Why one Bible School is expanding its teaching on biblical sexuality

This article explains why Capernwray Bible School is planning to extend and deepen its curriculum regarding what the Bible teaches about gender and sexuality for its students.

Capernwray Hall is a former stately home in North West England. Think scaled-down Downton. Since 1947, it’s been a Christian residential holiday centre and Bible School. It is evangelical and non-denominational. Each year we welcome around 2000 guests  At the time of writing, 130 students from 18 nationalities, predominantly young adults, are studying together in residential community. The emphasis is on discipleship, spiritual formation, outreach and a deepened understanding and experience of the indwelling life of Christ.

The teaching is delivered by a combination of Capernwray staff and visiting guest lecturers. For over two decades, True Freedom Trust speakers have been annual fixtures on the guest speaker roster. In recent years, they have delivered a three-hour seminar and offered follow-up consultations to individual students. Their presence and input is increasingly important to the college’s teaching programme.

In each intake, a handful of students may be non-Christians, or just unsure where they stand. The majority, however, come as established believers, often raised in strong Christian homes and vibrant churches. The questions below were submitted anonymously before a recent panel on sexuality, marriage and singleness. They reflect a common lack of conviction and clarity amongst many young believers on these issues:

• “Is it OK to experience same-sex attraction, but not act on it?”
• “I don’t understand why homosexuality is a sin. Every other sin I can think of has negative consequences for others or the individual, but same-sex attraction is about love. Is love a sin?”
• “How does it make sense that a God who is about love would consider it a sin for me (a woman) to love another woman? I have so much love to give and I am struggling with the fact that, if I experience same-sex attraction, I will never be able to give that love to someone in marriage, according to the Lord.”

For a lot of our students, the sessions with the TFT speakers are the first time they have heard clear, honest, biblical teaching on same-sex attraction. The majority won’t have encountered same-sex attracted believers before speaking openly about their experiences and convictions, whilst simultaneously upholding traditional biblical perspectives on sex and marriage.

They’ll know that their home churches disapprove of gay sex and same-sex marriage, but they may never before have had the chance to process clear teaching that explains why. Many will rarely have heard celibate singleness upheld and embodied as a viable and abundant lifestyle. The tone of previous discussions may have lacked warmth: as one student described it, “We were just shouting at a bunch of people we never actually met.”

Some will have been silently struggling, without much help, with the disconnect between the position of the church and the world they meet beyond it. Each year, we welcome students who themselves experience same-sex attraction, as the questions above reflect. It is releasing and refreshing for them to hear their questions answered by coherent, empathetic Christians with similar lived experiences.

In the 2025-26 academic year, we are expanding our teaching provision on gender and sexuality. What TFT and others offer is wonderful, but we need more time to help our students process and interrogate these and other issues more fully. Connected issues include marriage, singleness, identity, gender and pornography. We’re also increasingly aware that other teaching topics should be directly informing these questions:

• Our ecclesiology (our theology of church) needs to dethrone the nuclear family and foster genuine spiritual community.
• Our eschatology (our theology of how the present relates to the future) needs to contrast the eternal marriage of Christ and his church with the temporary institution of human marriage.
• Our cultural studies need to highlight how relatively young our current era of ‘authentic individualism’ is, as well as the journey that brought our culture to this point. And so on.

Our prayerful hope is that TFT and similar ministries will continue to know the Lord’s sustaining power, protection and provision. Their partnership in the education and training of emerging generations of God’s people is hugely strategic and deeply encouraging. We are grateful to God for their work.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2025 edition of the TFT magazine, Ascend. Click the button below to download your copy.