We told the story wrong for decades.
The version we preferred went like this: the world is seductive, the flesh is weak, and our children—raised on memory verses, Revelation seminars, and Vacation Bible School—eventually succumbed to secular culture. They left because out there was louder than in here.
It was a comforting lie.
The data doesn’t support it. Study after study shows LGBTQ young people didn’t drift away from Adventism. They were pushed. Not always with cruelty—sometimes with carefully worded love, with “we accept you but not your lifestyle,” with silence from the pulpit that said more than the sermons did. They sat in Sabbath School and learned that God made them wrong. They watched their questions get deflected, their existence treated as a theological problem to be managed rather than a person to be known.
And they left. Quietly, mostly. Some loudly.
Here’s the thing we keep missing: they didn’t stop believing in Jesus. Many of them still do. They stopped believing the church was a safe place to do it.
That’s not a worldliness problem. That’s an us problem.
The hope—and there is hope—is that the cause of the wound is also the clue to the cure. We didn’t lose them to the world. Which means the world isn’t who has to change.
We are.
And we still can.
❤️❤️❤️
If this kind of clarity feels uncomfortable, that’s the point—and it’s also why it matters. Help us keep telling the truth, even when it costs something. Become a patron and make sure voices willing to say what others won’t don’t disappear just when they’re needed most.
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