Before addressing some of the concerns you’ve expressed, we want you to know that our hearts go out to you and that you have a place in our prayers. It’s obvious that you’re hurting badly. As far we’re concerned, your pain is a primary issue here.
Focus is first and foremost a family-oriented ministry. We care about mothers, fathers, and children, and we don’t want to see anybody rejected or ostracized by their flesh-and-blood relations. It concerns us deeply to hear that you’ve been forced to endure this kind of treatment as a result of your decision to self-identify as homosexual. If you’ll give us a chance, we’d sincerely like to come alongside you and help you work through this difficult period in your life. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve done, or how you feel about your sexual identity. God loves you unconditionally. He wants you to know His love in a profound and personal way. This is the Christian message in a nutshell.
As Bible-believers, we take the position that every individual is made in God’s image: “And God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). This means that everybody is loved by God and has innate dignity and worth as a human being. Accordingly, our organization is committed to encouraging its friends and constituents to reach out to gay people with compassion. We also feel confident that a majority of sincere Christian people have followed this advice. As a matter of fact, we’ve heard from a number of believing parents who have actually thanked us for giving them “permission” to love their gay-identified teen.
In our opinion, it’s this kind of compassion that has led Dr. Ritch Savin-Williams, a gay professor of Human Development at Cornell University who specializes in working with homosexual adolescents, to assert that religious families actually have a good track record when it comes to responding to their gay children with understanding and support. As he understands it, this is directly attributable to these families’ faith, which exhorts them to imitate God by loving their children unconditionally. Such love is essential to healthy parenting.
This also explains why we strongly support fair and objective bullying policies that defend all children against bullying of any kind for any reason. We see no reason to single out any particular group for special attention or protection in this regard.
We should add that our perspective on homosexuality and same-sex marriage has nothing to do with “hatred” or “discrimination.” On the contrary, it’s basically a matter of our allegiance to the testimony of Scripture. As evangelical Christians, we regard the Bible as the authoritative Word of God. What’s more, we believe the Bible teaches us that God intentionally created human sexuality to function according to a particular plan. Both marriage and the physical union upon which it is based are necessarily heterosexual by nature and design. We find this idea clearly expressed not merely in certain passages of the Old Testament Law, but in the words of Jesus Himself: “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?'” (Matthew 19:4-5; quoting from Genesis 1:27, 2:24).
If you’d like to discuss all of this with a member of our team, our staff of trained counselors would love to speak with you over the phone.
Resources
If a title is currently unavailable through Focus on the Family, we encourage you to use another retailer.
Loving My (LGBT) Neighbor: Being Friends in Grace and Truth
101 Frequently Asked Questions About Homosexuality
Referrals
Desert Stream Ministries
Articles
Understanding Homosexuality
