I just finished reading Love Is an Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community by Andrew Marin. It was an eye opener for me. Marin tackles tough questions that arise when Christians engage the subject of homosexuality. Some will be put off by this book. If they can get past the foreword by Brian McLaren they will need to exercise a significant amount of patience and openness to glean the harvest this book offers. I deeply appreciate the life of Andrew Marin. To me, his life represents a model for kingdom living.
His principles and methods for engaging the gay community are an antidote to the shrill voices of fundamentalism and judgmentalism that seem to dominate most conversations on the subject. For me, the book provides not only answers to how to engage the gay community, it also opened my eyes to, (as McLaren describes) “the judgmental lifestyle”, the “take-take-the-splinter-out if your-brother’s-eye” religiosity that Jesus talked about in the Sermon on the mount that I continually struggle with.
His call is to seek the voice of God in our lives. To that end he suggests: “The way forward with the (gay) community is not a debate on the Bible’s statements about same-sex sexual behavior but a discussion of how to have an intimate, real, conversational relationship with the Father and Judge.”
What he posits for relating to the gay community is in reality what we should be employing as we encounter all the world which stands against God’s reign in our lives.
