No Mere Hospitality: Toward an Integrative Perspective on Same-Sex Sexuality

One of the most persistent and emotionally weighty issues I deal with in my work as a pastor is the question of LGBTQ+ identities: how should the church respond to LGBTQ+ people, how should we understand and apply the teaching of the Bible when it comes to same-sex sexuality, and what is the most Christ like way to show love to our LGBTQ+ friends and neighbours?

I completed a Doctor of Ministry degree at Northeastern Seminary back in 2020, and this was, in fact, the topic of my doctoral thesis: what does meaningful ministry with/to/among LGBTQ+ people look like, and how do we do it well? At that time, I focused on the theme of hospitality, arguing essentially that as Christ’s people we are called to practice radical hospitality towards all, that the bedrock of Christian community is the hospitable welcome that God extends us in the cross, and that the moral imperative of hospitality requires us to practice radical welcome and inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in the worshiping community.

I have to be honest that oftentimes these days I wish I could disavow my doctoral dissertation. At the time when I wrote it, I felt it was offering a fresh way forward on this issue, and that it would perhaps help shed some light on the path my own denomination (the FMCiC) was journeying in seeking to adopt a biblical posture towards LGBTQ+ people. Looking back over the last four years since I published it, however, my sense is that my “hospitality thesis,” such as it was, did neither. I have some small assurance that it helped some (I certainly received multiple requests from people to read it). Even so, I know I would definitely write a different thesis a second time around, if I had to write it all over again (which, thankfully, I don’t).

In a nutshell, the problem with “hospitality” as way of framing the church’s posture towards LGBTQ+ people is that, as loving as it may seem, “hospitality” is a gesture of welcomed offered, especially, to the stranger. As I argued in my thesis: biblically, you cannot offer hospitality to a friend or a family member, because biblically, hospitality (xenophilia) is explicitly about loving and welcoming the stranger. Hospitality is perhaps a helpful starting point, but the obvious problem with it is just this: if our relationship with LGBTQ+ people is framed solely in terms of hospitality, it means that they will always remain, in some real sense, “strangers” in the community—always a guest and never a fully contributing participant.

So I would no longer make “hospitality” the controlling theme for shaping the church’s posture towards LGBTQ+ people. Instead, I have come to describe my position as an “integrative approach.” By “integrative,” I mean that I think Christians need to wisely and graciously “integrate” what they believe the Bible teaches about same-sex sexuality with what we have come to know and understand about the realities of having a non-heteronormative sexual identity, of experiencing same-sex sexual attractions or gender dysphoria, the real lived experience of LGBTQ+ people.

I do not know if I am the first to use this term—“integrative”—to describe a Christian view of same-sex sexuality. I have not encountered it in any of the many books on the topic that I’ve read, and I am not aware of any major thinkers on the issue who currently use it. This may be a sign that it is a fresh way forward, or it may be that it has already been considered and found wanting. In either case, over the next few weeks here at terra incognita, I intend to sketch out in broad contours what I mean by the term and how it shapes my own response to this particular issue in church life and ministry. You can judge for yourself whether if it’s a helpful way forward or just a novel take on old ground.

The term itself comes from the realm of Christian psychology. Since 2021, I have been completing a degree in Clinical Counseling at Tyndale Seminary, and one of the first things we were asked to do early on in our studies was to write an “integrative paper,” where we articulated how we integrated the findings of contemporary psychology with the teaching of the Bible, to show how we saw the relationship between them, and how we believed that relationship ought to direct Christian counselors in their practice.

It occurred to me then that the “integrative” approach we were being asked to develop when it came to psychology generally could be mapped onto the question of LGBTQ+ identities specifically, and that rather than a simple, one-size-fits all statement on “what does the Bible say about same-sex sex,” what we really need is a gracious way to integrate the biblical witness on this matter with what we now know about what it means to be gay, or lesbian, or queer, or trans.

If you’ve read this far, I expect you’re scratching your head with all sorts of questions: what on earth does “integrative” mean? What does it look like practically? And what do you think the Bible actually teaches on this matter?

I can’t promise to answer all those questions in a format like this—blog posts are not the best venue for presenting deep, thorough, carefully researched material—but over the next series of posts, I hope to at least give readers a sense of how I would develop a full fledged “integrative approach” if I had a whole book-length format to work with.

For starters, let me say that when I talk about an “integrative approach,” I mean something that is both conceptually, and in practice, quite different from the basic options currently on hand. As far as I can tell there are essentially three. One can be “affirming,” which is to say they are supportive of same-sex relationships and/or marriage, and they believe they have a biblical warrant for being so (either because they believe that the Bible passages that apparently prohibit same-sex relationships are talking about something different than modern same-sex marriages, or because they believe there are other biblical principles that “trump” these prohibitive passages). One can be "non-affirming," which is to say they do not support same-sex relationships or marriage, primarily because they are convinced that the Bible teaches that all same-sex sex is a sin. Or one can be “accommodating,” which means that they are willing to welcome gay people into community even though they believe the Bible teaches that same-sex sex is itself sinful. Those with an accommodating posture, you might say, “accept” same-sex relationships but do not “approve” of them.

The “integrative” approach that I will be arguing for in this series is not “affirming” in the technical sense, because, as we’ll see, it does not attempt to argue for a revisionist reading of the Scriptures, but neither is it “non-affirming,” because it does not say that same-sex relationships are intrinsically or inherently sinful. Of the three current postures, my “integrative approach” is probably closest to an “accommodating” view, but it is different in that it is willing to say more than just “we can accept same-sex relationships, even though we think they’re wrong”; rather, an integrative approach takes an honest, wholistic, compassionate view of same-sex relationships, and also engages in rigorous exegesis of the scriptures, and then attempts to integrate what we know to be true about both—the experience of being LGBTQ+ and the biblical witness, together—so that we can hold up what we believe to be the Bible’s teaching on the matter, in good faith, while still sincerely embracing, blessing, and celebrating the LGBTQ+ people who are part of our community.

This may sound like an impossible goal, to some. It may sound like a wishy-washy third-way approach, to others. But after more than a decade of working and reading, study and experience on this issue, I have come to believe that an “integrative approach” holds the most promise for a healthy way forward. I don’t offer it here as a final answer to this question, but I do hope it will help others take a next step in their understanding of same-sex sexuality, and especially in their willingness to embrace and include LGBTQ+ people in authentic ways in the life of the church.

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