Evangelicals Concerned Western Region (ECWR) is bringing all gay affirming churches in the San Diego area together at “Restoration: Coming Home to God,” the feature event of their annual conference, to be held July 29-Aug. 2.

Ladonna Everett and her partner Pat started the San Diego chapter of Evangelicals Concerned in 1996.

“I just felt strongly motivated to bring the Christian GLBT open and affirming churches together,” Everett told the Gay and Lesbian Times. “I recently went through the Billy Graham training and actually got out on the field as a counselor at the Billy Graham Mission as an open and affirming counselor.… I learned about how powerful a community is when they come together, united.”

Everett’s goal is to unite the open and affirming churches within San Diego County in the same way. “We’re all working for the same idea anyway in our local churches and organizations,” she said. “Why not come together? By doing that we make a statement to the greater Christian community.… No GLBT person should have to disown their faith because of who they are. So we work to that end, to reconcile the person back to their God through the commitments that they made earlier in life. We’re calling and inviting folks who have been wounded and bruised by the church to come to this major event in August to see about reconciling with God again….”

One of the keynote speakers at the event will be Jeremy Marks, who founded the Courage ministry near London, England in 1988 to “offer support to those who wish to follow Christ, yet need encouragement and understanding because of the inner conflict between their homosexual orientation and Christian faith.”

Initially affiliated with Exodus International, well known as an ex-gay ministry group attempting to “heal” gays and lesbians of their sexual orientation, over the last several years Jeremy Marks has led Courage in a 180-degree turnaround. The Courage website now states that, “The result of seeking the mind of Christ for this area of ministry in the light of many years experience, together with further bible study, has been to see that God recognizes and supports sincere committed relationship between gay people where there is no likelihood of the possibility of marriage.”

“Basically, I’d been running as an ex-gay ministry for years, although our emphasis on trying to change people was nothing like as strong as the Exodus ministers here,” Marks told the Times. “We tried to be a ministry that was a safe place for people who are Christian and gay, but our assumptions were that if people were sincere in following Christ then they would leave behind their homosexual identity. We were not aiming to make that happen so much as believing it would be the fruit of a godly life.

“Over the years it became very obvious that, although people were very devoted to their Christian faith and very sincere in doing everything they could to live a godly life, they never experienced any change in their homosexual feelings or orientation at all. Usually when they left us after being with us for a couple of years … they would find their gay identity reasserting itself very strongly. So they had big questions … and became very disillusioned.… I realized that a major crisis developed in one after another as to what those two years spent with us were all about and why their feelings hadn’t changed and where was God in all of this. And of course I had to ask the same questions, because I expected fully that people would feel a real release from those feelings, which had oppressed them in the past. I had a real concern as to why they hadn’t.”

“Gradually, over a period of years, I just came to realize that that’s just not what God was doing, and that actually people were much happier with themselves if they just accepted that they were gay and sought same-sex partnerships,” Marks explained. “I could see that those who did so were much better for doing it. So I just had to really realize that the assumptions we founded our ministry on were wrong. Also, it raised a huge number of questions as to how Christians think about sexual matters across the board – not only gay issues.… I realized, in going back to serious Bible study, that many of the things Christians proclaim are biblical in terms of standards or outlook actually don’t have their roots in the Bible at all, they really have their foundations in a kind of Victorian Puritanism that is oppressive, and that if we seriously read the Bible again and consider the implications of what we read there, the Bible isn’t oppressive in terms of people’s sexuality in the way we’ve interpreted it.

“I’ve always held the Bible in very high regard, and when I really look at it myself I just don’t see the Bible supporting these oppressive views,” Marks continued. “The whole of the church needs to be released from this, not just gay people. Everybody needs to be able to have a more healthy view of their sexuality. In those circumstances both gay and straight people will fare much better and relationships will be honored much better when we are able to relate to one another for who we are, rather than someone’s viewpoint of who we should be. [We need to] realize that our sexuality is so fundamental to who we’ve been created to be that we need to take a more welcoming and healthy view of it – embracing our sexuality in a more celebratory way, instead of regarding it as something to be kept under wraps and not talked about.”

All but one member of the Courage board of trustees was straight, but Marks said they listened carefully to his concerns. It took time, but in the end they all supported him. By about 1999, Marks began publishing articles moving toward a more gay-affirming stance. Exodus severed their affiliation and churches started withdrawing speaking invitations and financial support, but other avenues began to open.

Some of the members of Marks’s ministry were angry at the changes and left, but Marks said that bit-by-bit most of those who left have been returning because they realize their own approach doesn’t work.

“One of the messages I want to get across in everything that we’re doing with Evangelicals Concerned is for gay people to realize that God is absolutely for all of us,” Marks concluded, “and that the church’s hostile attitude is to do with human beings who’ve got control issues and are more concerned with building churches that seem to conform to a norm than really bringing the Christian gospel to people in a genuine way.”

For more information on ECWR or “Restoration: Coming Home to God,” contact Ladonna Everett at (619) 281-6256 or visit www.ecwr.org/cominghome. For more information on Jeremy Marks or his Courage ministry, visit www.courage.org.uk.