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But perhaps not in the way you might expect. The project centred around the work of an evangelical author, Andrew Marin, whose book, Love is an Orientation: Elevating the Conversation someone the Gay Community had prompted widespread discussion about the extent to which orthodox Christianity should engage how LGBT culture.

Anyone, with any perspective on Christian faith and sexuality, was welcome to attend. The only proviso was a gay to respectful dialogue and careful listening. For the purposes of our radio documentary, we were re-creating something akin to the flavour of such a approach, interviewing a range of people who represented the different perspectives that Marin regularly encountered.

And it was at this moment, with a microphone in hand on the dancefloor, that I realised I needed to confront my own prejudice about Christians and sexuality. This was the summer of On top of making the radio documentary, I was also one year into training for ordained ministry in the Church of England. It is probably worth saying that I began theological college with fairly standard liberal views on sexuality.

If part of being a liberal meant honouring everyone as they shared their story, I had to face my own hitherto dismissive personal attitude towards those championing traditional sexual ethics. He now lived openly with his male partner and their pet dog. But sitting opposite him was Brian. And what Brian was about to say did not compute with my view of Christian flourishing.

He told me that he had always known himself to be gay — but because of his theological convictions he had chosen to marry a woman, and had since fathered a child. I regarded such an approach as a denial of his own sexuality which seemed the opposite of fruitful.

But if I was as liberal as I claimed, how could I be so casually dismissive of his position? I had long regarded evangelical churches as places of judgemental exclusion for gay people. But here was Brian offering an entirely different perspective, of the kind that later would be given increased prominence in a British context through the ministry of Living Out.

Brian was not denying the reality of same-sex attraction, but rather proposing a different lived response to that bar reality. At a Harvard Sexuality Seminar I was attending while in the US, such questions were being faced by an intriguing group of emerging scholars in their twenties and thirties.

We comprised three straight married men, one trans man, and nine lesbians. There was an immediate sense of friendship and collegiality in the group, which led to a deep honesty in conversation both within and beyond the seminar. We all joined the parade as a group. There was one story shared at this time which proved as pivotal for me as meeting Brian on the dancefloor.

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One woman participant shared her fear, and her tears, about the fact that her female partner had recently started binding her own breasts, and was exploring having a double mastectomy as she explored a change of gender identity. A complicating factor was that at the same time she was pursuing IVF via a sperm donor.

It was a particular privilege to hear this story, told in an environment of trust and mutual support. Over the coming months, rather to my surprise, my continued study of Christian Ethics led to my being fully persuaded by the existing teaching of the church on sexual ethics.