How Do I Respond to My Gay Friend?

Many faithful Christians know and accept the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality. They understand that both the Old Testament and the New Testament present homosexuality as an inversion of God’s good created plan for sex. God created marriage in Genesis 2 to be a lifelong, monogamous, heterosexual union. Bible-believing Christians know this. But not all of them know what to do when a friend or a coworker casually drops that they are gay.

I teach an apologetics class for juniors and seniors. Every time I teach I give students the opportunity to ask a question that I would answer in front of the class. Over the years one of the most frequently asked questions was something along the lines of, “What do I do when a friend or family member is gay? How should I respond?” That’s a fair question. It’s one thing to believe that something is wrong. It’s another thing to know what to say to someone who looks you in the eye and says that they are gay.

Clarifying Terminology

One question that needs to be answered is what exactly they mean by “I am gay.” Some Christians believe that a person may have a gay orientation but that if they live a celibate life, they are pleasing to God. Most people that you bump into, however, would mean by that phrase that they are someone who engages in homosexual activity, or would like to. So if someone says, “I am gay,” you need to figure out what exactly they mean because how you respond will be very different.

If someone claims that they are a gay Christian, and by that they mean they have sexual desires for the same sex that they resist out of obedience to Christ, that’s a friendship I feel comfortable continuing. To be clear, I disagree with their framing of the issue. I think that they are accepting the world’s categories of homosexual versus heterosexual orientation. I think the Bible’s framework is broken desires that manifest differently for everyone, but I don’t see the Bible understand those desires as defining or permanent. I would think that what they believe is wrong and even dangerously wrong, but not heretical, much like I would think of someone who baptizes infants (and likely how they would think of me).

But what about the person, Christian or otherwise, who says, “I am gay” and by that they mean that they are a practicing homosexual and have no plans of changing? Fortunately, the Bible gives us guidance.

1 Corinthians 5 and the 3 Levels of Friendship

The church of Corinth was a mess. Fortunately for us, when Paul addressed this mess he said a lot of things that are helpful to us today. While addressing the Corinthians about how to respond to a member in their midst who was living in immorality, Paul gave a helpful rubric for how to respond to Christians and unbelievers who are living in open rebellion to God’s laws. What he says might surprise a lot of Christians. The key passage is 1 Corinthians 5:9-11:

I wrote to you in a letter not to associate with sexually immoral people. I did not mean the immoral people of this world or the greedy and swindlers or idolaters; otherwise you would have to leave the world. But actually, I wrote you not to associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister and is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or verbally abusive, a drunkard or a swindler. Do not even eat with such a person.

Follow carefully what Paul is saying here. Paul had told the Corinthians not to associate with people who were sexually immoral. They naturally thought he meant by that, “Stay away from those bad, worldly people who don’t know Jesus.” They then saw other Christians behave in a sexually immoral way and thought to themselves, “Well, I mean at least they are a Christian.” This is a common way of thinking about the issue, but sadly it is completely backwards.

Paul clarifies that he meant the opposite. Don’t hang out with sexually immoral believers. In fact he is explicitly clear that they should associate with sexually immoral unbelievers. After all, people who don’t know Christ live sinful lives. If we stayed away from all the people who don’t know Christ and live sinfully, we’d basically just have to completely pull away from the world!

With this insight in mind, I want to propose three levels of relationships that Christians should have. With obedient Christians, we can have fellowship. With unbelievers, we can associate. With rebellious Christians, we should be kind, but keep a healthy distance.

Level 1: Fellowship

This level of friendship should be reserved for committed Christians. People in this category are the ones who have the most direct access to your heart. They are the ones you share life with, and because of this you will one day end up looking and thinking like them. If they love Jesus, you will come to love Jesus more. If they love the world, you will come to love the world more. For this reason, those closest to you should be Christians who want to please the Lord.

Level 2: Association

This level of friendship is looser than fellowship. The Greek word Paul uses here in 1 Corinthians 5:9 is kind of fun, because you could translate it woodenly as “mix it up with.” In other words, you can and should have friendships with people who are not Christians. Based on the fact that Paul clarifies you shouldn’t eat with unrepentant Christians, he must here assume that you can eat and to some degree hang out with unbelievers.

Level 3: Kindness

So what do we do with people who claim to be believers but live in ways that bring shame to the name of Christ? Obviously, none of us are perfect. But there is a difference between me getting angry with my children (which is a sin) and me deciding I will leave my family for a man. Church discipline is not for every nitpicky mistake Christians make, but for serious sins that are unrepentant and harm the reputation of the church. When someone commits a sin that is serious enough that it warrants something like church discipline, and they refuse to repent, then we are not to even associate with them. We don’t even eat with them. Yet Paul reminds us in 2 Thessalonians 3:14-15 how we should treat those we separate from:

If anyone does not obey our instruction in this letter, take note of that person; don’t associate with him, so that he may be ashamed. Yet don’t consider him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother.

So we let them know the seriousness of their sin by telling them that we will not associate with them, but we do it in a kind way. We want them to know we view them as a brother or sister, and we want them to come back to Christ and to rejoin our Christian family.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

So what does this look like played out in real life? Well, ideally if a professing Christian committed to a life of blatant disobedience to God, their church would discipline them in accordance with Matthew 18, 1 Corinthians 5, and 2 Thessalonians 3. In that case, you would still be friendly with such a person, but you wouldn’t invite them over to your house for a BBQ or go to a sports game with them. You would pray for them. You would warn and encourage and plead with them to come back to Christ, but you wouldn’t associate with them. To borrow the language of Paul, you wouldn’t even eat with them.

What do you do if someone claims to be a Christian, is living sinfully, but either doesn’t go to church or goes to a church that doesn’t practice church discipline? Even if a believer is not under the official discipline of a church, if they are claiming to be a Christian but have clearly rebelled against God’s clear commands, I would follow the principle Paul lays down in 1 Corinthians 5 and not even eat with such a one. Why? Because the principles for why Paul says we should engage in church discipline remain valid. We want them to be ashamed of their sin so that they turn from their sin (2 Thessalonians 3:14). Their influence on us will be negative and will pull us down. They are spiritually dangerous (1 Corinthians 5:6, see also 1 Corinthians 15:33).

What about cases where it’s hard to tell? Someone who used to go to church, but doesn’t anymore and doesn’t really seem to have much interest in anything spiritual. Do they count as a Christian I must separate from? Or are they an unbeliever I can associate with? I think a good rule of thumb here would simply be to have conversations. “What do you think about God?” “Would you consider yourself a Christian? Why?” “What do you think about the Bible?” If they have no understanding of the Bible, but essentially consider themselves “Christian” because they went to a VBS or are American, I don’t know that I would feel the need to separate from such a person. I could see myself building a relationship with the goal of sharing Christ with such a person. If however they know their Bible, grew up in a church, and simply declare that they are fine with God and that God is fine with their sin, I would likely not associate with someone like that.

The challenge about this kind of discussion is that it is all very abstract, until suddenly it isn’t. For some of my readers, these aren’t hypotheticals. They are names and faces and uncomfortable conversations. In a “tolerant” culture (that is increasingly intolerant), to tell someone that their lifestyle is unacceptable to God and therefore wrong is scandalous. To say, “I’m not going to the game with you, because you claim to be a Christian but have rejected God’s Word” for many people is the same as saying, “Hi, I’m a hateful person.” Many of these situations will need wisdom, and if you are wrestling through a situation like this, let me encourage you to reach out to a pastor or spiritual mentor for help on how to navigate these admittedly tricky waters. In all of this, we want to be governed by love. Love for God and His holiness, but also love for the person trapped in sin. If we follow the dual principles of love for others and faithfulness to God, God promises to give us wisdom to make the right decisions if we ask (James 1:5).

Now, having said all of this, there are still a host of other questions that must be answered about a more tricky question. Namely, what do you do when a family member says that they are gay? Does the family dynamic change things? I believe it does, but because that is a whole other can of worms, I’ll save that discussion for next week.