A group can talk honestly about whether LGBTQIA people can trust the Bible if it practices three skills before it argues: hearing a person’s story without rushing to a verdict, reading the hard passages as whole arguments, and restating a view it disagrees with until the other side recognizes it. This guide builds those skills around one testimony, the story David Bennett told Lisa Fields on the Jude 3 Project podcast. Bennett is a celibate gay Christian, an evangelist and a preacher and an academic, who was finishing a doctorate in theology at Oxford when they spoke.
You can work through this alone in one or two sittings, or with a group over a single long session or two shorter ones. Each section begins with something to notice, then a short reading, then an activity. The aim is not to have everyone leave agreeing. The aim is that everyone leaves able to read these texts more carefully and speak about them without doing damage.
A word for whoever is leading. Some people in the room may be LGBTQIA. Some may love someone who is. Some may have been hurt by how churches have handled this, and some may feel nervous that the conversation is happening at all. Say plainly at the start that no one will be asked about their own sexuality or story, that everything personal stays in the room, and that anyone can pass on any question without explaining why.
Write your answer down before you begin
Before anyone opens a Bible, have each person write one sentence answering the title question: Can LGBTQIA people trust the Bible? Write it privately and fold the paper. No one will read it aloud. You will come back to it at the end.
Then spend two minutes on a second private note. Where did your answer come from? A sermon, a parent, a friend’s experience, a social media argument, your own reading of the passages? If you have never read Romans 1 through 3 in one sitting, say so to yourself. That is useful information, not a confession.
This step matters because most people walk into this conversation already holding a verdict they absorbed rather than studied. Bennett did too. He describes how the Bible looks when someone reads quickly, when “we treat it as a proof text or a manual for our lives, rather than the very human, but very divinely inspired word of God.” On that reading, he says, there is no way into relationship with God, no romantic love and no flourishing for LGBTQIA people. His phrase for the result is “door shut in your face.”
Notice what he is diagnosing. He is not saying the people who hear that verdict are oversensitive. He is saying a certain way of reading produces it. He also names the church’s history of oppressing LGBTQIA people and calls it “a high bar to get over.” A group that skips past that history will not be trusted by anyone who has lived it.
Listen to a testimony as a testimony
Scripture puts listening before answering. James 1:19 says, “let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” Proverbs 18:13 is sharper: “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.”
Here is the outline of Bennett’s story as he told it. He grew up in Sydney, Australia, and was an anti-Christian gay activist. He had what he calls a radical encounter with Jesus in a pub in the gay quarter of Sydney. Before that, his first encounter with his own orientation and the Bible pushed him toward atheism. He recalls the question that made faith seem impossible: “how could God allow me to have these desires do nothing to change them and condemn me for them?”
Then he describes an order of events that surprises many readers. He says he had to discover the love of God first, and only then could he read Scripture well. In his words, it was necessary “to discover the love of God before I could really read the Bible properly.” After he became a Christian, he spent years studying Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6 and Leviticus. And he adds this: “I still believe the same things now, but the process to get there is very different.”
Listening exercise. In pairs, one person retells Bennett’s story in their own words in about a minute. The other listens only for accuracy. Did the retelling add anything he did not say? Leave anything out that he treated as important? Slip in a judgment, approving or disapproving? Then switch roles and retell the same story again, fixing what the first version missed.
This feels slow, and that is the point. Many conversations about sexuality go wrong in the first sentence, because people respond to the story they expected rather than the one they heard. Bennett’s account fits neither of the two scripts people usually bring. He holds the historic Christian teaching that sex belongs in the marriage of a man and a woman, and he says the Bible is good news for gay people. If your group found itself wanting to file him under one side, talk about that impulse.
Read the passages the way they were written
Bennett’s central reading claim is simple: “So we can’t just read Romans one. We have to read Romans one, right to Romans three.” This section tests that claim with the text itself. Use a KJV or another translation alongside it if that helps people follow the older wording.
Romans 1-3 in one sitting
Assign the reading aloud in turns: Romans 1:18-32, then 2:1-16, then 3:9-26. While it is read, everyone marks two things: every time the text talks about them, and every time it turns to you.
Most groups find the turn at Romans 2:1: “Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things.” The argument then arrives at Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”
Bennett reads this against a historical setting he describes: a Roman church divided between Jewish and Gentile believers after the emperor Claudius expelled Jews from Rome, with some insisting Gentiles come under the law. On his reading, Paul uses the law’s verdict to confront those who condemn through the law, and to point everyone to the righteousness that comes through Jesus. Lisa Fields drew the plain consequence from Romans 2: “we are equal at the cross and we have no right to condemn another.”
Bennett does not claim Romans 1 is silent on same-sex sex. He still reads Paul as teaching the historic sexual ethic. What he disputes is using the chapter as a charge sheet against one group, when Paul is building toward everyone needing the same grace. Ask your group: Does reading the three chapters together change what Romans 1 is doing? Does it change what it says? Those are different questions, and it helps to keep them apart.
Isaiah 56 and 1 Corinthians 6
Read Isaiah 56:1-8. Eunuchs in Israel had no children to carry their name, and the law in Deuteronomy 23:1 kept some from the assembly. Isaiah 56:3 voices their fear: “neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree.” Isaiah 56:5 answers: “Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off.”
Bennett treats eunuchs as a sexual minority of that world and links this promise to Jesus, who never married. Treat that link as his interpretation, a reasonable theological reading the prophet does not spell out. The promise itself is plain: people who lacked marriage and children receive a place in God’s house.
Then read 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and stop at verse 11: “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” Bennett takes this as evidence that the early church included people who once defined their lives around same-sex sex and no longer did. He is careful to say this does not mean their orientation disappeared. It means they belonged in the covenant as children of God.
Find exactly where the disagreement sits
Charitable disagreement starts with locating the real point of difference. Bennett names the strongest objection to his own view. Many Christians who affirm same-sex marriage argue that Paul had exploitative Greco-Roman practices in mind, not faithful partnerships. Bennett takes it personally and seriously. He says, “I would love to be convinced,” and he names what he would want: a partner, an adopted child, a home. His answer goes back to Romans 2:1. If Paul tells the judging Jewish reader that he does the same things, Bennett argues, Paul is speaking about more than pagan abuse. His conclusion: “I cannot see that in the text,” when he reads it deeply.
Lisa Fields described Bennett as someone who has lived this question and also studied it, adding that “you do know the counterarguments.” That is the posture this exercise is trying to build.
Restatement exercise. Split the group in two. One half states the affirming reading of Romans 1 in its strongest form. The other half states Bennett’s response. Then each side restates the other’s position aloud, and the original side says whether it was fair. Keep going until each side says, Yes, that is what we mean. Only then is anyone allowed to say why they find one reading more convincing.
Pay attention to what the exercise reveals. The disagreement is not over whether the Bible matters, or whether gay people should be loved. It is over how to read particular verses in their historical setting, and what Paul’s argument requires. Jude 3 Project holds the historic Christian sexual ethic, that sexual intimacy is reserved for the marriage of one man and one woman, and holds it together with genuine welcome and honesty about where the church has wounded people. Your group may include people who land elsewhere. A fair restatement does not ask anyone to abandon conviction. It asks everyone to be accurate.
There is one more distinction worth catching. Lisa Fields put it this way: “we may land in the same place as somebody that proof texts, but you could proof text and actually do damage.” She added that a faithful reading can reach the same conclusion yet look “vastly different in how it’s communicated.” Bennett makes a related point by drawing on Paul’s words about the letter and the spirit. When Scripture is used as a bare rulebook, he says, “it actually brings death to people’s lives,” while read in the full story of the gospel, “It brings resurrection life.”
Questions for discussion
- Bennett says he had to meet the love of God before he could read the Bible properly. What do you think he means by that, and is there any risk in it? Could the same idea be used to excuse reading whatever we want into the text?
- When your group marked them and you in Romans 1-3, where did the text turn? What would change in a church if people regularly read Romans 1 only alongside Romans 2?
- Lisa Fields says two people can reach the same conclusion by very different roads, with very different effects. Describe, without naming anyone, what each road might sound like in a real conversation.
- In the restatement exercise, which position was harder for you to state fairly? What made it hard?
- Bennett says “everyone needs to come and wrestle with Jesus” about how to live faithfully, and resists making his own path a rule for every gay Christian. How does that change the way a church should speak to LGBTQIA people in its pews?
- Isaiah 56 promises a place and a name to people who lacked what others assumed was necessary for a full life. Who in your community might hear that promise as addressed to them?
A practice for the coming week
Choose one of the three passages from this guide. Write down, in two or three sentences, how you have heard it used in a short clip, a sermon or an argument. Then read the full chapter around it, and the chapter before and after. Write a second version: what the passage is doing within the author’s argument, who it addresses, and what it promises.
Put the two versions side by side. Where are they the same? Where does the fuller reading say something the short version left out? If you have a friend who reads the passage differently from you, ask whether you may hear their reading. Before responding at all, restate it back to them until they agree you have it right.
If this conversation stirs up past hurt from church, you do not have to carry it alone. A trusted pastor, a mature friend, or a counselor can help, and seeking that help is not a failure of faith.
Open the folded paper
Unfold the sentence you wrote at the start and read it to yourself. Do not grade it. Ask a narrower question: if you rewrote it now, which words would change, and which would stay? Bennett’s own account is of someone whose conclusions held while the road to them changed completely. Yours may have moved in one direction or not at all. The test is whether you can now give your answer to an LGBTQIA friend in a way that shows you heard them, read the whole passage, and could state their view fairly.