At the beginning of 2025, my church began the journey towards becoming a single friendly church, by working with the Single Friendly Church Network (SFCN). This is a UK‐wide organisation whose aim is to encourage churches to welcome and value single people. For a while we had been working on creating a stronger feeling of family among our members. This had initially focused on families themselves, but a small number of us gradually came to see that we needed to improve our ministry to single people.

“The heavens declare the glory of God;the skies proclaim the work of his hands.Day after day they pour forth speech;night after night they reveal knowledge.They have no speech, they use no words;no sound is heard from them.Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,their words to the ends of the world.” Psalm 19 vs 1-4

If you had asked me what intimacy looked like in a small group, I might have said something about Bible study or prayer. I would not have said “Monday evenings with eight or nine men, a book and a cup of tea.” But that is exactly where I have encountered some of the deepest intimacy, with God, with others and even with myself.

How are you feeling about Christmas this year? Are your emotions positive, negative or mixed? For some, Christmas can be an unavoidable annual reminder of the gap between how things are and how we wish they were. This can be particularly the case when it comes to our relationships, but there can also be a felt gap in connection to work, finances, living arrangements, the political situation in our homeland or in myriad other ways.

It turns out we’re all missing something - and not in a self-help cliché kind of way. According to Ed Shaw, what we’re lacking is intimacy: not just sexual intimacy, but a deep sense of connection. Shaw calls this the “intimacy deficit” and it’s something that affects everyone, Christian or not. 

I first came across TFT about 7 years ago when my daughter opened up to me about her struggles with SSA. At the time she was passionate about her faith and committed to the biblical view of sexuality. I went along with her to the TFT London and National Conferences, I honestly didn’t think I had much to worry about, as she was so zealous for the Lord. I naively believed she would never walk away from her faith. It was only a year previously that I had come to faith myself through my daughter’s encouragement to attend her church and home groups.

Easter 2025 was an emotional and spiritual time for me. I want to share my resurrection story with you, that sin is defeated and the darkness of guilt and shame can be exposed to His marvellous light! I am praying for all same-sex attracted parents to know God’s light and grace in their lives and to testify that God answers prayers in ways we can never imagine. 

I was about 15 years old when I realised I was gay. Though I grew up in the church – my dad was a vicar – it wasn’t a topic I ever remember being addressed. My only frame of reference for what Christians thought about homosexuality was a quick mention in a Religious Studies class, where it was stated that Catholics were against gay sex, but that Protestants thought it was probably OK! Goodness knows how that summary had been arrived at, but I took it as gospel. Fine, I thought. I’m not ready to come out yet. This was the early 2000s and I didn’t know any gay people in my rural community.

There’s a time and a place for almost everything, and that I believe includes identifying oneself by the terms ‘LGBTQ+’, ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ etc. Note that I said identifying oneself by these terms, not identifying with them. The distinction is essential, especially for a Christian who holds to biblical morality and a biblical worldview. The ways we identify ourselves are important. In the Bible, names are almost never just names, but rather have a prophetic value-proclaiming  (even just subtly) who a person is or who they are becoming.