From our Pastoral Care Worker – Haydn
It is with much gratitude and humility that I accept the position of Pastoral Worker with Liberty Christian Ministries in June 2011. Having struggled with unwanted same-sex attractions since I was a teenager, I thoroughly understand the issues and struggles that Christians go through with this issue. There are many people who deal with homosexuality: those directly involved; grieving relatives and friends of those who’ve gone into the gay lifestyle; and pastoral staff who don’t quite know how to help those with these problems. In various ways, I hope to serve people in each of these categories. My personal journey is recounted in the article that follows.
I have been actively involved in ministering to others with unwanted same-sex attraction in Australia and internationally. I have ministered in the United States, Korea, Brazil, Venezuela, Canada, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Middle East. I’ve had the privilege of ministering to Muslims, Catholics and Protestants, Jews, and non-Christians, and shared my testimony on national television in Australia in 2010.
I want to teach about homosexuality and relational wholeness, hosting conferences and running support groups. I want to help those who struggle personally with unwanted same-sex attraction. I hope to enhance the resources that Liberty has, both online and in print, and to work with other ministries in order to accomplish this goal. My vision is also to engage with the secular community, as social and political discourse requires, so that the wider community is informed about God’s good plan for human sexual and relational wholeness. I thank my Heavenly Father for blessing me with this position. I thank the Liberty Committee for entrusting me with the responsibility, and my faithful wife and two daughters for their support and prayers. I look forward to serving in this very privileged capacity.
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Haydn’s Story (‘Coming Out and Finding Freedom’ – Southern Cross magazine, October 2008, p. 17)
At the age of 14, I first became aware that I had same-sex sexual attractions. I was beginning to look at other boys in the kind of way that I was meant to be looking at girls. When I told my parents, their response was fear, shame, and disgust. I was specifically warned by my father to never mention the problem to anyone else, out of fear that others might find out and use the information to slander our family name. My parents gave little comfort at a time when their guidance was most needed.
As these events unravelled, I experienced bullying at the Roman Catholic high school I attended, an ordeal so bad that I soon developed depression and became suicidal. Eventually I left, and transferred to an Anglican school that had a fantastic pastoral care system in place, which was quite effective in looking after students.
At the same time, however, I wanted to explore my sexuality further and confided in the school counsellor about how to handle my orientation. As it turned out the counsellor wasn’t a Christian- despite working for a Christian school- and he actually encouraged me to assume a gay identity and declare it publicly ‘loud and proud’. So I ‘came out of the closet’ by revealing to my fellow students that I was gay.
That year of outing was one of great heartache as Christian students distanced themselves from me and told me that God could never love and save disgusting homosexuals, a persecution that had the effect of encouraging me to further explore the gay life. Soon after my 18th birthday, I attended the Annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras: before going to the parade, I thought that the Mardi Gras was an amazing display of human sexuality and diversity, but what I witnessed was an immoral, blasphemous, and degrading event. I thought it so obscene that it made me think twice about living the gay lifestyle for good and I wanted to know more about God.
Soon after, a Christian school mate encouraged me to think about having a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Despite much cynicism on my part, I read the New Testament for myself and through that it became obvious that God loved me so much and had gone to so much length to have a relationship with me by dying on the cross. So I became a Christian and gave my life over to Christ in my final year of school.
Ironically, one of the most difficult aspects of my walk with God has been relating to some Christians who have preferred to distance themselves from me because of my sexuality. Many Christians I’ve encountered have missed the point that a Christian’s struggle with a homosexual orientation is not just a sexual, emotional, or psychological problem – it is a spiritual one. The salvation of the cross has not removed my unwanted same-sex attractions. I continue to deal with the temptations of lustfulness and resisting the urge to connect with other men in unhealthy ways.
When I did yield to temptation, I would do so because I was – as unusual as this may actually seem- ultimately trying to reconnect with my dad and make myself worthy and acceptable to him. At the time that I began to have gay sex, my mother had died and my father was emotionally absent; instead of grieving with me, he busied himself with other things and I was desperately trying to keep him back and be consoled.
Eventually, in 2007, I got married and I now have two daughters with my wife. I have Jesus as my Saviour and have a connection with God which is deep enough that I now have my most profound needs met, including the needs for love, acceptance, understanding, truth, grace, and purity. I was able to share with my wife my sexual past before we got married. She was able to understand my struggle, in part, as she herself had come out of a broken home and had her own experiences of ‘years in the wilderness’. (She had lived for 10 years without her mother, and had made her own mistakes , which made it easier for her to see where I was coming from.) Before we were married, I tried to ensure that I was strong in my walk before making any commitments to her, and I didn’t see our marriage as a means of being healed.
My same-sex attractions have not completely gone away, and they may not before the Lord Jesus returns in judgement, or before I die: just as a married heterosexual man may still look lustfully at other women who are not his wife, marriage hasn’t removed my temptations or the brokenness which informs them. Marriage doesn’t work like that: but God can when He returns in glory to make me whole again.
(For a more thorough account of Haydn’s journey out of homosexuality, you can read here. He also maintains a regular blog at Senator Qoheleth).