Hello all!

I hope you are dry, safe, connected to friends, and have things in your life that give you hope.

I don’t usually do this but, this month, I am going to tell you a quick story from my life that I hope will give you a sense that it’s possible to have good things come out of difficult ones.

When I got outed two decades ago, I lost all the work I had been doing as a consultant for several conferences and camp meetings: family trainings, teaching individuals and systems how to deal with sexual abuse in the church, supporting pastors and their families, preaching, teaching Sabbath School, etc. Thanks to Floyd and the Glendale City Church, I had a congregation that is still sanctuary to me. From there, my life began to build again.

I won’t bore you with the entire journey, but I believe God used and is using Kinship to make what had been a time of loss, a blessing, and an adventure.

If I had safely stayed with my little New England congregation and camp meetings, I never would have:

I was in Lexington, Kentucky, recently with Floyd Poenitz and several other Kinship members to create awareness about Kinship at the CALLED Convention for Adventist pastors in North America. On the whole, it was a positive experience with lots of wonderful interactions.

I came away from the experience with the impression that most of the people we met support Kinship’s goals of making the church more inclusive and accepting of LBGTQ+ individuals, their families, and friends. We met a few people who voiced their opposition to the issue of homosexuality, based on a misunderstanding of Scripture, but most people affirmed Kinship’s ministry of inclusion.

The story is told of a king who held a race in which all the young men in his kingdom were invited to participate. A bag of gold was promised to the winner.

On the day of the race, the young men assembled and started running at the sound of the fanfare. At a certain point in the course the runners found a large pile of stones, around which, one by one, they managed to scramble over or around. Gradually, the runners crossed the finish line. After almost everyone had finished the king refused to declare a winner.