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Coming Out Ministries

Wayne Blakely

Engage

I pray that you will be blessed this morning.

There's a lot of confusion with regards to homosexuality.

When I grew up, it was made pretty clear to me that homosexual sin was something that was, you know, terrible.

And so I would guess that most of you weren't here last night for my testimony and the testimony of my colleagues, and we share our testimony to relay the credibility for which we have to speak about this.

Each of us lived immersed in the gay culture for a number of years, for myself 40 years, and the interesting thing is that God is merciful and he is so graceful and he is so patient and he listens to and answers every prayer and that would be the prayers of our loved ones, including my parents who prayed for me for 40 years.

Now, we're gonna cover a lot of territory and I'm going to tell you right now that this is an hour-long presentation, so if you're a clock watcher just, you know, you can start getting nervous about an hour from now.

I spent a lot of years going to church and I felt very uncomfortable there because I wasn't supposed to be uncomfortable there, but for some reason I saw a lot of this.

And what do you think what that was all about?

And so I knew very early that there was something drastically different about me, and if you did hear my presentation last night, you would see why when I was at the age of 18 years old that I ran to the open loving arms of the gay community.

Now, I also know that loving arms, I'll put in quotes there, because once I got into the gay community, I found that there's, there are all kinds of things in the gay community that there are in, in the heterosexual culture as well.

There's a lot of backbiting, there's a lot of judgment, and, and it's, you know, it's, it's not great, but there were people that understood that my same-sex attractions were not something that were going to distance them from speaking to me.

And so that's not something that I experienced in God's church family, which is where I should have been experiencing it, because I may not have gone down a lot of dead-end roads that I went down that I didn't need to go down.

And because of those dead-end roads, and because of all the choices I made, not Jesus Christ, I suffer today from the scars of those decisions.

I want to tell it like it is today because I want the church to come together and to love 1 another the way Jesus loves us because we're not heading to heaven with a pink section over here and the other section over here and the other tempted people sitting over here.

We're all supposed to integrate and get along with each other.

Well right about now you're probably thinking, well I got a lot of questions good remember them because this afternoon at 445 we will have a Q&A it's our most favorite part of our presentations and that's listening to you You have things that you want to get off your chest.

You have questions that you want to ask, you know What what does our life really look like today?

And by the way, it's not our ministry It's Jesus Christ's ministry Jesus has made atonement for all sins of ignorance, but there is no provision made for willful blindness.

The church hasn't known how to reach out in relationship to this topic.

Let me see, let me phrase this just right.

Some of you may be aware that there is a new statement on homosexuality out of Andrews University.

I'm not going to address that entirely in this particular presentation.

I'm happy to discuss it a little bit more this afternoon during the Q&A, but I think that you might pick up a little bit about an observation or 2 that I have about it in this presentation.

I would like to also introduce you here to my colleagues, Ron Woolsey, who we refer to as Moses, because Ron immersed himself in the gay culture for a number of years, and then 23, 24 years came out of homosexuality.

Let me make another stipulation right here.

I want to get this all out of the way so I can preach to you.

Ron is married with children, but let me say right now that the opposite of gay is not straight.

And so For any of you who believe and think that we promote conversion and reparative therapy, we do not, except for under 1 circumstance, Jesus Christ is our reparative therapist.

And that would be that no matter what damages in your life, He is the 1 that will repair you.

My colleague Mike Carducci lived in the culture, the gay culture, for 20 years and also had praying family for him that helped him be put in a circumstance, an environment he wasn't expecting to be in.

When God called upon his heart, You see, when Jesus talks to you, when you're in a state where you will consider his ways instead of your own, he usually gets right through.

But we often put up a lot of barriers and that's why the Holy Spirit doesn't get through to us because we're going, no, no, not right now.

But when we're ready to listen to to the Lord and let him convict our heart all kinds of changes do take place in our lives.

Danielle Harrison, she has an amazing testimony if you saw that last night, Danielle lived in a goth element of society for a while, in a rebellious way, totally against religion, and looked pretty different from everybody else.

She was making a statement to society that she was going to be her own person.

And that's part of where our confusion is today.

You hear the term a lot, just be yourself.

Well, I want to challenge you on this because God is not asking you to be yourself.

He's asking you to be who he would like you to be, that would be a child of God who would represent him.

And so I would ask you again here, do you ever feel judged?

I sure did, when they were whispering and pointing at me.

I knew it had something to do about me that people thought particularly odd.

Unlike when I was a child, it is not the church that decided that we should start talking about this.

What happened is, is that in society, they've decided that there's nothing different about homosexuality than there is heterosexuality and then the church was like oh 0 man they're pushing us into this corner you know if they keep doing that we're gonna have to say something we're gonna have to reflect don't tell me we're gonna have to talk to those people.

Do you know why Christians aren't persecuted today?

Because they don't look that different than the rest of the world.

Now I'm not asking you to do anything but to get in touch with Jesus Christ on a personal level and because of what he's doing in your life begin to reach out to others and help draw them in to that relationship with Jesus Christ.

That's because we're near the university.

Because all the other congregations that I speak to that don't have universities in the neighborhood say, no, no, he can't do that.

God can breathe the breath of life into us, he can create, he can do all kinds of things, but he can't help the gay person.

Wouldn't there be a gospel message to those suffering from afflictions, the lies that the enemy might be selling them, if the gospel were true?

Don't we have a mission that's actually outside the church, not just inside the church?

And we have a mission inside the church as well.

Drew, and Anderson Cooper about 3 years ago all had programs called Can You Pray the Gay Away?

And so society would have you believe today that your feelings equal truth.

And for anybody who's here, who I welcome here, that's gay or bisexual or whatever your temptation is, you are most welcome here.

And when God reached me, I just found that he convicted my heart to live more in agreement with him instead of what my flesh was crying out for.

So I'm still on that journey, and my flesh still cries out.

And so it's about Using the tools that are available to us and that comes to us through the power of the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ And so unless I'm praying unless I'm communicating with my father on a day-to-day basis, by the way, I'll put another plug in here for an amazing presentation called The Lost Father, and that is this afternoon at...

You will want to come and hear that presentation.

If you've had difficulty connecting with your your earthly father, do you think that sometimes it's difficult to make the connection to your heavenly father?

Do you ever find that when you go to prayer meeting that you'll find someone say, please pray for my grandmother, she has cancer.

Please pray for my husband, I think he's immersed in pornography.

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