Right from the off I want to be clear that I am not the finished article – and thank God for that! However, over the years God has shown His grace in the most wonderful and powerful ways in my life. I am now in my sixties and have had a lifetime of being same-sex attracted. For over 40 of those years, I have been a follower of Jesus. Inevitably this has led to challenges and battles with temptation. The devil doesn’t give up trying to trip me up, but most importantly neither does God give up on me. 

The pandemic hit people living on their own particularly hard. But gathering on Zoom provided a sense of community and continues to do so today. Recognising that at times I struggled to end the day well, I started to wonder if others had the same struggles - perhaps gathering via Zoom could be a positive way to draw our days to a close? And, so, Night Prayers was born just after the National Conference in 2021. 

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.

For a number of years, I attended an accountability group for Christian men with sexual addictions, and found it very helpful. It was a mixed group - old and young, black and white, manual labourers and city professionals, businessmen and civil servants. The men came with a broad range of issues, whether battling lustful thoughts or porn addiction, compulsively masturbating, using female sex workers or being promiscuous with other men. They were all with a very obvious broken sexuality and all trusting Jesus for their salvation.

True Freedom Trust is right to prioritise fellowship and community as ways for members to ensure that their faith walk keeps to the straight and narrow. There is no surprise here, since finding and keeping community are fundamentally scriptural (1 Cor. 1: 10; Heb. 10: 25; 1 John 1: 7, and many others). As we have seen in some of the other articles in this edition of Ascend, a key function of fellowship and community is accountability. As Christians, we need each other’s help identifying the course corrections urged by the Holy Spirit.

In this article, I explore what I see as four common pitfalls when it comes to teaching on biblical sexuality. It’s not easy to get everything right when explaining this sensitive topic. But, if you can avoid these blunders, that’s a good start!