I wish I’d allowed myself to socialize with students from other colleges in the city who could have told me about LGBTQ+ rights and introduced me to a more diverse social circle. University could have been an enlightening opportunity for me—a place of healing and self-acceptance, where both my faith and my gay orientation could have been affirmed. Instead, I just ignored my feelings, buckled down, and focused on my academic work. The pace was intense, and before I knew it, my first year at university was over.
8
One afternoon during my second year at university, the phone rang abruptly, interrupting the writing of my latest essay. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of my student room, surrounded by a huge pile of books. Knocking papers everywhere as I rushed to grab the receiver, I was surprised to find the voice on the other end was American.
It was Vineyard Records, an international record label founded by the church denomination I attended. They were well known for producing worship CDs that flew off the shelves in the States.
The man on the phone said I was invited to a training retreat for Christian songwriters who showed great potential. Thirty of us from around the world would be given a week of input and teaching to take our songwriting skills to the next level—we’d also get the chance to pitch our newest compositions to Vineyard Records representatives.
The entire trip would be fully paid for by the label in the hopes of discovering fresh talent. It was a lot to take in; I couldn’t stop smiling as he talked. The best news of all was finding out where this training would take place: Los Angeles, California. I’d always wanted to visit the US, and now I finally would.
Hanging up the phone, I was delighted and stunned. I’d been singing a lot in my Oxford church and at national Christian conferences, and now this trip to the States felt like a sign that exciting opportunities were ahead. My goal for getting a theology degree wasn’t a career in academia—I still wanted to be a professional musician, singing and playing in churches—so I was encouraged to see doors opening nationally, and now also internationally.
The dates of the trip fell during a university vacation, so my parents and tutors wouldn’t mind. It would be a much-needed break from my studies, and it would introduce me to a country that, in the coming years, would become a huge part of my life.
As the plane descended toward LAX airport I watched the grid-shaped streetlights of Los Angeles coming into view. When I stepped out of the airport into the Californian evening, the hot, dry air hit me like a wall. The sky was a smudged, pastel mess of pinks and blues, with rows of tall palm trees rustling overhead. A black SUV collected the other songwriters and me, and as we drove along the coastal road, the turquoise ocean filled our view, with the sun lazily melting into the horizon.
I didn’t know the other songwriters on the trip, and they were older than I was, but they took me under their wing. Our days consisted of sharing our newest compositions, chatting with record label executives, and then sitting around fire pits at night, playing guitar and toasting marshmallows. I adored it.
I got to put my toes in the Pacific Ocean for the first time. I tried fish tacos and root beer soda, neither of which we had in the UK. Most of all, I loved experiencing the warmth of American culture; people were so friendly. After that week, part of my heart belonged to the US and always would.
The Vineyard, the church denomination I attended in Oxford, had begun in Anaheim, about twenty-five miles south of Los Angeles. Since then, it had established fifteen hundred separate churches around the globe. During my LA trip I was taken to visit the flagship church, where it had all started. It was my first experience of a megachurch—a fascinating phenomenon, with very few parallels in the UK.
Anaheim Vineyard’s six thousand members met in a huge purpose-built auditorium. It was a facility to rival any high-end theater in London, nothing like the traditional churches in England with ancient stone walls, pews, and steeples. This had cinema-style seats, a huge stage, and state-of-the-art sound and lighting systems. A giant screen filled the front wall, and high-spec projectors beamed song lyrics and videos onto it.
I walked around the massive venue, struck by its size. It had its own coffee shop and, within the same facility, an entire bookstore selling publications by its pastors and musicians. I shook hands with some of the staff and noticed how many there were. Back home in the Church of England, one full-time priest was the norm. But here there were multiple leaders, all salaried—including a worship pastor, a teaching pastor, a youth and kids pastor—and various administrators, maintenance staff, and coffee-shop and bookshop staff—a whole crowd of people.
I was stunned by how vast the overhead expenses must be to have bought a building like this, equip it with such amazing technology, and employ so many people. I found out that megachurches are funded by “tithing” or donations, the collections taken at each service. People’s generosity kept the bills paid.
That first visit to an American megachurch was eye-opening indeed. I felt like a tourist taking in the new sights. I had no idea that these vast buildings would be where I’d spend most of my twenties. There was an endless network of huge churches, just like this one, ready to book and pay worship leaders to come and sing, and that very soon would become my livelihood.
The trip seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. As I took off from LAX airport, I knew I was leaving part of my heart there and hoped it wouldn’t be long before I’d visit again.
Back at university, I reflected on how much I loved the innovative culture I’d experienced in California. Everything about it seemed huge, shiny, and new. But going there had also given me a fresh appreciation for the history and architecture in Oxford.
Walking to and from my classes, I was aware that every stone staircase echoed with the footsteps of centuries past. It was amazing to sit in The Eagle and Child pub, where C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien had held the Inklings society meetings and read aloud their drafts of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Lord of the Rings, or to walk around the Iffley Road sports ground, where Roger Bannister, back in 1954, became the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes.
So many world-changing people had passed through the university buildings—authors Aldous Huxley and William Golding; poets W. H. Auden, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Donne, and Oscar Wilde; suffragette Emily Wilding Davison; philosopher John Locke; and the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, just to name a few.
Their achievements—and their faces in oil paintings—stared down at me as the months went by. Somehow, the way they’d challenged limitations and forged new ground was waking me up. I began to think perhaps anyone could take a stab at changing the status quo, if they had enough grit and daring.
This sense of waking up grew and grew the more time I spent around the exceptional lecturers and professors who taught us. I was learning a great deal from them. Plenty of them were Christians and passionate about their faith. Using their minds—revering and exploring the sacred text of the Bible, its historical context, and its layers of meaning—was, to them, part of their worship of God. Many of these academics and professors were ordained as pastors or priests as well, and I loved the congruence between their academic work and their vibrant personal faith.
The church I’d grown up in spoke about the Bible as though it had been hand-delivered last year in contemporary English and with a glossy hardback cover. It was seen as a familiar book with an obvious and unmissable message. “The Bible clearly says . . .” was a phrase I’d heard endlessly.
The more I learned in Oxford lectures, the more I saw what a rich, complex, and vast journey the Bible had been on. After its infancy as oral tradition (stories passed on by word of mouth), it had been written onto early scrolls in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and then later translated into Latin and finally into various versions of English. It had been through thousands of years of evolution, and the people in its pages lived in cultures startlingly different from ours, yet the book had found its way into our hands.
Understanding the complexity of the Bible, especially how translators made varying (and sometimes conflicting) decisions about what the Greek or Hebrew words actually meant, didn’t devalue scripture in my eyes. I gained even more respect for how the book had traveled through the centuries. This was an important shift for me; I was around academics, many of whom were passionately committed Christians, who were saying the texts could be interpreted in different ways and that the context and culture in which they were written had to be taken into account.
Thanks to hours of homework, I could now read the Bible in its original languages of Greek and Hebrew, and I had a strong understanding of the cultures in which it was first written. I could see it was a far more complex book than I’d imagined.
It felt like being given the keys to drive a car, when formerly you thought you were only allowed to sit in the backseat. I had been handed the necessary skills for serious study of this ancient text. My new perspective was enlightening but also frightening. Honestly, it felt safer to just sit in the backseat. I wondered what tackling the tricky aspects of the Bible for myself would lead to—and whether I was ready for it.
I knew my biggest questions related to what the Bible actually said about same-sex relationships, but I dreaded challenging the status quo of my church, of Wycliffe Hall, of my friends and family, and of the people at the American Christian record label, Vineyard Records, whom I hoped to work with after I graduated. What if the arguments in favor of same-sex marriage convinced me? What would I do then?
I wanted to explore these questions, but I feared doing so would come at too high a price. I’d adored my visit to California, and my heart was set on that career path. My family and close friends loved the songs I was writing, and they felt God was using me to touch a lot of people’s lives.
As I wrestled with these huge questions, the psychological damage that had begun in my teens was continuing through my years at Oxford. I felt trapped and fearful. Part of me longed to find a soul mate, as loneliness was a constant and painful reality. But I couldn’t give up my community, my conscience, or my future career. It was a cruel choice for anyone to face, and as the years went by, the toll it was taking on my life grew and grew.
“Why do I have to choose between such core aspects of my identity?” I often asked myself, sobbing into my pillow at night. “Why can’t I pursue my Christian music career and also be able to date and marry someone of the same sex?” It seemed immensely unfair that straight people didn’t have to make these vast, cruel choices, and it felt like being ripped in two.
9
Magdalen College stands proudly above Oxford’s High Street. It’s the place C. S. Lewis worked for almost thirty years. A herd of deer is kept on college property and are a beautiful sight to behold; Lewis wrote that he could stare out of his window and watch the stags running majestically in the early morning mist.
One of Lewis’s favorite habits was to travel a sixteenth-century pathway known as Addison’s Walk through the grounds of Magdalen College, past the deer, and down along the banks of the river. He reminisced in his letters about walking there with Tolkien, so I loved going there, knowing they had trod the same ground. Addison’s Walk became my favorite place to escape the indoor world of libraries and lectures, and I’d sit on the banks for hours, watching the river flow past.
At that point in my studies, we were learning about church history. Attending classes and doing my own reading, I was fascinated to see a recurring pattern. Each generation of Christians had wrestled with particular ethical issues they saw as insurmountable. In every case, they’d said it would be the issue that would split the church into pieces. But with prayerful consideration and the passing of time, they always found a way through. Usually, this involved admitting they were wrong and adopting a better approach. It was intriguing to see this play out, again and again, in the history of the church.
One warm afternoon I strolled through Magdalen College, past the deer, and down Addison’s Walk to the river. Choosing a grassy spot, I put down my backpack of books and laid out a blanket. That day I would be doing some research on an important topic—how the church had handled the question of human slavery.
The river sparkled in the sunshine, and I began reading.
I discovered that in centuries past the church had argued that the Bible “very clearly” defended slavery as part of God’s ordained structure for society and that people of certain nationalities were divinely preselected for slavery. Genesis 9:18–27 was seen as definitive proof of this, so I flicked through my Bible and read those words myself:
The sons of Noah who went out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. . . .
Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness.
When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” He also said, “Blessed by the LORD my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for Japheth, and let him live in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.”
Noah clearly thought slavery was an acceptable burden to place on a human being—and even on his own offspring. That in itself was a lot to take on board. Also, I was baffled how this part of the Bible was used to justify enslaving a certain demographic of people; I could see no specific link to race or skin color in these verses, despite the fact that they had been the foundation of Christians’ belief that slavery was ordained by God for certain nationalities and not others.
I later found a BBC article that explained the way this link was formed:
Africans were said to be the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah, who was cursed by his father after looking at his naked form. Moreover, in Genesis 10, the “Table of Nations” describes the origins of the different races and reveals that one of the descendants of Ham is Cush-Cush, and that the Cushites were people associated with the Nile region of North Africa. In time, the European connection between sin, slavery, skin color and beliefs would condemn Africans.1
An op-ed in the New York Times also summarized this succinctly:
In the biblical account, Noah and his family are not described in racial terms. But as the story echoed through the centuries and around the world, variously interpreted by Islamic, Christian and Jewish scholars, Ham came to be widely portrayed as black; blackness, servitude and the idea of racial hierarchy became inextricably linked.2
I was horrified at how offensive, and how lacking in biblical evidence, this argument was. My mind spun as I thought of the vast damage done in the name of this so-called theological truth. Fellow Christians who loved and worshipped Jesus had defended this, and it was heartbreaking to realize that.
I read on. The Old Testament book of Leviticus was also used to support slavery. God said to Israel:
As for the male and female slaves whom you may have, it is from the nations around you that you may acquire male and female slaves. You may also acquire them from among the aliens residing with you, and from their families that are with you, who have been born in your land; and they may be your property. (25:44–45)
Exodus 21:21 was brought in as scriptural evidence too: “The slave is the owner’s property.”
Based on these verses, everything existed in the binary categories that God had (allegedly) created: there were Jews and Gentiles; there were free people and slaves. Using these Old Testament scriptures, the church had argued throughout history that God had made it this way, and that to change things would disrupt his design for social, political, and family life.
I was curious to find out whether they had used the New Testamen
t to defend slavery too. They had. According to 1 Peter 2:18–21:
Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh. For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. . . . For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps.
Not only was slavery portrayed by St. Peter as acceptable, but even slaves who were mistreated were supposed to stay quiet and put up with it. It sounded as though he was condoning abuse. Maybe, I hoped, the subject had come up at one of the major councils of church history as an issue that needed reexamining? Not so.
The Synod of Gangra held in 340 CE issued this statement: “If anyone shall teach a slave . . . to despise his master and to run away from his service, and not to serve his master with goodwill and all honor, let him be anathema.”3 So, any Christian opposing slavery was “anathema,” literally meaning “cursed,” which in practice meant being declared heretical and, most likely, excommunicated by the church.
What about some of the influential thinkers from church history? I wondered. What about a famous theologian like St. Augustine? St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), in his book The City of God, argued that slavery “is appointed by that law which enjoins the preservation of the natural order and forbids its disturbance. . . . Therefore the apostle admonishes slaves to be subject to their masters, and to serve them heartily and with goodwill.”4 Augustine believed slavery was a result of the Fall, so he didn’t see it as God’s ideal state for humans. Despite that, he didn’t reject it as immoral. Instead, he regarded it as an unavoidable part of society and taught Christians to accept it.
Did Thomas Aquinas (1225–74 CE) think along these same lines? A Doctor of the Church, Aquinas believed that all humans were inherently equal, and that slavery was a consequence of the Fall. But he was still willing to teach that “slavery belongs to the right of nations” and that it should not be challenged by the church.5
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