Our Bible App Seeks to Promote Inclusiveness Among LGBT Christians
A person can never be gay and a Christian at the same time. This was what many believers who have come out of the closet in the past few years have been told as they found themselves shunned by the church and community they have grown to love.
Crystal Cheatham, an activist and writer, was one of these people. She was 23 years old when she came out as a lesbian, according to PBS. Instead of being guided through this difficult time, Cheatham said she was ostracized by the Seventh-day Adventist church she was attending.
"When I came out, I was told by ministers so far above me that I couldn't be an out lesbian and also be on the stage as a leader, and it crushed me. It crushed me so hard," she said. "I felt like I was at an impasse at the road in my life and I had to decide between this love for my God and my personal identity."
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Cheatham is certain she is not the only person who experienced this, so she set out to create the Our Bible app to provide LGBT Christian a spiritual haven. She plans to release it this fall, and it will provide at least 20 Bibles and more than 300 devotional readings, meditation exercises, articles and podcasts for LGBT Christians and others who feel they do not really belong to mainstream Christianity.
Cheatham found several individuals who went through the same ordeal as her to help with the app. One of them is Rodney McKenzie, a minister who is selecting the reading materials for the app.
He grew up in a Holiness church that encouraged testimony services every day. Through it, churchgoers are encouraged to speak up about the role of God in their lives. One day, McKenzie decided to talk about his gay preferences.
"When I stood up at church and came out as gay, I expected people to clap and celebrate, and people did not clap. People did not celebrate. People were horrified," he said. "This is why this means so much to me. Every Sunday, young LGBTQ people are going to services and they're hearing messages not of their perfection, not of how good they are, but that there's something wrong with them. Those messages are antithetical to the Biblical text."
The 2014 Religious Landscape Study by the Pew Research Center earlier revealed that majority of the 35,000 people they polled who identify themselves as LGBT are Christians (48 percent), followed by 29 percent who are Protestants and 17 percent Catholics.
An earlier Pew Research Center survey conducted on 1,200 LGBT adults in 2013 revealed that 79 percent of respondents feel that the Catholic Church was unfriendly towards their LGBT lifestyle, while 73 percent of evangelical churches are the same.
