If you’re like me, when "Is God Anti-Gay?" by Sam Allberry was first published in 2013, you found it a helpful and informative read. I was surprised when an updated version was recently released. But what are the differences in the two editions?    

I grew up in a non-Christian family. No one, even in my extended family, went to church except for the standard weddings, christenings and funerals. I attended a boarding school which was nominally Christian. We had Chapel 5 times a week and I sang in the choir at churches and cathedrals around the country. I went to church a lot, so I knew about God, but I didn’t know Him. My school ran an evening club, where we could hang out after curfew.

When I originally planned an edition of Ascend on the theme of outreach, I sounded out a few TFT members who live around Brighton based on the thought, “I’m sure Christians living in Brighton have got some good tips on how to reach out to LGBT people”. What I discovered was how disheartened they were about the prospect of outreach in an area that has an established history of hostility to Bible-believing Christianity. 

In my late teens, I adopted a stray budgie that had flown in through my next door neighbour’s window and landed on his head whilst he was asleep. After trying unsuccessfully to locate the owner of the bird, I kept the budgie, naming it Wally (after the neighbour), not knowing that it was actually a female! Uneasy with keeping birds in cages, I left Wally’s cage door open for her to come and go as she pleased. She loved to have a fly around the room, but always returned to her cage after her excursions.

When looking at this question, “is the Bible positive about singleness?”, it’s easy for us to jump straight to the Apostle Paul’s verdict, “I wish that all men were [unmarried] as I am”– 1 Cor 7:7. But how do we reconcile this with the consistent emphasis on marriage and filling the land throughout the Old Testament? This seems to be one of God’s priorities from the start, beginning with God’s command to Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply” – Gen 1:28.

The boy was looking at me like I was crazy. I can still see his face, bemused and laced with disdain.
“Why are you answering? You’re a girl!” It was a primary school assembly and the teacher had just asked a question, specifically directed at the boys, to which I had responded effusively. The boy’s words doused me like a bucket of icy water.
“Oh yes,” I remembered with a start, “I’m a girl.”
That was the first time I realised that despite being female, I’d assumed I was male. And it was not to be the last.

“I want to talk about sex and relationships” said Dr Helen Roseveare as we interviewed her at the Keswick Convention as part of the 19-24s stream back in 2011. She continued. “Being single is a gift from God and we can use it to serve Him. We don’t need to go chasing a life of romance and sex”. I found that deeply challenging in a world that was telling me otherwise. I’ll come back to Dr Roseveare. 

On the back cover of “Leading a Church in a Time of Sexual Questioning”, the claim is that this book offers “…biblical guidance for ministering God’s love in a sexually diverse culture.” The words “God’s love” are circled in red, emphasising that central theme.Compassion drives this book. Miller shows great care and concern, and urges his readers to exhibit those same qualities, for the queer teenagers who are being raised in a Christian home, the gay man who has walked away from his Christian faith and the lesbian couple who have never even been in a church.

Independent evangelical churches very rarely appoint single men as elders. Personally, I don’t know any other single elders. The reasons for this are cultural, historical and a mis-reading of Bible teaching. The key texts used in the argument against single elders are 1 Timothy 3:2 where the elder is to be the husband of ‘but one wife’ and Titus 1:6 which again talks about the elder being a husband of ‘but one wife’ and ‘whose children believe’.