Service empowers the gay faithful

Young people from the gay and lesbian community are keen to hear and learn from their elders -”this was the message to come out of last weekend’s Gay Christian Network meeting at the Pitt St Uniting Church.
The interfaith event, held as a GLBT alternative to World Youth Day, was judged a success with 200 people coming to see gay representatives from the Catholic, Anglican, Uniting and Pentecostal churches speak about reconciling faith with sexuality.
Event organiser and Catholic author Michael Kelly said the group was pleased to see such enthusiasm for the event from younger audience members.
It went well. It was a very empowering afternoon. What really impressed me was the resilience, the witness to faith and courage and the grace that the four mature speakers showed, he said.

I was also really struck by the young people and something that the young pastor from the Metropolitan Community Church said, that it was very important for him as a young person to hear us speak as more experienced gay and lesbian Christians and talk about what we’d learned and what we knew about faith.

It was a great compliment to hear him say that young people needed us to do this as more mature people, that they wanted to hear more about the experience and learnings of older people in the GLBT community.