Messy Grace: How a Pastor with Gay Parents Learned to Love Others Without Sacrificing Conviction

by Caleb Kaltenbach

The idea was to communicate to the congregation that our church should be known for what we are for, not what we’re against.

In this book I’m going to tell you my story of having a mom who was a lesbian and a dad who was gay, of growing up in the LGBT community with my mom and her partner, and of finding Christ and eventually becoming a pastor.1

being unloving to gay people in your life is a sin. Also, it’s a crying shame because it puts a barrier between people and the gospel. It’s the opposite of being Christlike. I don’t see Jesus acting like that anywhere in the Gospels.

Messiness is what happens when you try to live out God’s perfect grace as a flawed person in a flawed world. Yet God has a way of working through us when we keep on trying to share his grace, regardless of how messy our situations get.

Because of this lack of biblical understanding, Christians sense that they are not well prepared to have conversations about homosexuality and related issues. They’re afraid they won’t have the answers to hard questions that might be put to them. Or they’re afraid they won’t be able to back up their positions biblically, even if they’re pretty sure they’re right. They might get backed into a corner, make a mistake, or be made to look foolish.

Some Christians need to understand that we can be right in our beliefs but wrong in how we communicate them.

They believe that you’re in the LGBT community because you want to have sex with people of the same gender. This isn’t totally true. Sex is only a part of the equation (and probably a small part for some).

There are times when these Christians can be so concerned about holiness that they end up keeping away those who are less than perfect. They create a church culture that allows only a narrow few to participate in the community.

I want to invite you to live in the tension of grace and truth. I’m not asking you to do something that you’re not already doing. Christianity is filled with tension.

we don’t have to walk through such tension alone, and it is possible to come through it with good results for everyone involved.

The bottom line is this: when you deal with people, you’ll always get messy. When you choose to love people who think and act differently than you, the situation could get extremely messy.

My relationship with Vera was not easy. She was the opposite of my mom in many ways. She was taller and thinner than Mom. She also had fewer emotional highs or lows. Most of the time, even at a young age, I felt that I was competing with her for my mom’s affection.

The first thing we might notice about this situation is that somebody is missing. I mean, where’s the dude? Did this woman’s lover—the guy whose bed she just got dragged out of—get handed a Get Out of Jail Free card or something? Only the female partner in sin was being forced to face the music. In that time and place, while promiscuous men often got a pass, women of loose morals were looked down on severely. Or to put it another way, this woman hauled before Jesus was considered to be messy.

He alone, being the true God, had every right to condemn this woman if he wanted to, but instead he chose the path of mercy and forgiveness. Yet he also had truth. He did not condone her activity. As a matter of fact, he used strong language for it: sin.

Jesus loved her enough to tell her the truth and show her grace.

What does it say about our opinion of the blood of Christ if we are willing to let it go to waste by not bragging on what God has done to save those who are lost?

You know where I’m going with this: if Jesus calls us to be fishers of people and to get involved in the lives of others, we’re going to get messy.

Along the route, someone (I’m not sure who) placed a sign in my hands that compared angry preachers to the Nazis. The sign I carried was hugely popular.

She replied sharply, “Well, Caleb, they’re Christians, and Christians hate gay people. Christians don’t like anyone who’s not like them.”

Those in attendance at the party also learned a lesson. They were the outcast and the downcast—the fringe of society. They were used to being passed by in the streets and not being invited anywhere nice. Yet now they learned that God was chasing after them. God was aware of them. God loved them.

Now, there may be times, seasons, and places where street evangelism is the best way to go. John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, Peter, and many others were street preachers, in a sense. God blessed their words, and I believe that God blesses the words of street preachers today, even if they are words that are hard to accept. But their message should have a completely different tone from the one used by the parade hecklers.

Usually it’s better to share hard truths with people in the context of a relationship you have already formed.

Ever since I held my kids for the first time, I’ve been pursuing my kids, in order to stay connected to them.

Invite people from different religious backgrounds to your house for dinner.

Looking back now, though, I realize this girl was the first Christian I knew who didn’t look at me or my family as if we were the enemy. I had told her about my parents, and she didn’t care. She didn’t think people in my parents’ community were out to get her. She simply knew she had to let me know how Jesus really felt about me. She was willing to engage those who were far away from God, and she saw them as important.

Now, some Christians are completely against mingling faith and politics. I’m not necessarily opposed to it. After all, the Bible says God sent many of his messengers to kings and governmental authorities. God also put his people in positions of power—people such as Joseph, Esther, Daniel, and others.

Paul went out of his way to use something from Greek culture to explain the gospel to those Athenians. He could have stuck to his own Jewish understanding and never met them on their own turf, but he cared enough about them to study their culture and draw from it to show Jesus to them.

But Paul went out of his way to be careful and thoughtful so he could share the gospel. He opened up about this style of evangelism in 1 Corinthians 9:19–23:

Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

I’ve wrestled with this issue much more over the years, and I’ve decided there’s one option that people with same-sex attraction can always choose: celibacy.

My point is, celibacy may actually prove to be a great thing for some people. It may be a gift from God.

While this may be true, I feel like this would be a common question for individuals that are initially discussing this. I would expect a question like "So what do you believe I should do". This is hard. I'm not sure if I quite agree with this...

From a practical standpoint, people who have chosen celibacy don’t have to live alone if they don’t want to. I know many LGBT people who are celibate and who have richer lives because they have roommates, live with families, or even find comfort in living on their own. I know that a friend will never be a replacement for a spouse, but sharing living space with others can be an alternative to living alone. In fact, it can provide some deep and lasting relationships.

The lesson was clear: don’t air your dirty laundry to others in church. Hear me on this. The church should be the first place someone would go for conversations like these. Yet for many it’s the last place.

Why is this the case? How can we help to keep this idea away from our current churches?

We need to hold on to the traits of the tax collector. We also need to resist some of the traits of the Pharisee I didn’t mention—traits like thinking we’re more spiritually advanced than we really are, forgetting what sins we’re responsible for and how desperately we need forgiveness, focusing on secondary issues, trying to force other people to have the same priorities we do, and refusing to have anything to do with messy people.

In our culture, churches need to know where they stand and the leadership needs to be unified.