey, you want to talk for a little bit? Sure.

And then 10 minutes, can we just read and do our thing? And it was like, I think it was a great experience. It was fantastic. Both of us after that trip were like, we got to do this again. I'm sure there will be more opportunities. do this again. I'm sure there'll be more opportunities. Um, uh, so, uh, to, to land the plane final big picture encouragements for people that are listening and they're like, man, I, I do think I've absorbed kind of this family centric narrative in a way that might be unhealthy. Man, I do feel like I've been blind to, you know, saying things, doing things that could make

single people feel excluded or not truly part of the family. What are some things, say, churches, or just individuals, I guess, but also some things churches could do better in this area to be more inclusive? Yeah. You know, I'm always torn between suggestions that feel like, here's a nice thing you could tack onto the way that you already do life, and suggestions that fundamentally amount to something like, burn down the whole system and start it from scratch. And maybe both are constructive in their own ways at various times. I think on sort of the smaller scale level, just to think about ways that you can, I would say if you're in marriage or pursuing marriage, think about ways that you can turn that vocation outward. Cutter Calloway is great on this, by the way. His book, Breaking the Marriage Idol, so good in terms of conceiving of how the Christian vocation of marriage is actually not meant to be a turning inward of two people just exclusively toward each other,

but it's actually meant to be a turning outward, arm in arm, toward the world so that you can collectively invite, collectively welcome, collectively work for the benefit of everybody, not just sort of for your own individual duality. And I feel like if you have a microphone, a platform, an influence, like just, I don't know, like it sounds so simplistic, but just being aware that everything you say, every illustration you give, like just assume half the people, it may not be true in a church, but just assume half the people are single. How would this feel? Hey, we have a family camp coming up, you know, like is that biological family? Are the single people excluded? How does that make them? Like if you were single, how would, you know, how would

they feel if every single illustration of the pulpit is, you know, my, my wife, my smoking hot wife and my five kids and how wonderful they are. I don't know. Like just, it's made me apprehensive, probably to a fault even posting stuff about my family or kids on social media. In fact, my kids started feeling bad. Like you'd never posted. My wife's like, there's not a single picture of me on your Instagram. You know, do you not want me? I'm like, no, I was, cause I don't like when people just are constantly like,

let's look as good as we possibly can stop fighting you know i'm gonna take an instagram picture so we look all like just just being aware of how somebody who has a broken family uh or doesn't have a family maybe they will or want one maybe they're called a celibacy or whatever and i don't know i think i think maybe a really practical thing there is like i mean i think it's great when people you know love their family. If you want to post about your family on social media, awesome.

But like, do you have other people in your life who you also have deep enough relationships with to also go on trips with them and post about it on social media? And like, like is, is the, is the cutesy,

like, look at us doing our beautiful belonging thing. Does that only happen in the context of your nuclear family and if so maybe the problem is not like how dare you hang out with your nuclear family yeah maybe it's like maybe is there is there a less insular way of doing that could you actually do that in a way that that's more inclusive of more people than just yeah your little mini tribe you know who does a great job at that on social media is um and i from the times i i rarely like looking at it but what the times i've seen them are the kriegs i feel like when i do see them in like family stuff at least 50 of the time i feel like cat

our mutual trans friend is is there like there are the kids and laughing all this stuff and it's just you could tell like wow this just is a subtle i mean kind of 2022 way of kind of i don't know like demonstrating that our family is an inclusive family but yeah um yeah well the book no longer strangers finding belonging in a world of alienation put up by ivp great book highly recommend this and i mean I, last time we talked about single gay Christian, but this is, so I haven't read a ton of books that would be within this theme, like hospitality belonging. So I think it's an outstanding book. I can't compare it to anything else. There might be other good stuff out there. Um, but I can with this book and this is my now

number one, go to like memoir. No, it's not just a memoir though. It's like a theological. I mean, it's so just all around good, but you know, Washington Waiting, Wesley Hill's iconic book that changed so many lives. Like I now recommend yours just because it was written 10 years later. And obviously Wes is amazing. But if people said,

I want one kind of memoir book to read, this is my number one go-to. So if you have not read Single Gay Christian, Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity with an awesome picture of Greg Coles in the cover, your first book, and you got your picture on the cover. Hey, it's all downhill from here.

It's such a beautifully written book. It's like, that's, it's not, even if you're not like, if you're like, well, I'm not really into reading a book on sexuality, then still read it because it's like, just such a good book. It's like, that's, it's not, even if you're not like, if you're like, well, I'm not really into reading a book on sexuality, then still read it because it's like just such a good book. So anyway. Hey, thanks. Yeah. It's always a pleasure to hang out in your basement. Yeah. Thanks for listening to Theology Raw, folks. We will see you next time. Thank you.