Before you can speak well about faith and same-sex attraction with someone you disagree with, you have to do three things. Examine the posture you bring. State the other person’s view so accurately that they would sign their name to it. Listen long enough to learn which question the person is actually asking. This guide trains those three habits. It draws on Lisa Fields’s Jude 3 Project conversation with Sam Allberry, a minister at a church in the UK who has experienced same-sex attraction throughout his adult life.
You can work through it alone with a notebook or in a group over one or two sessions. It will not settle the debate about sexuality, and it will not pretend the debate is absent. It asks you to practice fairness while holding a conviction.
Before anyone speaks
Take two minutes and write two sentences. In the first, state what you currently believe about whether a Christian who experiences same-sex attraction can follow Jesus faithfully, and what that faithfulness requires. In the second, state the view you most disagree with, as its strongest defender would put it.
Most people find the second sentence much harder. Notice whether yours came out as a caricature: a view no thoughtful person holds, or a motive assigned in place of an argument. Keep both sentences. You will return to them at the end.
If you are leading a group, collect nothing and ask no one to read these aloud. Assume that for someone in the room this question is personal, whether or not they ever say so. That assumption should shape every instruction you give.
What Allberry claims, and what he does not
A fair conversation starts by stating a position precisely, without inflating or shrinking it. Allberry’s position has several parts, and they are easy to blur.
He holds the historic Christian teaching that sex belongs within marriage and that marriage is between a man and a woman. He became a Christian around the same time he began to recognize his attraction, and he says that teaching made sense to him from the start. So he describes his struggle in a particular way: “I’ve never struggled over whether it’s right or wrong, or whether it’s biblical or not.” The fight, for him, has been how to “say no to ungodly feelings and seek to honor Christ in this area of life.”
Look at what he does not claim. He does not say the attraction was chosen. He does not say it will go away. He describes feelings that have been with him for years. He also calls his own timing something he is thankful for, which implies that other people’s stories run differently.
One exchange shows a common assumption being corrected. Lisa Fields observed that when Christians meet someone with same-sex attraction, “the initial response is to think that that’s the biggest struggle in their life.” Allberry agreed and sharpened the point: “it’s the headline issue in the world today and in the church today, but it doesn’t mean it’s the headline issue in everybody’s lives.” On a given day, he said, other temptations may press on him harder, and there are seasons when this one is not at the front of his mind. Fairness means letting the person tell you how large the struggle is.
Two passages on hunger, one on hearing
Read each passage slowly. Pay attention first to what the text says in its setting, and only then to what it might mean for you.
John 6:35. “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.” Read John 6:26-35 for the setting. A crowd that Jesus has just fed comes looking for more bread. He tells them they are seeking the meal and missing the giver. The claim is about where a person’s deepest need finds its answer.
Allberry calls this the single verse that has helped him most. His feelings tell him he has a need that must be met in sexual intimacy, and he answers them with this claim about Christ. He calls that “answering a negative feeling with a positive truth,” and explains: “I’m not just saying no, I’m saying no, there’s something better.” He says the approach works against any sin. That widens the passage beyond the debate. Every reader has some desire that presents itself as a need they cannot live without.
Philippians 4:11. “Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” Paul is thanking the Philippians for a gift while making clear he does not depend on it. The word “learned” matters. Contentment here is acquired over time.
Allberry’s account of singleness fits that pattern. He is candid that contentment did not come at once: “I did go through a little season of being quite unhappy with God about that.” What changed was where he placed his hope: “The key is that I find my contentment in Jesus as a single person.” He treats marriage and singleness as gifts, as Paul does in 1 Corinthians 7:7, where every man hath his proper gift of God. He also says that “marriage is not the solution to the problems of life.”
Proverbs 18:13. “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.” This is wisdom literature, a principle about how speech works rather than a promise. Hold it beside the two passages above. Before you speak about anyone’s hunger or contentment, you have to hear what it actually is.
Where Christians actually divide
Christians who love Jesus and read Scripture seriously disagree about same-sex relationships. Most churches across history have held the view Allberry holds. Jude 3 Project affirms that historic ethic, that sexual intimacy is reserved for the marriage of one man and one woman, and holds it alongside honesty that the church has genuinely wounded LGBTQ people. That pairing is itself a lesson in fairness: conviction does not excuse skipping past the harm.
Other Christians have reached an affirming conclusion, and their argument deserves to be heard in its strongest form. Many affirming readers argue that the passages in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 address practices of the ancient world such as exploitation, excess, or sex bound up with idolatry and unequal status, and do not have faithful, lifelong partnerships in view. They hold that reading those texts in their historical context limits what they can be made to forbid. Many also ask whether the goods Scripture honors in marriage, such as fidelity, self-giving love and permanence, can be present in a committed same-sex covenant. Those who hold the historic view answer that the biblical vision of marriage rests on creation as male and female, not only on those goods. You do not have to accept the affirming case to restate it accurately.
Much of what Allberry describes does not depend on which side you take. Secrecy is heavy. For years, he says, the attraction was a temptation he wanted no one to know about, and “we’re not designed to cope with those kinds of things on our own.” Loneliness is real. A person is more than one struggle. Someone who discloses something personal deserves gratitude rather than a lecture. A Christian on either side can affirm all of that without giving up a conclusion.
Allberry names the deeper question as he sees it. He says the issue is not mainly particular verses in Romans and 1 Corinthians 6, relevant as they are: “the issue is always about do we trust Jesus? Is he enough and is he good?” Be careful with that reframing. It explains why he speaks as he does. It does not settle the argument about the texts, and a Christian who reads the passages differently would also say they trust Jesus. What would actually clarify the difference is close, honest reading of those passages in context.
Allberry raises an objection worth taking seriously. People who hold the historic view can be told it is easy for them, as someone straight and married. That is why he wanted to speak “from the inside of the issue,” to say that “God’s word on this issue is a good word to us.” His testimony does not prove his view correct. It does rule out dismissing the historic view as something held only by people it costs nothing. He also sets a standard for those who share his convictions: “we have to work a lot harder at explaining and commending our view and not just stating it.” You cannot commend a view to someone you have not understood.
Practice: restate before you respond
This exercise works in pairs. Alone, you can do it with a recorded conversation or a piece of writing by someone you disagree with.
- One person states, in a few sentences, a view they hold on this question and the main reason they hold it.
- The other restates it in their own words, with no evaluation: no “but,” no tone that signals disagreement, no recasting it into what the listener thinks the speaker really means.
- The first person answers only one thing: yes, that is what I mean, or not quite. If not quite, they say what was missed, and the listener tries again.
- Only after a yes may the listener respond, and the first response must be a question, not a rebuttal.
- Switch roles.
Afterward, compare notes. How many attempts did it take? What did the listener tend to drop or distort? Often it is the reason behind the view, or the cost of holding it.
Leaders: keep this to positions people actually hold, voiced by the people who hold them. Do not ask anyone to argue a view on behalf of a person in the room, and do not let anyone’s story become an exhibit. If pairs drift into talking about “those people,” bring the language back to “I.”
Listening to a person, not a position
The restating exercise trains fairness toward arguments. Allberry’s counsel about disclosure trains attention to a person. When someone shares that they experience same-sex attraction, he begins here: “I think we need to assume it probably wasn’t an easy thing for them to share.” Being trusted with something that personal is a privilege, he says, and it is right to thank them.
Then he warns against deciding too fast what will help. He says “the best thing to do actually is just to ask lots of questions and hear their story.” Some people “are very, very clear on what the Bible says” and need prayer and encouragement. “Other people are fuzzy on what the Bible says” and may want clarity from Scripture. For others, “the biggest struggle for them with same sex attraction, might not be dealing with sexual temptation, but dealing with loneliness.”
Those are three different conversations. Misread which one you are in, and even a true answer lands on the wrong wound. Allberry borrows a phrase from a man at his church: “give them a thorough, good listening to before kind of swooping in there with particular responses.”
For the week ahead, try one concrete form of this. Choose one person carrying something hard, on any subject. Ask one open question about how it is going, then at least two follow-up questions before offering any thought of your own. Afterward, write down which need you would have guessed at the start, and what the person actually needed.
If this subject is your own story and it feels heavy, notice Allberry’s turning point: it came when he stopped keeping it secret and told a few trusted Christian friends. A pastor you trust or a Christian counselor can also help carry it. Seeking that care is not a failure of faith.
Questions for discussion
- Allberry distinguishes struggling over whether something is right from struggling with a desire you believe is wrong. Why might people in a debate assume the first when the person is living the second? What changes when you ask which one it is?
- Read John 6:35 again in its setting. What does the crowd want, and what does Jesus offer instead? Where in your own life do you treat a desire as a need you cannot live without?
- Allberry says the issue is whether Jesus is enough and good. Is that where the disagreement lies, or elsewhere? What would you need to read or hear to answer well?
- In the restating exercise, what did you find hardest to say fairly about a view you reject? What does that reveal about how you have been hearing it?
- Allberry says his congregation supported him and then went “back to business as usual” without making this the lens through which they saw him. What would that look like in your church or friendships, and what would it ask of you?
- How does your church speak about singleness, and what does that teach people?
Back to your two sentences
Return to what you wrote at the start. Rewrite the second sentence, the one stating the view you disagree with, and ask whether someone who holds it would now recognize it as theirs.
Then look at the first sentence. You may hold it exactly as before. Fairness does not require you to give up a conviction. It does require you to know what you are disagreeing with, and to be ready for someone who brings you not a position but their own life.