I’m sympathetic to what roderickm writes, especially:

Unless we can earnestly answer, “YES!” without hesitation or veiled motive, we will not reach anyone that is suspicious of church. Even with a church in a brewery.

Amen! And i do believe that our love for gays is to be without hesitation or veiled motive.

But…. there’s always a but. I don’t want to think of it as a but, because answering “Yes, but….” implies that our love is somehow compromised or conditional. That’s emphatically not the point.

Yes…. and. We love you. And because we love you, we’re not going to give you easy answers that are what you want to hear. We’re willing to do the dirty work of digging deep into questions of identity, to ask if your sexuality is really what defines you or if there’s an identity, a longing, that transcends that sexuality.

I know it’s not likely to “sell well.” The gay community is so predisposed to seeing the church as a den of hatred, with good reason, that many people make “What do you think about homosexuality?” the all-encompassing touchstone of judging us. If you’re on the “right” side of the issue, then maybe there’s hope for you. If not, then you’re just a closed-minded bigot. Our challenge to manage to not be closed-minded bigots, but not tell people what they want to hear when it diverges from our Biblically-based conviction.

We want to love people so thoroughly that the answer is, “Yes, and I care about you too much to give you easy answers.” Many people will reject that. Some won’t.