a change in orientation...

I saw an article this morning about the death and life of  Sy Rogers. He was an early leader of the Ex-Gay movement.  It’s a fine read about his life and ideals, but the overall topic of orientation change is what got me thinking.

Before you hit the back arrow to leave this page, can we think together for a moment? 

I will fairly routinely have people send me articles such as this with the story of a person who experienced same-sex attractions and was healed of those attractions through an encounter with God.

I want to say upfront that I believe God heals today. 

Not just figuratively. 

Not just spiritually.

He heals people from cancer, from alcoholism, from paralysis, and from anything we can think of. 

He is Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals (Ex. 15:26).

But in this season of history, healing seems to be more of the exception than the rule. Whether it’s emotional or physical, we can all probably think of many examples where God said “no” to healing, or at least “not yet” (my husband often reminds me of this one!).

But in evangelical Christianity, often our “go-to” with our gay friends is to encourage them to pray and ask the Lord to heal them of their unwanted same-sex attraction. Pray. Fast. Seek. Continue seeking.

Are these good things to do? Yes.

Is this a request we should bring to Jesus? I think so. In fact, I’ve never spoken to even one person who is following Jesus and experiencing same-sex attraction that hasn’t asked for this healing.

And yet, we as evangelical believers are often unaware of the statistics surrounding this issue. Mark Yarhouse and Stanton Jones in the book Ex-gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation, come to the conclusion that change from “solely attracted to the same sex” to “solely attracted to the opposite sex” is fairly rare. This is a book about a research study, so it’s not really an  easy read, at least it wasn’t for me. The authors go to great pains explaining how they set up their study, how they got their participants, what questions they used, and what metrics they used to evaluate the data. We owe them a great debt in their earnest and challenging research in the area of orientation change, which had not been done in a rigorous fashion prior to this.

One of the questions that they address in the book is the psychological assertion that orientation change was not possible and never truly occurred. They found that assertion to be false.

But it seems just as false to assert that orientation change is the norm, and I believe this happens in churches a lot. This assumption is prevalent and hurtful. 

I believe our false assumptions come from a hidden belief that the goal is to pursue heterosexuality, and we forget that the actual goal is holiness.

Let that sink in. If I believe that heterosexuality is what we are all shooting for, then by all means I should make every effort to pursue that and encourage everyone around me to do the same. On the other hand, if I see holiness as what I should be pursuing, I approach my areas of fallenness differently.

We all have areas of fallenness to reckon with, spaces where our desires are not what the Lord would have us desire if we all lived in Eden. Our desires are disordered in many areas. 

Sometimes God immediately transforms our desires to match His, but most often it seems like He has us persevere, pursue, and learn sanctification through daily obedience over the long haul of life.

Rightly ordered desires come from a pursuit of holiness.